The city of Amsterdam is aiming to “cut back” on brothels. By opening up options for sex workers to find other employment, perhaps? Nope. They’re just buying the brothels.
The Dutch city of Amsterdam is to close one-third of the brothels in its famous red light district.
The city has reached a 25m euro (£18m) deal to buy 18 buildings and turn them into shops or housing.
The mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, said that although prostitution was legal in the Netherlands, there was too much of the sex trade in the city centre.
He also said that the trade involved exploitation and trafficking of women, and other kinds of criminal activity.
This pisses me off to extreme lengths. Does Mayor Cohen actually believe that closing brothels is going to lesses the exploitation found in sex work? He couldn’t, right?
The Wallen, as the area is known in Dutch, is in one of the oldest and most picturesque areas of Amsterdam.
But the city’s authorities say the windows are a magnet for crime and money laundering.
Mr Cohen said the move was not intended to get rid of prostitution entirely, since it is part of the area’s history.
“What we do want is to get rid of the underlying criminality,” he said.
Ah, there we go– this has nothing to do with protecting women, it has to do with protecting the “beauty” of the area. Funny how it reminds me of something . . . it’s almost as though we’ve seen city officials claim that buildings should be closed to protect women when they actually want to protect property values before.
I mean, if they actually wanted to lower criminal activity, they would, you know, start arresting the criminals, right?
And of course, closing down the brothels isn’t going to do a damn thing to help women– but it is going to do a hell of a lot of good for the brothel owners. The brothels have been bought under the restriction that the money exchanged in the purchase can not be used to open more brothels. So while the sex workers go underground to more dangerous working conditions, their old bosses are sitting on a big wad of cash. Nice. But hey– it’s all about the women. Don’t you forget that.
Here’s how I see it: no one likes a red-light district in their city. But whether or not they’re legal, pretty much every city has one. I know it and you know it. Making prostitution illegal has not stopped red-light districts. Making them legal, on the other hand, has resulted in sex worker unions. In the world of prostitution, that’s a fucking dream come true. Would I like a red-light district in my city? Not particularly. But if my choices are between a district that is legal, with regulations and unions and a district that is illegal, more dangerous and resulting in pointless arrests, I’ll definitely take the former.
And on a far less important point, but nearly impossible to ignore, what the fuck is Amsterdam thinking? Have they not noticed why tourists come to Amsterdam? Because the last time I checked, it was for prostitution and drugs. The drugs are, for fairly obvious reasons, typically kept near the prostitution. Are they actively trying to cripple their economy by causing tourist dollars to plummet? Compared to the other issues at stake, I can’t say that I really care all that much– but I am completely incapable of wrapping my head around that one. It makes me wonder if the city officials have been smoking up a bit too much.
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