violence

An increasing number of young people in Amsterdam carry a knife with them, make threatening videos with it, and actually use it on the street, and that is very concerning, Amsterdam police chief Frank Paauw said to AT5.

"You can see it is getting out of hand", Paauw said to the Amsterdam broadcaster "Sometimes you see young people under 15 who are already walking around with a knife. The possession of weapons the carrying of knives, is becoming commonplace."

A large number of GP posts say that patients are becoming increasingly aggressive towards their doctors. Some 60 percent of the directors of these house doctor posts say that they receive telephone threats every week and that patients are more likely to threaten violence than five years ago. Almost a third of GP posts deal with physical violence at least once a year, newspaper Trouw reports based on its own research.

The student campuses in Amsterdam are not safe, student union ASVA warns. The union received 39 reports of incidents over the last two months alone, mainly involving incidents of violence, sexual offenses, robbery and burglary, AD reports.

A large part of these reports came from the Spinoza Campus and the nearby apartment buildings Echtenstein and Bergwijkdreef in Amsterdam Zuidoost. Students also feel unsafe at the campus on the NDSM wharf, according to ASVA.

The Dutch authorities launched a Safe Press project on Monday with the goal to better protect journalists and help ensure that they can do their jobs safely. The project includes the police and Public Prosecutor giving high priority to finding perpetrators of violence or aggression against journalists, harsher punishment demands for these crimes, and a hotline where journalists can report incidents, the police said in a statement.

Union FNV received 60 reports in two weeks' time about unsafe working conditions at asylum centers across the Netherlands. Most of the reports concerned daily violent incidents, both among the residents and towards the staff of the asylum centers. The union is shocked and calls for immediate intervention, ANP reports.

The police are investigating the death of Bianca van Es. The 29-year-old woman was found dead in her home on Luntershoek in Rotterdam under suspicious circumstances on Friday morning. An autopsy found traces of violence on the young woman's body, but her cause of death is still a mystery, the police said in a statement.

A team of 20 detectives is working on the investigation. Police officers spoke to a number of local residents and witnesses, forensic experts investigated the victim's home, and detectives are currently viewing available camera footage.

The vast majority of people who work in the Netherlands' sex industry face some form of violence, mostly from customers, according to a study by Aidsfonds, Soa Aids Nederland and sex workers' interest group Proud, Het Parool reports. 

Three people were arrested in the asylum center in Weert on Monday evening on suspicion of violence and vandalism. Initial reports stated that a man was threatening others with a firearm, but the police emphasize that this was not the case, the Telegraaf reports.

Sources told regional newspaper 1Limburg that tensions were high in the asylum center all day and that a man with a firearm threatened to shoot people. According to the police, this is not what happened and there was no question of a hostage situation.

Ruling party ChristenUnie wants violence with a religious or racist motive to be punished more harshly, as is already the case for violence against public officials. "If you fulfill a public function in the public domain and are attacked, we believe you need extra protection. That must also apply here", said Gert-Jan Segers, leader of the Christian party, NOS reports.

The anti- Zarte Piet protestors arrested in November 2016 during the national arrival of Sinterklaas in Maasluis will not be prosecuted.

168 people have received the news through a letter from the Public Prosecutor this week. Their cases have been dismissed due to insufficient evidence and because they have been unjustly regarded as suspects, according to NOS

Victims of child abuse while in youth care faced violence for an average of 7.5 years, according to a report by investigative committee Violence in Youth Care. More than half of the victims did not report the abuse, because the possibility of doing so did not exist, or because they were scared, RTL Nieuws reports.