NETHERLANDS—Femke Halsema, the first woman to become mayor of Amsterdam, announced on Wednesday that she plans to bring the first major reforms to the city’s legendary “red light” district since the Netherlands legalized professional sex work almost 20 years ago, according to a BBC report. But the 53-year-old Halsema, a member of the country’s left-wing GroenLinks party, said that her proposed reforms are aimed at protecting the sex workers who ply their trade in the district.
Not only an increase in human trafficking but also a rising influx of tourists who visit the red light district only to gawk at—and take cell phone photos of—the women who display themselves in windows there spurred the need for change, Halsema told the news agency Reuters. Doing away with the window displays would be one of the major reforms proposed by the mayor.
“We’re forced by circumstances because Amsterdam changes,” Halsema told Reuters. “I think a lot of the women who work there feel humiliated, laughed at—and that’s one of the reasons we are thinking about changing.”
Her proposal, presented in a report titled “The Future of Window Prostitution in Amsterdam,” also suggests limiting adult businesses including prostitution to a single “erotic zone” in Amsterdam, which would be set apart from the city with a clearly marked entrance gate, Reuters reported.
Halsema said, however, that she continues to support legalized sex work in the Netherlands.
“We legalized prostitution because we thought and still think that legal prostitution gives a woman a chance to be autonomous, independent,” she told Reuters. “Criminalizing prostitution has been done in the United States, which I think makes women extra vulnerable.”
A growing “abolitionist” movement in Holland has been pushing for the renewed outlawing of sex work, according to The Independent newspaper. Numerous legal prostitution zones in the city have already closed down, the paper reported.
In April, youth activists submitted an online petition to the Dutch parliament calling not for prostitution itself to be outlawed, but for sex trade consumers—those who pay for sex—to be subjected to criminal penalties, according to a BBC report.
Not all of the sex workers interviewed by Reuters were thrilled with the idea of closing down Amsterdam’s famed window displays, saying that the windows allow them to remain in sanitary conditions, and to evaluate potential customers in advance.
“If they close the windows, then all the sex workers will go underground and they’ll need much more people to regulate that,” said one, who gave her professional name Foxxy Angel, who is a member of PROUD, a sex workers organizing group.
She acknowledged, however, that inappropriate and harassing behavior by tourists has become a problem in the district.
Photo By Jos van Zetten / Wikimedia Commons
