Amsterdam’s famous red-light district is set to receive a radical overhaul thanks to the city’s first female mayor.
In a Wednesday announcement, Mayor Femke Halsema outlined her plans to revamp Amsterdam’s sex trade in an effort to protect sex workers from snoopy tourists and illegal sex trafficking. Prostitution has been legal in the Netherlands for almost 20 years.
Her report, titled The Future of Window Prostitution in Amsterdam, explores four main policy changes, according to Reuters. The scenarios include ending window displays of sex workers, increasing the requirements for the licensing of window workers, reducing the number of brothels in the city, and moving city-centered brothels out of Amsterdam.
Halsema cites a rise in human trafficking, cultural shifts, and an increase in camera-equipped tourists visiting the area for her interest in establishing new regulations.
“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,” Mayor Halsema said in an interview. “We’re forced by circumstances because Amsterdam changes.”
Her plan also proposes an “erotic city zone” that would have a defined entrance. She likened it to the system used in Hamburg, Germany.
She hopes new reforms will protect sex workers from degrading working conditions, reduce crime in the area, and revitalize the historic neighborhood.
Sex workers are skeptical that the reforms will improve the industry.
“If they close the windows, then all the sex workers will go underground and they’ll need much more people to regulate that, and check that,” Foxxy Angel, a sex worker told Reuters. “So, no I don’t think that’s going to work.”
Despite criticism and push back from the sex trade industry, Halsema maintains she is not interested in outlawing the practice.
“We legalized prostitution because we thought and still think that legal prostitution give a woman a chance to be autonomous, independent,” Halsema said. “Criminalizing prostitution has been done in the United States, which I think makes women extra vulnerable.”
This comes as Washington, D.C., city council members introduced legislation last month that would decriminalize prostitution for consenting adults within the district. Advocates, including four city council members, say a new approach to sex work should focus on human rights, health, and safety instead of criminalization.
The Amsterdam mayor’s proposals will be aired in front of residents at town hall meetings throughout the month. One will be picked and voted on by Amsterdam’s city council later this year.
