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I have been living in Amsterdam for about half a year. Met lots of locals. The red light district is not liked. It’s full of trashy people wanting to do drugs a

I have been living in Amsterdam for about half a year. Met lots of locals. The red light district is not liked. It’s full of trashy people wanting to do drugs and have sex. Sure if you find those to be pleasures of life then be my guest, but the locals hate it: imagine having an entire neighborhood ruined by these kind of people, who let me tell you are not the most respectful kind. But the real issue is that none of the girl prostitutes are locals. Not once I heard of a local Dutch girl doing this. And it’s also mostly lots of people that need he money. If the brothels were full of dutch-rich women then I’d be fine with it... but reality is that it’s not and it encourages poorer people to participate in the activity. And in a way it exploits these people even if it’s their choice. Also let’s not forget the immortal rule: wherever there’s money, there’s corruption. So unfortunately I don’t favor the red light district. Maybe if it was far from the center and if it was done in a way where you would be 100% sure where nobody was exploited, then yes. But reality is that nobody can know for sure that exploitation doesn’t happen. But then there’s also the other side of the coin that if you make it illegal it will anyway happen in a worst manner... on the streets and with more exploitation. So maybe having something organized and outside cultural city center seems like a good win-win situation.

TylerE 7y ago
> imagine having an entire neighborhood ruined by these kind of people So, just like multiple neighborhoods in any big urban city? Except that it's at least somewhat regulated/under legal protection?
- dylanz 7y ago
  Exactly. There will always be people doing drugs and paying for sex. I think Amsterdam is in a unique position to try and come up with ways to make this all work. It's definitely new ground, and won't be an easy task to say the least!
  - GrumpyNl 7y ago
    Most major cities in Holland have a red light district. The Hague has two, Rotterdam one.
    - vidarh 7y ago
      Most major cities have one. The only difference tends to be how obvious it is to visitors. E.g. walk around Soho in London and pay attention, and you see hints of it all over the place; they're just not sitting in the windows.
mido22 7y ago
so... it is okay as long as people can't see it? > wherever there’s money, there’s corruption ... I guess I should stop working in IT
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  I actually disagree strongly with the trend of moving to non-urban red light districts. My neighborhood is incredibly safe for everyone at all hours because of the density of legal sex workers, most of which will call police when they see a disturbance. It is also relatively resistant to corruption, because interactions between the police, the workers and the establishments are overheard. There's an excellent claim that most domestic abuse per capita happens in suburbs in contrast to most reported abuse. I would look for better counter evidence before moving the fence.
close04 7y ago
> Not once I heard of a local Dutch girl doing this. How is this relevant? I mean in what manner would nationality change your opinion on this topic?
- teej 7y ago
  Places with legal sex work have higher rates of human trafficking > Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization. https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/ https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...
  - dleslie 7y ago
    Human trafficking exists in many industries where employing local labour is the exception; it could be that the tolerance of sex work and its unlikelihood of hiring locally sourced labour makes it attractive to human trafficking.
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > Places with legal sex work have higher rates of human trafficking Places with legal sex work have higher reported rates of human trafficking. This is not a surprise; one of the biggest arguments consistently made in favor of decriminalizing sex work is that it will make it easier to catch human trafficking, and make it easier for trafficking victims to come forward without the risk of being charged for a crime.' Even the article you quote, if you take the time to read it all the way, doesn't draw the conclusion that the higher reported rates of human trafficking mean that sex work should be criminalized.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- moccachino 7y ago
Spearchucker 7y ago
All true. There are other realities worth considering too - one being that if sex workers are driven from Amsterdam, that they'll simply go elsewhere. Ostend and Bremerhaven are both served by ferries from the UK. What might the financial impact of the NIMBYism be on the Netherlands?
yread 7y ago
Take a walk around Oude kerk on sunday morning and there will be plenty of dutch to be heard. Those ladies are also no teenagers
- tasuki 7y ago
  Very mildly put!
FakeComments 7y ago
> And in a way it exploits these people even if it’s their choice. How, exactly? Your position is that they’d be better off with a different job, but presumably we’re talking about adults there by choice. How is voluntary prostitution more exploitative than, say, a construction worker? ...or even third shift at a grocery store? I mean, if your point is Marxist all labor for pay is “exploitation”, okay — but otherwise, I don’t see how adults choosing a profession exploits them.
- vidarh 7y ago
  This argument tends to come from the exact opposite viewpoint of Marxists. Part of the issue is that prostitution is often "in your face exploitative" (I'm not suggesting it always is), and because it often is, a lot of people are very insistent on making it into a moral issue where it can't be anything but exploitative, because the alternative if you allow yourself to accept prostitution as "just another profession" among many that can also be dangerous, exploitative, uncomfortable, and so on, is to accept that "normal" occupations can also be exploitative, and that's surprisingly hard to swallow for a lot of people even if you don't go anywhere near all the way to a Marxist "all labor is exploitation" line.
