Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business (29 page)

While window owners are minimally involved with the sex workers who rent from them, brothel and escort owners
do
treat their workers as employees to some extent: they impose rules regarding attire, demeanor, working hours, and so on. This means that those who work in brothels under a manager are not fully “independent” contractors, though the owners insist to the contrary. A survey of 40 owners describes the situation:

Operators are keen to stress the contractual or servicing nature of their relationship with the prostitutes, with no superior-subordinate relationship. They present themselves as people who rent out rooms and supply facilities. Sometimes agreements are set down on paper, but often they are not, as operators assume that anything set down in writing could be used against them in official arguments about their being employers. The need to present a uniform impression to potential customers, a suitable image of the business, and for the prostitutes to conduct themselves accordingly is translated into house rules, recommended prices, recommendations on dress, etc. In practice these rules are often not as voluntary as is suggested: women who do not abide by them are excluded. Many of them accept this situation, partly because they see it as part and parcel of working in the industry, partly because it provides a certain amount of protection: the operator helps to resolve quarrels with customers, for instance, and sees to it that they are accompanied in unsafe social situations. Operators regard it as wrong and unfair that the tax authorities and the UWV [workers’ insurance agency] can interpret such support as indicating that they are employers.
⁵³

As a prominent brothel owner told me, “The tax people say we should employ them, but the health costs are high. So we prefer they stay independent workers, and the tax people allowed this—an ‘opting in’ to the new system.”
⁵⁴
In a 2006 survey of 354 prostitutes, the majority admitted that they did not pay income taxes; but since 2009 almost all of those working in licensed brothels and escort agencies have been paying their taxes in full.
⁵⁵

A 2006 survey of 49 sex proprietors found that they “have the impression that the authorities have a negative image of the industry, are putting pressure on legal businesses (licenses, fees, arguments about regular employment), and are doing hardly anything to deal with illegal prostitution.”
⁵⁶
It is true that officials have focused most of their attention on the legal establishments, where access is easy, compared to the clandestine, illegal operations. When I suggested to one brothel owner that perhaps the problem is the hidden nature of the illegal establishments, he responded, “The police
can
find the illegals, if you give them more authority and power. Police don’t get sufficient resources, so that’s why they only check the legal ones.”
⁵⁷
Another explanation is that the number of illegal brothels or escort agencies is much less than what some have claimed. Statements by some government officials and brothel owners that the majority of all prostitution takes place in unlicensed brothels and other venues have not been substantiated, and some experts think these claims are greatly exaggerated.

Tensions between legal and illegal sectors have arisen in other societies as well—for example, in New South Wales, Australia, where legal owners have been in the forefront in encouraging city councils to crack down on illegal brothels
⁵⁸
—but such friction is not inevitable. In New Zealand, a two-tier system of legal and illegal prostitution has not developed since decriminalization in 2003.
⁵⁹

In Amsterdam, there has been a decline in the number of legal sex businesses in recent years, a result of a larger campaign to “clean up” the city, including reducing the number of bars, casinos, and marijuana cafes. Some elites have grown increasingly concerned that the city has become a vice mecca, as a city councilor complained: “Amsterdam has a reputation that you can do everything here. That’s not the way I want people to look at Amsterdam.”
⁶⁰
A 2007 poll of Amsterdam residents found that two-thirds (68 percent) agreed with a policy of reducing the city’s image as a place where deviant behavior is tolerated, and 78 percent felt that the city should actively fight criminal involvement in the prostitution sector (surprisingly, 22 percent opposed this).
⁶¹
In the past few years, some politicians have called for the elimination of
all
prostitution. What has happened instead is gradual curtailment.

The recent downsizing of the main red-light district has roots that go back to 1996, when a parliamentary commission released a report that concluded that Amsterdam had become a major center for organized crime.
⁶²
The following year, the Amsterdam city council appointed a manager of the RLD to coordinate efforts against organized crime, with the help of the police and tax authorities, by closing suspected businesses, withdrawing licenses, and initiating criminal investigations (the manager’s team is now called the Van Traa Project). Under a law passed in 2003 (the Public Administration Probity in Decision-Making Act, known as BIBOB), local authorities are empowered to withhold or revoke a permit for any business (e.g., bar, hotel, marijuana cafe, casino, brothel, escort agency) if the owner is suspected of criminal wrongdoing or cannot prove that his or her finances are legitimate. The burden of proof is on the owner or prospective buyer. Since BIBOB is an administrative mechanism, not criminal law, the authorities do not have to prove that unlawful activity has occurred and can act on
suspicion
alone in refusing or revoking a permit.
⁶³

The majority of municipalities had not made use of BIBOB as of 2007;
⁶⁴
it is largely an issue in Amsterdam. Still, a total of 376 businesses nationwide
lost their license between 2003 and November 2009, a number that includes both sexually oriented and other businesses.
⁶⁵
Amsterdam has seen the closure in recent years of a few brothels and several window units, leaving about 400 windows today. The shuttered windows and brothels were then sold to entrepreneurs not involved in the adult sector, thus reducing the number of such places.

If the RLD is further downsized, reducing legal options, it will displace prostitution to other parts of Amsterdam, to other cities, or into the illegal sector. There appears to be another counterproductive outcome of the crackdown: a reduction in small-scale operators who own a few windows and the ascendancy of large-scale operators, who buy out the small owners. Since the implementation of BIBOB and the work of the Van Traa Project, “many small brothel-owners have sold their windows to a few large players, who now own almost all brothels in the area.”
⁶⁶
This trend toward monopolization constricts workers’ options in relocating to a brothel or window unit with a different owner (e.g., one with a good reputation) or their ability to rent at an affordable price. In fact, over the past few years, window owners have steadily increased their rental prices.

