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‘How Could I Have Been so Blind?’ Love, Money, and Victimhood in Transnational Interracialised Relationships between Dutch Women and Men from MENA Countries

Iris Sportel (2025) — Regulating Interracialized Intimacies: Perspectives from Europe and Beyond, chapter 15

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003449560-21 (opens in a new tab)

Country:   Netherlands
Tags:   Bezness, Dutch Women, Marriage Migration, Mena Men, Racialization, Romance Fraud Narratives, Transnational Relationships, Victimhood
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Synopsis

            
This chapter analyzes how bezness narratives shape and security-check transnational relationships between Dutch women and men from MENA countries (primarily Egypt and Morocco). The author argues that intimate relationships crossing race, class, and national borders are treated with suspicion, and that bezness stories function to warn European women, police cross-border intimacy, and frame women as vulnerable victims while casting MENA men as predatory offenders. Drawing on a mix of popular media, interviews with lawyers, embassy staff, and divorced couples, and online forums and NGO blogs (collected 2009–2014), the study tracks how these narratives circulate in Europe and in MENA destinations and influence both personal experiences and state regulation of marriage migration. A central finding is that bezness discourses operate as transnational narratives of victimhood. Women who enter such relationships often narrate themselves as innocent and careful, seeking to establish that they were not to blame for the breakup after discovering financial or personal betrayal. The analysis uses critical victimology to show how “ideal victims” are constructed and how the offender is racially and culturally essentialized as the distant, dangerous other. The narratives also globe-trope state actors and migration regimes, illustrating how bezness stories shape public warnings, embassy cautions, and border-control practices, sometimes legitimizing heightened scrutiny of mixed couples and marriage migrations. The chapter also shows that bezness stories serve a social function for women whose relationships end: they provide meaning for loss, enable connection with fellow sufferers, and offer a framework to claim victimhood and social support. While acknowledging the real existence of fraudulent “romantic entrepreneur” behavior, the author cautions that the discourse relies on racialized and colonial tropes that can stigmatize sincere transnational relationships and reinforce surveillance of Global North–South intimacies. The material is limited to heterosexual Dutch-MENA pairings and publicly accessible sources available through 2009–2014.

          

        
                  

            
Identified Gaps

            
The chapter predominantly examines bezness through Dutch women’s accounts of relationships with Egyptian and Moroccan men. It provides limited analysis of former male partners’ perspectives because they did not use the racialized bezness discourse, and it does not establish the prevalence of fraudulent conduct or whether particular warning signs reliably identify fraud.

          

        
                  

            
Methods

            
Qualitative, multi-source analysis of Dutch bezness discourse. The author analyzed popular media from 2005–2021, Dutch-language blogs and public forum discussions, and interviews conducted in the Netherlands, Morocco, and Egypt between 2009 and 2012. The interview material included 31 professionals involved in transnational divorce and 26 divorced Dutch, Moroccan, and Egyptian men and women. Most interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed in Atlas.ti. The chapter focuses on Dutch women who used bezness narratives to explain relationship endings.

          

        
                  

            
Limitations

            
The analysis is primarily based on Dutch women who framed relationship breakdown through bezness narratives and on public online material. The study was limited to heterosexual couples because same-sex marriage or divorce was not legally available in Morocco or Egypt. Its qualitative, purposive sources support interpretation of discourse and meaning-making, not estimates of fraud prevalence, causal effects, or generalizable profiles of MENA men or transnational couples.

          

        
              

    
    

        
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