Amsterdamnation

Twenty five years of legalised prostitution in Holland has provided reams of evidence of its abject failure, resulting in more danger for the women, impunity for pimps and punters, and vile propaganda

Amsterdam, often hailed as the sex Mecca of Europe is to have a major face-lift. After 25 years of legalised window brothels, attracting hordes of British and other European stag parties, politicians, police, citizens and even many of the prostituted women themselves are admitting that state-sanctioned buying and selling of women is a failed social experiment.

After more than 20 years of evidence that criminal gangs (and not entrepreneurial ‘sex workers’) are controlling the red-light area of De Wallen, the local council 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 cafes and in will come more museums, high-class restaurants and art galleries.

Despite my significant knowledge of the Dutch sex trade, I was nevertheless shocked to discover that the latest potential solution on offer is to build a multi-story mega brothel in the middle of a new cultural centre. This way, according to the current Mayor, De Wallen can appeal to the tourists that simply want ride bicycles across the canals and visit the flower market away from mobs of men looking to abuse women for cash.

Legalisation increased demand by bringing hordes of sex tourists to the Netherlands who can indulge their whims in the legal brothels. The red-light area in Amsterdam – consisting of three districts – is reported to draw as many visitors to Amsterdam as its museums and canals. Many of the visitors are stag parties from the UK.

One 2019 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 Amsterdam in order to visit the window brothels.

“Amsterdam was like going through a turnstile into a fairground ride: two minutes and you’re out,” one punter in the city told me. “The idea that the women had been with five men in the last hour or twenty men in a day was a big turn off.”

NIMBY-ism

As an MP, Mayor of Amsterdam Femke Halsema, helped make prostitution legal in the Netherlands. But when I spoke to her, in 2020, she said it would be a radical option to close down the window brothel zone in De Wallen, because the women, especially those trafficked in from other countries, are so vulnerable, that she “cannot accept this kind of humiliation of women.”

At the same time, however she told other reporters that she defended the “edgy city” and the window brothels, insisting she will not make a “taboo of sexuality … or of a woman’s body”.

Femke Halsema, 2024

Her most recent comments on how to tackle the problems inherent to the sex trade came in March last year, when she doubled down on her support to move the window brothels out of the centre to a multi-occupancy high rise building which will be named the Erotic Centre, in the Zuid district. Halsema claims this will be a “safe workplace” and will reduce problems relating to sex tourism, such as sexual harassment and assault, overcrowding, violence and drunken behaviour.

An architect was paid to design a building which would include 100 rooms for prostitution, as well as bars, restaurants, entertainment spaces and a health centre. But local residents and businesses have mounted fierce opposition: no-one wants prostitution in their neighbourhood.

SAME OLD M.O.

Many of those controlling the window scene and facilitating the trafficking of thousands of women into Amsterdam are so-called ‘loverboys’, young Dutch men from Moroccan, Turkish or Surinam descent, most of them Muslims, who look for vulnerable young Dutch women, pose as boyfriends, and after a few months, force their ‘girlfriend’ into prostitution, keeping them under close control by force and psychological means.

Loverboys have almost exactly the same Modus Operandi as another group of sex exploiters – the so-called grooming gangs, that operate with impunity across the UK.

These men single out insecure, underage girls in schools, coffee shops, outside care homes, and woo them as "boyfriends", promising love, clothes, status and excitement. Then they start to run them as prostitutes. The girls, emotionally and financially dependant on their loverboys, find themselves locked into a cycle of abuse, sometimes made to work in windows in official red-light districts or being handed from flat to flat in several cities.

Loverboys 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 Amsterdam, so often hailed as an exploitation-free zone by lobbyists for legalisation, has been shaped by the huge influx of desperate, vulnerable women coming to the EU from Eastern Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia to work in the legal zones. Most will have been trafficked by criminal gangs or individual entrepreneurs promising them a better life and the chance to earn a lot of money. Trafficking, and a sharp rise in heroin and crack abuse among prostitutes, means the women are increasingly desperate, resulting in punters getting what they want.

"I was told I needed someone to protect me when I started working here five years ago,” Ingrid, a 24 year old Slovakian woman who was prostituted in a window brothel tells me. “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.”

Under legalisation there are no pimps in Amsterdam's red light area. Men who own the windows and brothels, and live off the earnings of prostitution, are now "managers" or "facilitators". A few feet from the windows, men resembling bouncers stand chatting, looking around, and checking their merchandise. A punter comes out of a brothel, zipping up his trousers. "The English men drink a lot and can be difficult to handle,” admits Lena, a quietly spoken woman from Estonia. “But they spend money. They tell me back home it is seen as dirty to pay for sex, but here it is just like going to the toilet.”

THE HISTORY OF LEGAL PIMPING IN HOLLAND

In 1995, a Tippelzone, meaning ‘pick up area’ was set up for street prostituted women in central Amsterdam. The zone was a strip of road behind which were several parking spaces separated by 6ft-high wooden partitions, as well as one for cyclists, or those who wish to stand up to have sex.

