The Dutch are moral realists. They don’t believe that making so-called vices illegal will cause them to go away, or result in fewer people indulging in them. In the Netherlands, both prostitution and the purchase and smoking of marijuana are legal, based on the theory that since many people will pursue these activities anyway, you might as well create safe and comfortable venues for them.
When I visited the 800-year-old red-light district, or Rossebuurt, of Amsterdam in 1984, I was coming from a city well-known in the U.S. for its moral liberalism: San Francisco. Yet even in San Francisco, as in every other town and city in America, prostitution is against the law. Sex workers either hide away, reachable only by phone or the Internet, or they lurk on street corners in the seedier parts of town, where they are the victims of beatings, robberies, murder, pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases. In contrast, Amsterdam red-light prostitutes pay taxes, have access to medical care if they want it, and even have their own union and information center.
Like other tourists, I was amazed at the apparent cleanliness and orderliness of the sex worker industry in Amsterdam. Here were prostitutes in alluring outfits openly offering sex to tourists and locals from the windows and glass doors of their one-room apartments. I was surprised that there was a 14th century church, the Oudekerk or Old Church, in the same historic neighborhood that featured brothels, sex shops, sex clubs, and marijuana and sex museums. And I was amused by the Disneyland-like atmosphere of the prostitutes’ colorful, brightly lit bedrooms facing an otherwise ordinary street.
But in the intervening years since I visited, clouds have appeared in the controlled atmosphere of Amsterdam’s red-light district. Not everybody in Amsterdam approves of prostitution, and there is discrimination against them, particularly economic discrimination. There are also many illegal immigrants working as prostitutes. According to Amsterdam vice cops, two main groups of human traffickers now flourish in the area and try to take advantage of young women by forcing them into prostitution. Many of these women are lured to Amsterdam from Eastern Europe. A 2004 Amsterdam study found that many prostitutes are not independent workers and have a pimp who is either a former boyfriend (called a “loverboy”) or involved in human trafficking (called a “Turk”).
For the past five years, Amsterdam has
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