Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Executive Lifestyle. Business Insider. Prostitution is legal and regulated in Germany , Switzerland , Greece , Austria , and many other countries in Europe.
Many major European cities have red-light districts and regulated brothels that pay taxes and follow certain rules. Regulating the prostitution industry was supposed to help limit sex trafficking and connect sex workers with critical health and government services, but reports say there hasn't been much success on either front.
While laws vary, Europe has a more permissive attitude towards prostitution than in the US. In other countries, it is legal but not regulated.
For most Americans, prostitution in Europe likely calls to mind Amsterdam's red-light district. In , the Netherlands was one of the first countries to legalize and regulate prostitution Though the Netherlands began regulating prostitution in , the sex trade was more or less tolerated for decades before.
The idea behind legalizing the trade was that it would it would root out organized crime, limit human trafficking, improve worker access to healthcare, and make sex work safer. While prostitution has been legal in Switzerland since and is protected by the constitution, Petit Fleur, the first legal brothel, didn't open until Typically, sex workers work in a brothel or buy a daily "ticket" to sell sex in designated street areas.
Europe's 'biggest brothel' is Germany. While sex work was tolerated as early as the s, the government formally legalized it in Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany has long been one of the world's most famous red-light districts. In its s heyday, it was home to over 1, prostitutes, but in recent years, the area has become better known cheap bars and binge drinking.
Hamburg's main sex-trade street is blocked by foot high barricades on either end, and men under eighteen and women are prohibited from entering. The barricades are a major point of contention for feminist activists, who frequently demonstrate nearby. The women then sell to customers at prices they negotiate directly. The brothel takes only the room rental fee. The oldest brothel in Hamburg is Hotel Luxor, which opened over 60 years ago. In , Waltraud Mehrer, the Luxor's "madame," closed the brothel due to declining business.
One of the largest 'eros centers' is Pascha, a story brothel-nightclub in Cologne, Germany. Typically, a woman has to sleep with four men to break even. Pascha has hair, tanning, and nail salons, a restaurant, and a boutique for the women.
Pascha is run by Hermann Mueller, whose father opened the brothel. Mueller told The Telegraph in that his girlfriend of several years is a prostitute. Her profession doesn't bother him. Legalized prostitution has spawned even bigger ventures than Pascha, like Paradise, a chain of five brothels across Germany, with more on the way.
Not everyone is happy about the increased sex trade. As a result, the ban on brothels and pimping was finally removed from the Criminal Code, which resulted in the legalization of the prostitution sector in the Netherlands.
Therefore, a clear distinction was made between forced prostitution and voluntary prostitution Outshoorn The legislator held that the state should more vigorously, forcefully, and effectively fight damaging forms of prostitution, such as forced prostitution or prostitution by minors. At the same time the authorities should allow forms of prostitution that were acceptable in social terms, such as voluntary prostitution by adult men or women, in order to protect the right to self-determination and the autonomy of the prostitute.
For that reason, starting in , city councils have been permitted to adopt by-laws, in which regulations are laid down with regard to the regulation of prostitution in a municipality Hennekens ; Schilder and Brouwer We can conclude from this that the main objective of the Act Lifting the Ban on Brothels was the prevention and reduction of harm caused by prostitution for prostitutes and residents of municipalities. Moreover, prostitutes were protected against harm by the strengthened criminalization of trafficking in women, of involuntary prostitution, and of prostitution by minors.
Since the lifting of the ban on brothels in , prostitutes and brothel owners have been considered to be legitimate entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. Thus, according to current Dutch law, the practice of prostitution is characterized as regular labor. Still, starting in , from a legal point of view, things have become complex. A large number of legislative proposals since then, aiming to reform prostitution legislation, have been introduced, discussed, amended, and then even reintroduced.
This bill was amended in and, as a result, renamed the Amended Bill Regulation of Prostitution. In addition to this, some members of the Dutch Parliament wanted to go one step further than the government and submitted a bill entitled the Bill Penalization of Abuse of Prostitutes Who Are Victims of Human Trafficking to Parliament in The introduction of all these legislative proposals can be linked to changes in public opinion regarding prostitution. A number of reasons can be identified for the latter, such as recent police reports concerning prostitution and human trafficking, a number of evaluations of the Act Lifting the Ban on Brothels, and the considerable amount of media attention paid to these reports and evaluations.