ldng 7y ago
So basically, maybe it's better than make it illegal, as long as it's Not In My Back Yard ?
- criddell 7y ago
  Sounds right to me. I'm not sure what it's like in Amsterdam, but most cities in America have zoning laws to regulate what types of businesses can be located in a specific place.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    Difference between 'regulate' and 'prevent' certain types of businesses, I guess. Do any cities have laws which state certain areas are ok for prostitutes to work in? I'd guess not
  - ldng 7y ago
    Well, it is just displacing the problem. It does not solve anything, just hide it. Beside, wasn't the red light district precisely that, a zoning ?
wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago
Its location in effectively the city center is unfortunate. I absolutely love Amsterdam and recently spent 10 lazy days there but tried hard to avoid getting within a kilometer of Amsterdam Centraal. Reminds me of Times Square but with a lot more bros.
thrower123 7y ago
The thing that struck me about the red light district when I visited Amsterdam and walked through it one night was just how sad and small and tawdry it was. It has this almost mythic reputation, but there's not a whole lot to it.
goobynight 7y ago
I don't see why being "trashy" and into drugs+sex has to be relegated to a journey outside the city center. Pearl clutching moralists (not necessarily you) always have a strong voice at this table though. Being interested in these things is no better than raising useless generations of children who, on average, will eventually have MULTIPLE degenerates in the family line. Some jobs are just simply for poor people. I'd rather solve that problem than isolate the effort to sex work. The work involving sex doesn't make it significantly more exploitative than being so poor that you're willing to take short term gains and long term losses driving for Uber or something. At least you can come out profitable in sex work. Let's also think of the service being provided here. Low economic status, ugly men can have their biological urges satisfied. What happens to incels if that goes away? This question is only going to become more important, given the trajectory of hypergamy. As someone that lives in the US, neighborhoods, in my opinion, are ruined by moralists, even if they appear respectful. e.g. I can't legally walk around sipping a beer.
- pyrale 7y ago
  > The work involving sex doesn't make it significantly more exploitative than [...] driving for Uber How many uber drivers were assaulted or killed in the last month? How many are coerced into driving for uber, and have their gains captured by third party? In which cities are there rings traficking slaves to drive uber cabs? What is the mean age of death for uber drivers? I mean, please... do yourself a favour and research a bit before you make such ignorant claims.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    What about those, that, as in TFA, say that they do it by choice, it's a job, and that the government/"concerned citizens" should leave them the duck alone?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    There has been a recent rash of taxi driver suicides. It is being largely attributed to the rise of services like Uber. There are many articles about the dark side of the Gig Economy and how much workers feel exploited, don't have healthcare, etc. I do gig work and I think it has potential to do good things for the world, but my views are in the minority. Most people see the Gig Economy as an evil force doing nothing but exploiting workers and that exploitation absolutely kills people at times. There is substantial evidence that a large part of the danger involved in sex work comes from the fact that it is criminalized. This fact actively makes it harder for sex workers to operate safely. Uber drivers do not have that problem.
bogus_323423 7y ago
How dare people try to get ahead in ways I find repellent. They clearly must be coerced into doing it, so let's coerce them into not doing it. It attracts trashy people and tweakers! They should abuse prescription drugs and wear the respectable fashion and be mannerly like upper class people such as myself. Mote, meet beam. I'm sure we can whip the sinners into virtue and establish the true city on the hill. We may not like the criminal underworld, but the cure is worse than the disease.
naasking 7y ago
> Maybe if it was far from the center and if it was done in a way where you would be 100% sure where nobody was exploited, then yes All kinds of low and high paying jobs are exploitative and hardly anybody cares. But as soon as some degree of sex is involved, everyone is suddenly peculiarly interested exploitation. Why is sex treated so differently?
- mc32 7y ago
  Probably a few reasons, it often involves very vulnerable people, people who were coerced, people who were tricked (we have student jobs for you, hand over your passport though), etc. People are similarly uncomfortable with migrant manual laborers in the ME who are also coerced and tricked, though many do it knowingly because the alternative is worse. Initially trafficked sex workers tend younger than initially indentured migrant manual laborers, so they can be taken advantage of easier.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    How much worse is it than people who are trafficked in to work as housekeepers, lawn service, construction, etc...? The primary problem is the dubious legal situation the prostitutes find themselves in which enables even worse exploitation.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      Do you think being raped is worse than being mugged? If so, then there's your answer to why people care more about human trafficking for sex than for manual labor.
