AMSTERDAM—Sex work has been a legal, licensed profession in the Netherlands for two decades, but lawmakers from the country’s ruling party, the Christian Democratic Appeal, have introduced a measure in parliament to make it illegal again. But CDA member Anne Kuik, who introduced the bill, says that her objections have nothing to do with religious views toward sex.
Kuik claims that the move to outlaw sex work once again is motivated by what she sees as the gender inequalities caused by the job, saying that she believes “most prostitutes would not actually want to have sex with the man in front of them.”
Purchasing sexual consent “is no longer possible in these modern times," Kuik said, as quoted by the NL Times news site.
The Netherlands has two other major, Christian political parties which have long supported re-criminalization of sex work, but Kuik insisted that any religious prohibition on sex outside of marriage was a non-factor in the CDA’s support for stripping sex workers of their legal status.
"For me it is about emancipation and protecting women in a vulnerable position," she said. "Prostitutes, mostly women, are treated unequally"
The Netherlands was one of the earliest European countries to allow sex workers to get back to work after economic shutdowns caused by the global coronavirus pandemic. Sex workers were legally permitted to resume their activities on July 1, after the government there initially required legal brothels to wait until September to reopen.
Other close-contact businesses, such as hair salons, had been allowed to resume operations earlier.
But pressure from sex worker advocacy groups who protested that the government was using the pandemic as a pretext to strip sex work of its legality led officials there to move the brothel reopening schedule up by two months.
Nonetheless, local officials have been cracking down on legal sex work. In Amsterdam, home of the Red Light District which drew nearly 20 million tourists in 2019 alone, Mayor Femke Halsema has attempted to shut down the district’s distinctive window displays, in which sex workers station themselves as living advertisements for their services.
In late July, Halsema proposed moving sex workers out of the Red Light District into a single “prostitute hotel,” to be located well outside of the city center, where the famed adult entertainment district now sits.
Kuik says she wants the Netherlands to follow Sweden’s model, under which paying for sex has been illegal since 1999, though receiving payment has not. But sex worker advocates say that the approach, known as the “Nordic model,” is just another form of criminalization, and encourages law enforcement to place sex workers under surveillance as a way to identify and arrest their clients.
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