History of Feminism

The brothel boom is over. A third of Amsterdam’s bordellos have been closed due to the involvement of organised criminals and drug dealers and the increase in trafficking of women. Police now acknowledge that the red-light district has mutated into a global hub for human trafficking and money laundering. The streets have been infiltrated by grooming gangs seeking out young, vulnerable girls and marketing them to men as virgins who will do whatever they are told. Many of those involved in Amsterdam’s regular tourist trade — the museums and canals — fear that their visitors are vanishing along with the city’s reputation

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Rather than remove the sleaziness of the red light district, it made the area more depressing than ever — full of drunken sex tourists who act as window shoppers, pointing and laughing at the women they see. Local women pass the streets with their heads down, trying not to see the other women displayed like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop. Men can be seen entering the brothels, trying to barter down the price. Others come out zipping up their jeans. Many of the women look very young, all of them bored, with the majority sitting on stools in underwear playing with their phones.

Nowhere else in the world is street prostitution legal, because people do not want it in plain sight. Where there is a street sex trade, women are accosted on their way home by punters, and often condoms, drugs paraphernalia and pimps are visible. But the Netherlands decided in 1996 that street prostitution was a decent way to earn money and created several ‘tolerance zones’ for men to safely rent a vagina, anus or mouth for a few minutes. Cars drive into cubicles. This being the Netherlands, there is a special section for cyclists. Keep prostitution green.

The day after the Amsterdam zone opened, more than a hundred residents from nearby neighbourhoods took to the streets in protest. It took six years for the mayor to admit in public that the experiment had been a disaster, a magnet for trafficked women, drug dealers and underage girls. Zones in Rotterdam, The Hague and Heerlen have shut down in similar circumstances. The direction of travel is clear: legalisation will be repealed. Legalisation has not been emancipation. It has instead resulted in the appalling, inhuman, degrading treatment of women, because it declares the buying and selling of human flesh acceptable. And as the Dutch government reforms itself from pimp to protector, it will have time to reflect on the damage done to the women caught in this calamitous social experiment.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8835071/flesh-for-sale/

As a teenager, I worked in Germany’s legal sex industry. I was, like many girls in the club, underage; most of us were immigrants, nearly all of us had histories of trauma and abuse prior to our entry into commercial sex. Several of us had pimps despite working in a legal establishment; all of us used copious amounts of drugs and alcohol to get through each night.

Violence is inherent in the sex industry. Numerous studies show that between 70 percent and 90 percent of children and women who end up in commercial sex were sexually abused prior to entry. No other industry is dependent upon a regular supply of victims of trauma and abuse.

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To truly address trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation, it’s critical to address the systemic factors making girls and women so vulnerable -- poverty, gender inequity, racism, classism, child sexual abuse, lack of educational and employment opportunities for women and girls globally. Sanctioning an industry that preys upon some of the most marginalized and disenfranchised individuals in our society isn’t the answer.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/04/19/is-legalized-prostitution-safer/legalizing-prostitution-leads-to-more-trafficking