  - landryraccoon 7y ago
    I'd like to hear viewpoints that represent sex workers as having agency, rather than pets or wards to be told what they need. Why don't we listen to sex workers themselves, when they tell us what policy changes they want? If sex workers say sex work should be criminalized, that would hold some weight for me. If they're exploited, I'd like to hear what they think would actually help them.
misja111 7y ago
I have been living in Amsterdam for the last 25 years, here is a bit of background. 25 years ago the red light district was a no go area for except for people looking for sex or drugs. But in the recent decades that has slowly changed. At some point it became fashionable to live in the old city centre and in the red light district housing was cheap. As soon as those 'normal' people were living there they started to complain about all the noise and the shady figures that were hanging around. And the city government listened; now the policy is to make the Red Light district a normal neighbourhood for families and what not. >> But the real issue is that none of the girl prostitutes are locals. This has a simple reason: the red light district is all window prostitution, and as a local girl you wouldn't like to be standing there when your uncle or some friend happens to be passing by.
- targonca 7y ago
  Sounds like gentrification to me.
  - Yaa101 7y ago
    It is, I live in the Red Light District for 34 years and have seen it all. This plan to get rid of the girls is a setup of the civil cervants and the church since around 2000. When I came living there in 1985 the neighborhood was rough, relative unsave because of dealers and junkies and there was a lot of crappy state housing. Round 2000 most of these problems were gone and the land/housing slowly started to become more valueable. A lot of parties with interest to gain a lot from that neighbourhood, with all their own reasons, started to plan for the removal of coffeeshops and the girls. The tourists coming for these coffeeshops were low key and hardly a problem for the authorities. The interested parties started 1012 project to buy out all the owners of the window bordellos, this failed due to finance problems caused by the expensive north/south metroline and the downfall of the economy in 2008. Then the parties had another plan, "Let's invite lower class uncivil drinking tourists through the tourist buro", then they can trash the neibourhood and make life difficult for the ladies behind the windows. Then the parties started to talk how little respect and danger these girls are getting from those tourists, now we have a reason to relocate these girls and make the money from those now high valued buildings and land. There are billions involved with this, don't let people fool you into thinking that there is a milligram of altruism.
tecleandor 7y ago
"And it’s also mostly lots of people that need he money. " Are you implying that people is working for the money and not just for the sake of it?
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Might shock you but some prostitutes do enjoy their work. I guess it's the higher paid, non-streetwalkers though. edit: "[...] she stated that she enjoyed her job as a prostitute [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Coghlan#After_the_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Coghlan#After_the_trial
chimeracoder 7y ago
> it exploits these people even if it’s their choice. This is a talking point used by people who try to criminalize sex work, and it flies completely in the face of what sex workers' advocacy groups around the world actually say. No, you're not equating sex work with sex trafficking in your comment, but you're adopting wholesale the language of people who do. > But the real issue is that none of the girl prostitutes are locals. Not once I heard of a local Dutch girl doing this. And it’s also mostly lots of people that need he money. If the brothels were full of dutch-rich women then I’d be fine with it. Why is it a problem when foreigners engage in sex work to make money, but not a problem when "Dutch-rich" people engage in sex work to make money? You're talking about unionized workers in a highly regulated industry doing very lucrative labor. It's very hard to make the argument that they're being exploited, any more than laborers in any other industry are being exploited.
- plurple 7y ago
  Because most of the foreign sex workers are trafficked in and forced to do the work.
  - chimeracoder 7y ago
    > Because most of the foreign sex workers are trafficked in and forced to do the work. Citation needed, especially since they're unionized and very vocally and visibly fighting these measures.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
holoduke 7y ago
You are so wrong about the red light district. I am Dutch and live in Amsterdam almost my entire life. The red light district is not shady at all. Plenty of hipster bars within and around the zone. Hardly any dealers walking around anymore these days. Red-light district is both popular by locals and tourists. It's the safest city center neighborhood. The place never really was a shady place. Not even in the 17th century. It's a place of obscure trade. Sometimes a bit too much for outsiders. The available sex and drugs in the red light zone is not linked to criminal activity. It is heavily regulated with many different institutions watching over it. No Dutch girls working behind the glass? Again you are so wrong. Yes the mayority are Romanian and Bulgarian. But the private clubs are mostly Dutch girls.
chrismcb 7y ago
How did they ruin the neighborhood? They ARE the neighborhood, and have been for hundreds of years. You seem to be arguing that something is ok if one doesn't do it for the money? Lots of people do things for money, are they being exploited as well? Your argument seems to be, there might be corruption, and there are no locals.

