by Alison Bass
The rise in trafficked sex workers throughout Scandinavia was cited by two New York University law students in a 2012 research paper arguing that criminalizing prostitution tends to reduce the number of voluntary prostitutes and increase the number of those involuntarily trafficked into the trade. It all has to do with supply and demand. Workers who sell sex by choice are more likely to exit the trade when faced with the risk of arrest, and that drives up the price, making it more lucrative for traffickers to step in and fill the demand.14
The 1999 law has had negative public health consequences as well, according to surveys of sex workers and reports from Swedish authorities.15 Because clients are so rushed and afraid of being arrested, sex workers have less time and power to screen them and demand safe sex (that is, use condoms). “You have to get into a car really fast rather than having time to talk and screen the client, as you did before,” Kock says. A report from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and a separate 2014 survey of Swedish sex workers found much the same thing: female sex workers are now exposed to more dangerous clients and cannot take the time to negotiate condom use or evaluate the risks involved.16
In addition, Sweden’s prohibitionist approach discourages the distribution of condoms to sex workers, according to a recent survey by HIV Sweden, a nonprofit health group, and the Rose Alliance, a sex workers group in Sweden. Of the sex workers surveyed, 68 percent said they had never received condoms from social services providers who work with sex workers to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.17 This has led to reports of an increase in unprotected sex between prostitutes and their clients.18
In large part because the Swedish law impedes sex workers’ ability to practice safe sex, the Global Commission on HIV and the Law, an independent group convened by the United Nations, released a report in 2012 denouncing the Nordic model. “Since the enactment in 1999, the law has not improved — indeed it has worsened the lives of sex workers,” the commission’s report concluded.19
That was certainly the case for Eva-Marree Kullander Smith. In August 2012, Eva-Marree lost custody of her children to her ex-boyfriend, despite his criminal record and the fact that he had restraining orders placed on him by two previous girlfriends. Social workers testified that Eva-Marree was an unfit parent because she had once done sex work. She appealed the court’s decision and lost again in March of 2013. The second time around, Kock says, the court didn’t question Eva-Marree’s ability to parent because she had once sold sex; instead, a judge ruled that the kids had been away from their mother for so long they were detached from her. The judge didn’t seem to understand or care that the separation was not Eva-Marree’s fault, Kock says.
A few months later, she finally arranged a supervised visit with her four-year-old son. The date was July 11, 2013, and it was to be the first time she had seen her son in eighteen months, Kock says. Eva-Marree was on her way to meet her son at a family social care facility in Sweden when she bumped into her ex-boyfriend, Joel Kabagambe, on the same bus (even though he wasn’t supposed to be at the visitation.) They started arguing, and when they got to the facility and were walking through its gardens, Kabagambe pulled out a knife and stabbed Eva-Marree thirty times in the back, neck, and chest. The social worker who was there to supervise the visit tried to intervene and was also stabbed in the neck. “She survived, but Eva-Marree died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” Kock says. “Her son, who was waiting inside the house, heard her screaming.” Eva-Marree was twenty-seven years old when she died.
Her murder and the circumstances surrounding it became nationwide news. At the October 2013 trial of Joel Kabagambe, the defense claimed that he was mentally unstable and was on medication at the time of the stabbing. Kabagambe was found guilty of murder and sentenced to eighteen years in prison.
“If he had these mental problems, how was he seen as the fit parent?” Kock asks. “She had no convictions and had done nothing illegal, yet she was still considered to be the unfit parent. It shows what people who sell sex are treated like in custody battles.”
The 1999 law itself didn’t cause Eva-Marree’s murder, Kock says, but it has certainly heightened the stigma surrounding sex work in Sweden. “The [1999] law is often portrayed as helping women in the sex industry, but that’s nonsense,” Kock says. “It doesn’t help them; it makes their lives more difficult.”
Laura Agustin, a well-known anthropologist and author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, agrees. As she wrote in a blog for Salon shortly after Eva-Marree’s murder: “The lesson is not that Sweden’s law caused a murder or that any other law would have prevented it. Whore stigma exists everywhere under all prostitution laws. Sweden’s law can be said to have given whore stigma a new rationality for social workers and judges, the stamp of government approval for age-old prejudice.”20
A Sea Change in Sex Worker Safety
In 2000, the Netherlands, long a bastion of tolerance, took an entirely different approach. After decades of tacitly allowing prostitution under a policy of de facto decriminalization, the Dutch government legalized sex work in certain indoor venues, such as brothels, massage parlors, and window units, and began regulating those venues as regular businesses. Owners were required to obtain licenses and become subject to regular inspections, much like the owners of brothels in Nevada’s rural counties. In the Netherlands, the licensed brothels and parlors are taxed and treated like any other business. Sex workers also have to register if they want to be considered legal and have access to health care and social security benefits.
