WUNRN
THE NETHERLANDS - AMSTERDAM TO CHANGE RED LIGHT DISTRICT FOR DEVELOPMENT, FEWER BROTHELS, LEGALISATION OF PROSTITUTION QUESTIONED
JULIE BINDEL -
October 2012
Given almost ten years of evidence that criminal gangs
control the red-light area of De Wallen, the local council has announced plans
to clean it up in an attempt to transform the reputation of the city. Out will
go at least half of the window brothels, sex shops and cannabis cafés and in
will come more museums, restaurants and art galleries.
Many of those controlling the window scene and
facilitating the trafficking of thousands of women into Amsterdam are so-called
"loverboys", young Dutchmen of Moroccan, Turkish or Surinamese
descent, most of them Muslims, who look for vulnerable young Dutch women, pose
as lovers, and after a few months, force their "girlfriends" into
prostitution, keeping them under close control both by force and psychological
means.
Loverboys have the same modus operandi as another group
of sex exploiters — the Asian grooming gangs, first exposed in Standpoint (December 2010)
— that operated with impunity in the northern towns of
They put their victims to work in a window so that they
can keep an eye on them day and night. Because it is not an offence under the
legalised regime to profit from this form of prostitution the loverboys appear
invincible, and the young women feel they have little chance of proving the
abuse.
The sex industry in
"I was told I needed someone to protect me when I
started working here five years ago," Ingrid, a 24-year-old Slovakian
prostitute, tells me, having agreed to speak to me because at 10am it is still
a quiet time for her, when customers sleep off their hangovers. "But
all that means is that I pay a pimp to stop me being beaten up, and that is on
top of my rent. I can barely make a living."
Since legalisation there are no "pimps" in
Jan is a beat police officer assigned to the red-light
district. I meet him at 1am as he is checking the window brothels by tapping on
them and asking the women if there are "any problems". He is nervous
about giving me his full name; he tells me that his chiefs have become
increasingly sensitive to criticism. "People are starting to hear that our
system has a lot of crime and a lot of violence against the working girls
linked to it," he says. "The trafficking problem, and the Turkish
loverboys, they are all coming to the surface now. Really we have allowed it by
being too adventurous with allowing prostitution to be such an attraction to
our city."
Legalisation has resulted in a significant increase in
sex tourists, in particular from the
In 1995, a tippelzone,
or pick-up area, was set up for street prostitutes in central
The tippelzone
was promoted as a way of controlling the problems associated with prostitution,
such as drug dealing, trafficking and violence. In 2004 the local council
closed it down. The mayor, Job Cohen, admitted it had become a haven for
traffickers and drug dealers, and had not achieved its aim — to break the links
between prostitution and organised crime.
That same year deputy mayor Rob Oudkerk, leader of the
Socialist Party, the city's biggest political party, lost his position when it
became known that he frequented prostitutes, including streetwalkers, whom he
would have known to be illegal or drug addicts. His successor, Lodewijk
Asscher, has very different views on prostitution, and has challenged the
pro-legalisation propaganda that has enabled
In 2006 the city council refused to renew the licences of
37 prostitution entrepreneurs in the red-light area. Using the Public
Administration Probity Act, which enabled municipalities to close illegal
venues, the council concluded that many brothels were run by organised crime.
Among the charges were human and drug trafficking, and money laundering.
Since 2006 Asscher has implemented radical new
prostitution policies. It is not just in
"I was very worried about what had been happening in
the old city. When I came into office, six years after legalisation, the signs
were not good," Asscher told me. "There is lots of crime in this part
of the city."
The Prostitution Framework Act, expected to come into
force next January, reads like a last-ditch attempt to address some of the
worst consequences of legalisation. It includes a requirement that prostitutes
register with the government — an unlikely scenario for those in a stigmatised
and clandestine sector. It will also raise the minimum age of involvement from
18 to 21 years. Customers of illegal prostitutes will also be punishable
and owners of premises where abuses recur repeatedly will be dealt with. A
national register will be introduced for prostitution businesses whose licence
application was rejected or licence revoked. But it is almost certainly too
little, too late for a city awash with under-age, trafficked and otherwise
coerced prostitutes.
"Legalisation was naive," admits Asscher.
"We thought we had dealt with it better than anywhere else in the world.
There are arguments that further criminalisation would push it underground but
it takes it out of the hands of criminals."
One research study on men who pay for sex found that 19
out of 103 interviewees, including some who had never previously had a sexual
encounter, had travelled to
"
Martine and Louise Fokken, 70-year-old identical twins
who worked in the red-light area for almost 50 years, give me a tour.
They tell me that the influx of loverboys and young foreign women has
"ruined" the trade for Dutch women. "Legalisation has never
worked. It is better for the pimps and the foreigners," says
Martine. "The vultures came in 2000 — organised criminals. They thought,
‘Aha, it's legalised, now we're OK.'"
The sisters appear to have a rose-tinted view of a region
that has always had problems with the sex trade. In the mid-19th century the
The women were forced to register as prostitutes and
submit to weekly medical exams for syphilis. When certified as
"clean", they received cards that effectively licensed them to
practise and without which they could be imprisoned. In Britain Josephine
Butler condemned this system of enforced medical exams, inspiring a coalition
of feminists, socialists and Protestants to abolish them in
But gradually the brothels returned; though still
illegal, they were tolerated. In the 1930s,
Pressure slowly grew for prostitution to be legalised. In
1985 the Rode Draad (Red Thread), the sex industry workers' union based in
The Prostitution Information Centre (PIC) is run by
Mariska Majoor, a former prostitute and advocate of total legalisation of
pimping and brothel-owning. She is on the record as saying that trafficking is
rare in
"It is a well-oiled propaganda machine," says
Chrissie Bennet, a British-born former escort who spent a month in the window
brothels in
But Lodewijk Asscher is sceptical about the propaganda
machine which has long claimed that the Dutch way is best when it comes to
regulating the sex industry. "The pro-sex-work lobby does not represent
the women but the pimps," he says. "They are financed by the
[prostitution] sector and so paint a picture that is too good to be true."
His latest scheme is called Project 1012, named after the
district's postal code, and aims to bring new and non-prostitution related
business and tourism into the red-light area. It is a collaboration between
banks, developers, corporations, investors and entrepreneurs. Under the scheme,
licences of coffee shops, gambling houses and brothels will be revoked if they
are discovered to be involved in criminal behaviour.
One of the city's most talked-about restaurants, Anna,
opened last year in a refurbished brothel building. Next door to the window
brothels is online music station Red Light Radio. When I walk round the red-
light district with the Fokken twins they take me to what was the first window
brothel they worked in together, and squeal with delight at seeing not naked
women in the window but naked mannequins: the building is now a haute couture
dress shop. The Red Thread sex workers' union went into receivership in August
as a result of losing its government grant.
Asscher hopes to attract more than £600 million of
investment from businesses moving to the area, but he also has a plan B if his
project fails: he will consider bringing in new legislation to criminalise the
buying of sexual services, as countries such as