TylerE 7y ago

> imagine having an entire neighborhood ruined by these kind of people So, just like multiple neighborhoods in any big urban city? Except that it's at least somewhat regulated/under legal protection?

dylanz 7y ago
Exactly. There will always be people doing drugs and paying for sex. I think Amsterdam is in a unique position to try and come up with ways to make this all work. It's definitely new ground, and won't be an easy task to say the least!
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  Most major cities in Holland have a red light district. The Hague has two, Rotterdam one.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    Most major cities have one. The only difference tends to be how obvious it is to visitors. E.g. walk around Soho in London and pay attention, and you see hints of it all over the place; they're just not sitting in the windows.

mido22 7y ago

so... it is okay as long as people can't see it? > wherever there’s money, there’s corruption ... I guess I should stop working in IT

yabadabadoes 7y ago
I actually disagree strongly with the trend of moving to non-urban red light districts. My neighborhood is incredibly safe for everyone at all hours because of the density of legal sex workers, most of which will call police when they see a disturbance. It is also relatively resistant to corruption, because interactions between the police, the workers and the establishments are overheard. There's an excellent claim that most domestic abuse per capita happens in suburbs in contrast to most reported abuse. I would look for better counter evidence before moving the fence.

close04 7y ago

> Not once I heard of a local Dutch girl doing this. How is this relevant? I mean in what manner would nationality change your opinion on this topic?

teej 7y ago
Places with legal sex work have higher rates of human trafficking > Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization. https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-prostitution-increase-human-trafficking/ https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...
- dleslie 7y ago
  Human trafficking exists in many industries where employing local labour is the exception; it could be that the tolerance of sex work and its unlikelihood of hiring locally sourced labour makes it attractive to human trafficking.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > Places with legal sex work have higher rates of human trafficking Places with legal sex work have higher reported rates of human trafficking. This is not a surprise; one of the biggest arguments consistently made in favor of decriminalizing sex work is that it will make it easier to catch human trafficking, and make it easier for trafficking victims to come forward without the risk of being charged for a crime.' Even the article you quote, if you take the time to read it all the way, doesn't draw the conclusion that the higher reported rates of human trafficking mean that sex work should be criminalized.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
moccachino 7y ago

Spearchucker 7y ago

All true. There are other realities worth considering too - one being that if sex workers are driven from Amsterdam, that they'll simply go elsewhere. Ostend and Bremerhaven are both served by ferries from the UK. What might the financial impact of the NIMBYism be on the Netherlands?

yread 7y ago

Take a walk around Oude kerk on sunday morning and there will be plenty of dutch to be heard. Those ladies are also no teenagers

tasuki 7y ago
Very mildly put!

FakeComments 7y ago

> And in a way it exploits these people even if it’s their choice. How, exactly? Your position is that they’d be better off with a different job, but presumably we’re talking about adults there by choice. How is voluntary prostitution more exploitative than, say, a construction worker? ...or even third shift at a grocery store? I mean, if your point is Marxist all labor for pay is “exploitation”, okay — but otherwise, I don’t see how adults choosing a profession exploits them.

vidarh 7y ago
This argument tends to come from the exact opposite viewpoint of Marxists. Part of the issue is that prostitution is often "in your face exploitative" (I'm not suggesting it always is), and because it often is, a lot of people are very insistent on making it into a moral issue where it can't be anything but exploitative, because the alternative if you allow yourself to accept prostitution as "just another profession" among many that can also be dangerous, exploitative, uncomfortable, and so on, is to accept that "normal" occupations can also be exploitative, and that's surprisingly hard to swallow for a lot of people even if you don't go anywhere near all the way to a Marxist "all labor is exploitation" line.

ldng 7y ago

So basically, maybe it's better than make it illegal, as long as it's Not In My Back Yard ?