The 2000 law also allowed street prostitutes to work in specific outdoor parks, known as tippelzones, in major cities throughout the country. In 2003, some of the tippelzones, including the largest one in Amsterdam, were closed in response to complaints from Dutch citizens about overcrowding and drug abuse in these parks. A few tippelzones in Utrecht and other Dutch cities remain open, according to Dina Siegel, a professor of criminology at Utrecht University.
The 2000 law also stipulated that only Dutch citizens could be considered legal sex workers, making at least 12,000 migrant workers illegal almost overnight.21 As sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein notes, a sizable proportion of the illegal workers left the country for Germany or Belgium, while those who remained relocated to the tippelzones or resorted to working for underground escort agencies or through the Internet.22
In an interview on Skype, Dina Siegel explained that the whole idea behind legalization was to make prostitution more visible and stem the rising tide of non-European women migrating into the Netherlands. “It was more of a migration issue than a prostitution issue,” says Siegel, who has studied sex workers migrating from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America into the Netherlands. “[The government was] trying to control the migration of non-European women.”
The 2000 law also stiffened penalties for traffickers or anyone found guilty of forcing people to engage in prostitution or employing the services of minors; it mandated prison sentences of up to six years for such offenders. Brothels and window units discovered to be employing illegal migrants or underage workers or breaking other existing laws could be shut down under the new legislation. In 2007, the city of Amsterdam closed down thirty different sex businesses, accusing them of breaking the law. Siegel, however, says the crackdown was largely an effort by municipal officials to refashion the red-light district into a shopping mecca for tourists. “They don’t want tourists who go to prostitutes; they want tourists who go to the Van Gogh museum,” she says. In 2008, after a new administrative decree permitted authorities to deny permits or contracts to any organization in which criminal activity was suspected, the Amsterdam city council shut two of the most famous sex clubs in that city and also closed a number of other brothels and window units.23
According to a major study commissioned by the Dutch government and published in 2007, the new law appears to have enhanced the safety of sex workers working in the legal sector.24 In
another study, sociologist Ronald Weitzer found that since legalization, there has been a sea change in the way that Dutch police treat sex workers and the owners of brothels and window units. “The police are our best friend at the moment; we work together with the police,” one owner of a window unit in Amsterdam’s red-light district told Weitzer.25
Decriminalizing the Dutch sex industry has also made it safer for the general public. For decades, the red-light districts in Amsterdam and other major cities have been safe places for tourists and residents to wander through at virtually all hours of the day or night. When I visited the city in the 1970s with several classmates (I was spending my junior year abroad at the time), we happened to stay in a cheap hostel in the middle of the red-light district, right next door to one of Amsterdam’s famous window units for prostitutes. These window units resemble one-room storefronts with large windows open to the street. The sex workers sit or stand in front of the windows dressed in bikinis or sexy lingerie. They pose provocatively or shake their bodies and call out to people passing by. When a client goes inside, they shut the red-velvet curtains lining the windows and get down to business.
One day during my visit, several tourists stopped in front of the hostel’s smaller front-facing windows and peered in at me as I was doing homework. They were probably wondering why a lady of the night was wearing a turtleneck and jeans. Apart from living in a fishbowl, my compatriots and I felt completely comfortable wandering around the district. Indeed, after an afternoon visit to the Heineken Brewery to sample the free beer, one of the men in our party (another American college student) disappeared for several hours, no doubt to taste the pleasures of Amsterdam’s red-light district.
Now that prostitution has been legalized, the sex industry in the Netherlands has boomed, and an even greater proportion of its clients are tourists. Elizabeth Bernstein visited the famous red-light district in Amsterdam, which lies in the center of town and is hard to miss. As she describes it, “The district is safe and well-policed, but the roaming packs of libidinous male tourists, rowdy and drunken crowds, wafting aromas of cannabis, ubiquitous fluorescent lights, and dense multi-directional foot traffic are overwhelming to the senses, to say the least. From the fragments of dialogue my ear casually perceives, it is clear that the buyers — like the sellers — hail from many different countries across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia. Amsterdam’s red-light district is a dense microcosm of the global sexual marketplace.”26
Bernstein also described her visit to a live sex show at one of the numerous sex theaters in the red-light district:
I stood in a massive line behind a group of some forty or fifty sari-clad women and their husbands, who had just piled out of the tour bus that was parked in front. There were also several coed groups of well-scrubbed North American, Australian and British college students on package holidays, already excited and in giggles. . . . [Inside] the members of the audience sat sipping beer, rather than munching popcorn, but otherwise it was quite like going to the movies. All watched politely as a young blonde woman dressed as a nun fellated a slightly older and darker Surinamese man dressed as a priest, while Gregorian chants played softly in the background. Then they went out in the audience, the robes came off and they proceeded to have full intercourse, splayed across the laps of giggling audience members.27
As Bernstein concludes, “the Netherlands’ pragmatic recognition of the sex trade as a legitimate sphere of commerce and employment has resulted in greater social legitimacy and working conditions for at least some parties” — that is, sex workers in the legal sector who are now free of police harassment.28 It has also improved the lot of brothel owners who can afford to pay the licensing fees and high taxes required of such businesses.
