A number of politicians and law enforcers are now accepting that
legalised prostitution has been an unmitigated disaster. There is
currently a proposed law being considered by the Dutch Senate which, if
passed, would result in punters being criminalised if they pay for sex
with a trafficked, pimped or otherwise coerced woman.
These changes are the result of a vibrant sex trade abolitionist movement emerging in Holland.
The Dutch legalised their brothel industry in the year 2000. The
government promised that this would result in safety for the women, and
an end to trafficking. It claimed that everything would be above board,
safe and clean. The opposite happened. Sex tourism is now a major
industry, with British men being one group of Europeans visiting the
city to pay for sex. A number of punters I have interviewed told me that
they wouldn’t have dreamt of using prostituted women back home, but
that being in Holland gave them permission to do it.
The illegal and unlicensed sex trade has boomed under
legalisation, trafficking of women has risen dramatically, demand is on
the rise and the women are certainly no safer than they were when
pimping was illegal.
I have been visiting Holland over the course of 15 years, researching
the consequences of legalisation.I have interviewed sex buyers
(including one who told me he first paid for sex when he was 12 years
old), women in brothels, pimps and pro-legalisation lobbyists that make a
profit off the backs of prostituted women.
Xaviera Hollander is a big part of the propaganda machine that
promotes the notion that prostituted women under legalisation are having
a great time. Hollander is known for her memoir, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story,
which sold by the millions. I visited her at her home in Amsterdam, to
ask if she thinks the women are happy under legalisation. She admits to
me that trafficking is on the rise, and that legalisation is far from
effective in removing criminality from the sex trade. Coming from a
former pimp, this is quite something.
There are large numbers of tour guides offering tours around
Amsterdam’s red light areas. I took one of these tours last year, and
was told that legalisation is a perfect model, that the women are safe
and happy and the public accept the window brothels as part of the
architecture. I asked the guide where he got his information from, and
he told me that the Prostitution Information Centre (PIC)
provide, for a fee, information for all of the tour companies. The PIC
is run as a business by women who claim to be “sex workers”. In fact
they appear to be nothing of the kind, being a company charging for this
advice and therefore profiting from prostitution.
What once looked like a revolutionary approach to prostitution is now
clearly seen as a disaster, by all except those who seek to make a
profit from prostitution.
Jolanda Boer is a senior public prosecutor specialising in human
trafficking. Over the past decade Boer has dealt with more than 100 such
cases in Amsterdam. “There have been cases where the girl has been
raped by their pimps and threatened into working behind the windows. The
women are not in a position to freely tell people when something is
going wrong. But of course they’re smiling because if you don’t you’re
not going to get a client,” says Boer.
On Saturday I spoke to a packed room about my book
on the global sex trade. The event was held in the red light district,
in a building that had previously been a Chinese massage parlour
offering “happy endings”. I had expected some kind of protest, or
infiltration by the pro-prostitution lobby. But every person in the room
was there because they recognised that prostitution is a human rights
abuse, harmful to the women involved, and that legalisation has been
disastrous.
The following day I was in Den Haag, home of the Dutch parliament,
launching my book in front of dozens of concerned citizens, all of whom
have had enough of Holland being held up as a perfect model in dealing
with prostitution. After the launch, dozens of us marched along the
local red light district, holding up banners and placards with slogans
such as “Shut down the sex trade” and “Enough is enough”. It was the
first ever public demonstration against legal brothels.
The Dutch empire is crumbling. Over one-third of all window brothels
have closed, and more will soon lose their licences. A group of 10
Hungarian traffickers are currently on trial in Den Haag, and much of
the reporting of the trial links trafficking of women to the legalised
regime. There is still a long way to go, but now that feminists are
daring to speak out against the disastrous Dutch model of legalisation,
there is no going back.
People don’t seem to realise that the vast majority of women don’t do prostitution because it’s illegal but because they don’t want to have sex with strange men. Making it legal doesn’t increase their willingness.
lately i’ve got to thinking about social media, and the internet, and everything
it just emphasizes all the bad things, anxiety, impatience, bad things
like that it makes you sit there and wait for a reply, that it informs you of the exact moment where someone sees your reply
imagine living in 1850, you’d have to wait for your letter to be delivered to its destination, and then for a reply. imagine how nice that was. you couldn’t get an instant reply so you had to think about other things in the meantime. i want that. the calm. i don’t want to think. i want to deal with things calmly in the order they’re supposed to be dealt with. i don’t want to be instantly available. i wanna be like laura from lord and master. i want a half finished drawing on my shelf and an open book on my desk. i want to be classy and not crude.
i want to be difficult to reach. people can seek me out if they want me. social media is lazy. do some work