criddell 7y ago
Sounds right to me. I'm not sure what it's like in Amsterdam, but most cities in America have zoning laws to regulate what types of businesses can be located in a specific place.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Difference between 'regulate' and 'prevent' certain types of businesses, I guess. Do any cities have laws which state certain areas are ok for prostitutes to work in? I'd guess not
- ldng 7y ago
  Well, it is just displacing the problem. It does not solve anything, just hide it. Beside, wasn't the red light district precisely that, a zoning ?

wDcBKgt66V8WDs 7y ago

Its location in effectively the city center is unfortunate. I absolutely love Amsterdam and recently spent 10 lazy days there but tried hard to avoid getting within a kilometer of Amsterdam Centraal. Reminds me of Times Square but with a lot more bros.

thrower123 7y ago

The thing that struck me about the red light district when I visited Amsterdam and walked through it one night was just how sad and small and tawdry it was. It has this almost mythic reputation, but there's not a whole lot to it.

goobynight 7y ago

I don't see why being "trashy" and into drugs+sex has to be relegated to a journey outside the city center. Pearl clutching moralists (not necessarily you) always have a strong voice at this table though. Being interested in these things is no better than raising useless generations of children who, on average, will eventually have MULTIPLE degenerates in the family line. Some jobs are just simply for poor people. I'd rather solve that problem than isolate the effort to sex work. The work involving sex doesn't make it significantly more exploitative than being so poor that you're willing to take short term gains and long term losses driving for Uber or something. At least you can come out profitable in sex work. Let's also think of the service being provided here. Low economic status, ugly men can have their biological urges satisfied. What happens to incels if that goes away? This question is only going to become more important, given the trajectory of hypergamy. As someone that lives in the US, neighborhoods, in my opinion, are ruined by moralists, even if they appear respectful. e.g. I can't legally walk around sipping a beer.

pyrale 7y ago
> The work involving sex doesn't make it significantly more exploitative than [...] driving for Uber How many uber drivers were assaulted or killed in the last month? How many are coerced into driving for uber, and have their gains captured by third party? In which cities are there rings traficking slaves to drive uber cabs? What is the mean age of death for uber drivers? I mean, please... do yourself a favour and research a bit before you make such ignorant claims.
- coldtea 7y ago
  What about those, that, as in TFA, say that they do it by choice, it's a job, and that the government/"concerned citizens" should leave them the duck alone?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  There has been a recent rash of taxi driver suicides. It is being largely attributed to the rise of services like Uber. There are many articles about the dark side of the Gig Economy and how much workers feel exploited, don't have healthcare, etc. I do gig work and I think it has potential to do good things for the world, but my views are in the minority. Most people see the Gig Economy as an evil force doing nothing but exploiting workers and that exploitation absolutely kills people at times. There is substantial evidence that a large part of the danger involved in sex work comes from the fact that it is criminalized. This fact actively makes it harder for sex workers to operate safely. Uber drivers do not have that problem.

bogus_323423 7y ago

How dare people try to get ahead in ways I find repellent. They clearly must be coerced into doing it, so let's coerce them into not doing it. It attracts trashy people and tweakers! They should abuse prescription drugs and wear the respectable fashion and be mannerly like upper class people such as myself. Mote, meet beam. I'm sure we can whip the sinners into virtue and establish the true city on the hill. We may not like the criminal underworld, but the cure is worse than the disease.

naasking 7y ago

> Maybe if it was far from the center and if it was done in a way where you would be 100% sure where nobody was exploited, then yes All kinds of low and high paying jobs are exploitative and hardly anybody cares. But as soon as some degree of sex is involved, everyone is suddenly peculiarly interested exploitation. Why is sex treated so differently?

mc32 7y ago
Probably a few reasons, it often involves very vulnerable people, people who were coerced, people who were tricked (we have student jobs for you, hand over your passport though), etc. People are similarly uncomfortable with migrant manual laborers in the ME who are also coerced and tricked, though many do it knowingly because the alternative is worse. Initially trafficked sex workers tend younger than initially indentured migrant manual laborers, so they can be taken advantage of easier.
- jandrese 7y ago
  How much worse is it than people who are trafficked in to work as housekeepers, lawn service, construction, etc...? The primary problem is the dubious legal situation the prostitutes find themselves in which enables even worse exploitation.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Do you think being raped is worse than being mugged? If so, then there's your answer to why people care more about human trafficking for sex than for manual labor.
- landryraccoon 7y ago
  I'd like to hear viewpoints that represent sex workers as having agency, rather than pets or wards to be told what they need. Why don't we listen to sex workers themselves, when they tell us what policy changes they want? If sex workers say sex work should be criminalized, that would hold some weight for me. If they're exploited, I'd like to hear what they think would actually help them.