While the legal approach in the Netherlands has undeniably improved some sex workers’ lives, one big question remains: what has the impact of legalization been on the trafficking and exploitation of underage sex workers and illegal immigrants? Let’s start with underage prostitution. Several studies have found the presence of minors virtually nonexistent in both the legal and illegal sectors of the Dutch sex industry. The 2007 study commissioned by the Dutch government found that “scarcely any underage prostitutes seem to be working in the licensed sector, and there are no signs of a large presence of underage prostitutes in the non-licensed [sector] either.” 29 In a 2010 survey of 94 window workers in Amsterdam, none was found to be underage.30
According to a recent report issued by the National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children, an independent government-funded Dutch agency, the percentage of reported underage trafficking victims (in relation to the total number of reported victims) declined from 28 percent in 2007 to 16 percent in 2011. Most of these underage victims have Dutch nationality, the report found.31
The overall trafficking picture is muddier. While there is no question that sex trafficking does exist in the Netherlands, Dutch officials and researchers who monitor human trafficking say there is no solid evidence of an increase in trafficking since prostitution was legalized in the Netherlands. The 2007 study commissioned by the Dutch government found that the number of foreign prostitutes working without valid papers had decreased in the years after legalization.
But in the past five years, there has been a substantial uptick in the number of Eastern European women (from Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary) entering the Netherlands. There are currently about 25,000 to 28,000 sex workers in the Netherlands, and between 65 and 80 percent of the women are not from the European Union, according to Dutch government estimates.32
However, most of these women are not being forced into the sex trade against their will. According to social services agencies that work with sex workers in Amsterdam’s red-light district, most of the migrant women know beforehand that they will be working in prostitution in the Netherlands. Many of the women from Eastern Europe (where the economy has been in a tailspin with the European debt crisis) were persuaded to move to the Netherlands by female friends who were already working there.33
Dina Siegel, who has studied and interviewed dozens of migrant sex workers throughout the Netherlands, found much the same. “These are girls from Romania and Bulgaria, and they come for a few years to help their families,” she says. “They invest the money they make in houses or their studies or a business. They are all here voluntarily. I haven’t seen one who was forced. There are probably a few [who have been trafficked], but I didn’t see them.”
In a 2011 article published in the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, Siegel cites a number of different studies finding that the overwhelming majority of the non-European women, including those from Nigeria and Latin America, choose to work in the Dutch sex trade and travel to the Netherlands in order to improve their economic situation. She concludes, “Given these findings, the problem of human trafficking often seems exaggerated and misinterpreted in the EU [European Union] as well as in other parts of the world. In . . . public debate, it is much more fashionable to talk about human trafficking, violence and exploitation than it is to approach the phenomenon of prostitution as a career path chosen by women themselves.”34
The number of possible trafficking victims “registered” by Dutch police in 2011 (1,222) was 71 percent higher than the number registered in 2007 (716), according to the 2012 report by the National Rapporteur. But that doesn’t mean that trafficking is actually on the rise in the Netherlands, as the report itself noted: “An increase in the number of reported victims could mean that human trafficking is increasing in the Netherlands, but is more likely an indication that more victims are being identified and that the reporting and registration of victims has improved. For example, a partial explanation of the sharp increase in 2011 could be the fact that in that year CoMensha [Coordination Centre for Human Trafficking] made agreements with regional police forces on the structural reporting of victims.”35
As Weitzer notes, the number of persons convicted of traffickin
g offenses in the Netherlands has remained fairly stable in recent years: 79 in 2003 and 23 in 2007. He argues that these numbers cast doubt on the claim by some antiprostitution groups that trafficking has skyrocketed since prostitution was legalized in 2000. Several studies commissioned by the Dutch government concluded that it is likely that trafficking has become more difficult under legalization (because indoor venues that hire illegal migrants are penalized). As one National Rapporteur report concluded, “Before the lifting of the general ban on brothels, THB [trafficking in human beings] and other (criminal) abuses were taking place in all sectors of prostitution. Some of these sectors are now under control and can be assumed to have rid themselves of their former criminal excesses. . . . It is possible that THB is increasing in the illegal, non–regulated or non-controlled sectors. If this were the case, it still cannot be assumed that the extent of THB is now at the same or even above the ‘old’ level it was before the ban on brothels. It is in fact likely that this is not the case.”36
Even if trafficking, or the transporting of migrants across borders for involuntary prostitution, does not appear to have increased, that doesn’t mean that sex workers in the Netherlands (and elsewhere) are not being exploited or coerced into the trade. The 2007 Dutch study found that despite legalization, pimps are still a common phenomenon there, controlling many sex workers, particularly those who work in the window units or as escorts.37 The researchers who conducted that study observed that a great majority of the window prostitutes work with a so-called boyfriend or pimp and that some of these workers are forced to hand over their earnings to their pimps.38 Problems with pimps occur relatively frequently among Eastern European, African, and Asian prostitutes, but also among Dutch prostitutes, the researchers found.39