In Amsterdam, the Labor Party dominates local politics and has been in the vanguard of a crackdown on the sex industry for the past five years. Prominent politicians have claimed that some brothel and window owners are involved in money laundering, other organized crime, or trafficking of illegal migrants, and three politicians have been in the forefront of an effort to “clean up” the city’s main RLD: the mayor (Job Cohen), an alderman (Lodewijk Asscher), and a city councilor (Karina Schaapman). A former sex worker turned staunch prohibitionist, Schaapman wrote a position paper on prostitution in 2005 that was based on the oppression paradigm and treated all prostitution as forced. The paper called for tighter restrictions on businesses and for raising the minimum age for sex work from 18 to 21. Her report, lobbying, and media appearances had a major influence on the views of other city councilors and helped set the stage for a crack-down, which has also been fueled by sensationalized media coverage of isolated incidents involving pimps and organized crime.
⁶⁷
Alderman Asscher has stoked the fire repeatedly—calling business owners “pimps” on television, advocating raising the minimum age to 23, closing windows between four and eight a.m., mandating psychological screening of sex workers, and claiming that trafficking is a big problem in Amsterdam. The rationale for raising the minimum age is that young workers are viewed as more vulnerable to pimps, abusive clients, and traffickers, and older workers are viewed as
better able to screen clients. Regarding the closing of windows for four hours in the early morning, Asscher stated, “Only the biggest creeps and boozers are walking around at those hours. Women really dread working then.”
⁶⁸
(The prostitutes’ rights group Red Thread opposed this idea as well as raising the minimum age to 23 because it would have the effect of driving those under 23 underground.)
⁶⁹
Proposals in Parliament to raise the minimum age have been opposed by Red Thread as well as the brothel and window owners’ associations.

City leaders frequently try to link prostitution, pimping, and organized crime—usually citing anecdotal evidence involving a single operation and generalizing to larger patterns. Mayor Cohen declared in 2008,

We’ve realized this is no longer about small-scale entrepreneurs, but that big crime organizations are involved here in trafficking women, drugs, killings, and other criminal activities. We’re not banning prostitution, but we are cutting back on the whole circuit: the gambling halls, the pimps, the money laundering.
⁷⁰

Cohen’s views are based in part on Schaapman’s claims that pimps are ubiquitous and that many workers have been trafficked, mistakenly equating trafficking with the number of foreign workers in the Netherlands. Mayor Cohen claims,

In the last few years we have also seen a lot of women-trafficking and women forced to be prostitutes against their will, and therefore we want to have more control. If there is control, there is transparency. … It is not that we want to get rid of our red-light district. We want to reduce it. Things have become unbalanced and if we do not act we will never regain control. At the heart of this project is our desire to drive back criminality and make the city welcoming for everyone.
⁷¹

Some window workers have indeed been forced into prostitution, with one-tenth saying they have in a recent survey of 94 workers.
⁷²
Pimping is also a problem, though its scope is a matter of debate. In 2007, the prostitutes’ rights organization Red Thread launched a campaign against pimping by affixing stickers to windows that declared “Pimpfree Zone” and “Pimping Is Forbidden in the Netherlands,” in an attempt to send a message to the pimps who loiter in the red-light district. If the effort does little to deter pimps, it is hoped that it helps to empower the women. Another recent initiative is the city government’s
attempt to tap clients for information about possible abuses of sex workers. The city created a panel of clients from three client-centered websites, where they are occasionally surveyed and can report signs (e.g., bruises, fear) that a particular sex worker might be in a problematic situation.

The extent to which organized crime is involved in the sex sector is debatable. In the full glare of the media, a single reported case can leave the impression that organized crime is more deeply embedded than it is. For instance, the most luxurious brothel in Amsterdam, the Yab Yum Club, was closed after the authorities determined that it had been taken over by the Hell’s Angels. The former owner had been extorted by the Hell’s Angels to give them ownership, while his name remained on the deeds.
⁷³
The club’s license was revoked in 2008, attracting great media attention. Yet, organized crime’s role in the sex trade is less than what is claimed by antiprostitution forces. According to an official at the Ministry of Justice whom I interviewed, most organized crime is small scale, such as two or three pimps working together, and rarely involves large organized syndicates.
⁷⁴
Most of the large-scale organized crime in the Netherlands is in the drug trade, not prostitution.
⁷⁵
The director of the Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam thinks the government’s crackdown on proprietors is misplaced: “The government are trying to get rid of criminal organizations, but they have picked on the wrong people. They really have to do something about the pimps, and a pimp is never an owner of a brothel.”
⁷⁶
As for organized crime’s involvement in sex trafficking, a government evaluation concluded that “it is likely trafficking in human beings has become more difficult, because the enforcement of the regulations has increased” since 2000.
⁷⁷
An independent report to the European Parliament concurs.
⁷⁸
And the government’s trafficking office adds that “curtailing the licensed sector is … an ineffective way of preventing human trafficking and abuses, since it could cause a shift to illegal forms of prostitution, which are more difficult to monitor and regulate through policy.”
⁷⁹

The high visibility of window prostitution may explain why the authorities are so concerned with the red-light district (i.e., the “image” it gives the city). What happens in such a central, visible location is easily magnified by those who are concerned about what they see as the proliferation of vice in the area—marijuana cafes, bars, porn shops, casinos, live sex shows, prostitution. (A single-use prostitution-only RLD, such as Antwerp’s, is less vulnerable to charges that vice is “out of control.”) Yet window prostitution accounts for only one-fifth of prostitution in Amsterdam, and the accessibility of window workers to oversight from the authorities might be grounds for expanding the number of window units rather than reducing them.