The Tippelzone was long promoted as a great way to control 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 Rob Oudkerk, leader of the Socialist Party, alderman and deputy mayor lost his position when it became known that he frequented women prostituting on street, whom he would have known to be illegal or to be drug addicts. His successor was Lodewijk Asscher, a man who has very different views on prostitution. Asscher did go on to challenge the pro-legalisation propaganda that enabled Amsterdam’s sex trade to flourish.

In 2006 the Amsterdam city council refused to renew the licenses of thirty-seven prostitution entrepreneurs in the red-light area. Using the Public Administration Probity Act (BIBOB) that gave power to municipalities to investigate and close venues where possible illegality exists, the council concluded that many of the brothels were in the hands of organised crime. Among the charges were human trafficking, drug trafficking fraud and money laundering.

Asscher set about implementing radical new prostitution policies as soon as he was appointed Mayor. It is not just in Amsterdam where change began to take place. Across the Netherlands the prostitution empire began to crumble. The Tippelzones in Rotterdam and The Hague are now closed, as well as the Tippelzone and one-third of the 450 window brothels in Amsterdam. Had politicians stuck to their guns rather than caving in to pressure from profiteers and coming up with the crazy Erotic Centre idea, things could have been on a very different trajectory.

PIECEMEAL CHANGES

The Prostitution Framework Act, which came into force in 2013, thirteen years after legalisation, reads like a last-ditch attempt to address some of the worst consequences of legalisation.

It includes a requirement that prostitutes register as such with the government – an unlikely scenario for those in a stigmatised and clandestine sector. It raised the minimum age of involvement 18 to 21 years. A national register was introduced for prostitution businesses whose license application was rejected or whose license was revoked. It is too little, too late for a city awash with underage, trafficked and otherwise coerced women.

“Legalisation was naïve,” admitted Asscher to me at the time. “We thought we had dealt with it better than anywhere else in the world.”

Holland has long had problems with the sex trade. The Netherlands in the mid 19^th Century was a hotbed of prostitution, with sailors being the most prolific buyers and impoverished Dutch women the streetwalkers.

The women were forced to register as prostitutes and be submitted to weekly medical exams for syphilis. When certified as “clean,” they received cards that effectively licensed them to practice without which they could be imprisoned. In the UK around that time Josephine Butler condemned this system of enforced medical exams as “instrumental rape” by the “steel penis,” inspiring a coalition of feminists, socialists and Protestants to abolish these exams in Britain and to campaign in Europe against the regulation and acceptance of prostitution as degrading to women.

Josephine Butler

In 1911 the abolitionists legally won the day in Holland, and the government adopted a legal system outlawing brothels and criminalising pimping and profiting from prostitution. In Amsterdam, all the brothels were shut down.

Gradually the brothels returned. In the 1930s, Amsterdam saw its first window brothels In the 1950s the red-light district in Amsterdam grew and became a tourist attraction. Prostitution, sex clubs, pornography shops and drugs were openly tolerated. The 1980s saw an influx of foreign women trafficked into Dutch prostitution, a trend that continues today.

In 1985 the Rode Draad (Red Thread) the sex industry workers' union based in Amsterdam maintained that ‘sex worker’s’ rights could only be achieved if pimps and brothels were decriminalised. Only 100 of Holland's 25,000 prostitutes are union members, most of them ‘erotic dancers’. Red Thread went into receivership in August 2012 as a result of losing its government grant.

Asscher was always skeptical about the well-oiled propaganda machine that has long given strength to the claims 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,” said Asscher. “They are financed by the [prostitution] sector and so paint a picture that is too good to be true.”

THE PROFITEERS AND GRIFTERS

The Mr. A. de Graaf Foundation, originally an abolitionist Christian research institute for the study of prostitution, did an about turn during the time that legalisation was being considered and began promoting the acceptance of prostitution as normal work. Supported by generous state subsidies, the Foundation and its studies helped to inspire and lobby for the legalisation that was passed in 2000.

The Prostitution Information Center (PIC) was co-founded 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 Amsterdam and that it is a much-exaggerated phenomena. Majoor once claimed in an interview that, “Standing in a window brothel can be real good for your confidence.”

PIC conducts excursions through the prostitution area. In 2005 Thomas Cook, a respected worldwide tour and travel agency founded to promote ethical and educational tourism with the reputation of being a family company, launched a night walking tour through the red-light area. Building on tours organised by the PIC, it offered outings, and advertised them “free to children under three.”

“It is a well-oiled propaganda machine,” says Chrissie Bennet, a British-born former escort who spent a month in the window brothels in Amsterdam. “The girls all knew we were under the cosh of the pimps, and of debt and desperation. No one would be there if there was any other choice.”

Amsterdam is a prime example of the failure of a libertarian approach to the sex industry. Hopefully it is not too late to undo some of the colossal damage caused by legalisation.