misja111 7y ago

I have been living in Amsterdam for the last 25 years, here is a bit of background. 25 years ago the red light district was a no go area for except for people looking for sex or drugs. But in the recent decades that has slowly changed. At some point it became fashionable to live in the old city centre and in the red light district housing was cheap. As soon as those 'normal' people were living there they started to complain about all the noise and the shady figures that were hanging around. And the city government listened; now the policy is to make the Red Light district a normal neighbourhood for families and what not. >> But the real issue is that none of the girl prostitutes are locals. This has a simple reason: the red light district is all window prostitution, and as a local girl you wouldn't like to be standing there when your uncle or some friend happens to be passing by.

targonca 7y ago
Sounds like gentrification to me.
- Yaa101 7y ago
  It is, I live in the Red Light District for 34 years and have seen it all. This plan to get rid of the girls is a setup of the civil cervants and the church since around 2000. When I came living there in 1985 the neighborhood was rough, relative unsave because of dealers and junkies and there was a lot of crappy state housing. Round 2000 most of these problems were gone and the land/housing slowly started to become more valueable. A lot of parties with interest to gain a lot from that neighbourhood, with all their own reasons, started to plan for the removal of coffeeshops and the girls. The tourists coming for these coffeeshops were low key and hardly a problem for the authorities. The interested parties started 1012 project to buy out all the owners of the window bordellos, this failed due to finance problems caused by the expensive north/south metroline and the downfall of the economy in 2008. Then the parties had another plan, "Let's invite lower class uncivil drinking tourists through the tourist buro", then they can trash the neibourhood and make life difficult for the ladies behind the windows. Then the parties started to talk how little respect and danger these girls are getting from those tourists, now we have a reason to relocate these girls and make the money from those now high valued buildings and land. There are billions involved with this, don't let people fool you into thinking that there is a milligram of altruism.

tecleandor 7y ago

"And it’s also mostly lots of people that need he money. " Are you implying that people is working for the money and not just for the sake of it?

tempguy9999 7y ago
Might shock you but some prostitutes do enjoy their work. I guess it's the higher paid, non-streetwalkers though. edit: "[...] she stated that she enjoyed her job as a prostitute [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Coghlan#After_the_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Coghlan#After_the_trial

chimeracoder 7y ago

> it exploits these people even if it’s their choice. This is a talking point used by people who try to criminalize sex work, and it flies completely in the face of what sex workers' advocacy groups around the world actually say. No, you're not equating sex work with sex trafficking in your comment, but you're adopting wholesale the language of people who do. > But the real issue is that none of the girl prostitutes are locals. Not once I heard of a local Dutch girl doing this. And it’s also mostly lots of people that need he money. If the brothels were full of dutch-rich women then I’d be fine with it. Why is it a problem when foreigners engage in sex work to make money, but not a problem when "Dutch-rich" people engage in sex work to make money? You're talking about unionized workers in a highly regulated industry doing very lucrative labor. It's very hard to make the argument that they're being exploited, any more than laborers in any other industry are being exploited.

plurple 7y ago
Because most of the foreign sex workers are trafficked in and forced to do the work.
- chimeracoder 7y ago
  > Because most of the foreign sex workers are trafficked in and forced to do the work. Citation needed, especially since they're unionized and very vocally and visibly fighting these measures.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

holoduke 7y ago

You are so wrong about the red light district. I am Dutch and live in Amsterdam almost my entire life. The red light district is not shady at all. Plenty of hipster bars within and around the zone. Hardly any dealers walking around anymore these days. Red-light district is both popular by locals and tourists. It's the safest city center neighborhood. The place never really was a shady place. Not even in the 17th century. It's a place of obscure trade. Sometimes a bit too much for outsiders. The available sex and drugs in the red light zone is not linked to criminal activity. It is heavily regulated with many different institutions watching over it. No Dutch girls working behind the glass? Again you are so wrong. Yes the mayority are Romanian and Bulgarian. But the private clubs are mostly Dutch girls.

chrismcb 7y ago

How did they ruin the neighborhood? They ARE the neighborhood, and have been for hundreds of years. You seem to be arguing that something is ok if one doesn't do it for the money? Lots of people do things for money, are they being exploited as well? Your argument seems to be, there might be corruption, and there are no locals.