This report showed that at least 78 women were victims of three Turkish traffickers who ran a major prostitution network in Amsterdam and two other Dutch cities in the first decade of the twenty-first century Outshoorn ; Huisman and Nelen In addition to this, the evaluation of the Act Lifting the Ban on Brothels by the Centre for Scientific Research and Documentation of the Ministry of Justice received extensive media attention as well.
The evaluation report found that abuses, such as involuntary prostitution and sexual exploitation, were still extensively part of the prostitution sector Daalder Consequently, the picture of the prostitute has slowly, but fundamentally, changed from that of an independent and autonomous person to a victim of exploitation and coercion as a result of deception and maltreatment.
Consequently, the government felt obliged to tighten up prostitution legislation. This bill contained, among other minor things, a mandatory and uniform licensing system for sex businesses, a rise in the minimum age to work as a prostitute from 18 to 21 years, the criminalization of clients who use the services of a prostitute under the age of 21, and an obligation on the part of the local authorities for prostitutes to register themselves.
According to the government, this stricter prostitution legislation was necessary to combat abuses in the prostitution sector more effectively. Therefore, more than previously, the Bill Regulation of Prostitution focused strongly on the special nature of the prostitution sector, and the many men and women who were victims of abuse.
As a result, under this bill, the idea that prostitutes were able to choose their profession independently and voluntarily slipped into the background. The Bill Regulation of Prostitution can still be placed in the regulatory model wherein prostitution is legalized. However, one of the differences, compared to the Act Lifting the Ban on Brothels, is that the national legislator now centralizes the regulation of prostitution on certain important parts instead of leaving it up to the local authorities.
It follows from the above that the most fundamental objective of the Bill Regulation of Prostitution is to protect prostitutes from harm. The bill is meant to provide better insight into the prostitution sector, which should then lead to a more effective fight against abuses inherent to it. Moreover, the Bill Regulation of Prostitution also aims to protect the general public from harm.
In this way, local authorities are entitled to protect citizens against harm as a result of prostitution in their municipality Post However, the arguments underlying the original Bill Regulation of Prostitution were based on the paternalism principle too. In early , the government introduced the Amended Bill Regulation of Prostitution. The Amended Bill Regulation of Prostitution of removed the regulations that required prostitutes to register with the authorities.
Under this bill, they are no longer punishable if they are working under the age of If this bill comes into force, brothel owners will no longer be allowed to let prostitutes, who have not reached the minimum age, work for them. Although this rise in the legal age is motivated by the desire to protect young prostitutes from harm, there is probably also a paternalistic motive underlying it. A remarkable aspect of the Amended Bill Regulation of Prostitution of is that it does not allow local authorities to introduce a local licensing system for self-employed prostitutes, such as those who work at home.
This is because self-employed prostitutes under the amended bill are no longer seen as sex businesses by the government. This has changed the position of the government, ensuring that these prostitutes are no longer controlled by the mandatory and uniform licensing system for sex businesses. However, this gives rise to the problematic situation that the authorities then no longer have the means to reduce harm to those prostitutes who do not work in a brothel or other sex business Post and Brouwer As stated above, some members of the Dutch Lower House believe that the Amended Bill Regulation of Prostitution does not sufficiently serve the interest of protecting victims of human trafficking.
The over-riding justification for penalizing the clients of prostitutes lies in preventing prostitutes from being harmed. However, penalization is also intended to have a normative effect. According to the initiators of the bill, the use of the services of a prostitute, who is forced to offer these services, is morally reprehensible and condemnable.
Therefore, there is a likelihood that disguised moralistic reasons are also motivating the introduction of this penalization of clients. In , however, both pieces of legislation are still waiting to be debated in the Dutch Senate. In October , the new government, made up of the right-wing liberal party VVD, two Christian parties, and the liberal democrat D66, presented new plans concerning the regulation of prostitution.
The Amended Bill Regulation of Prostitution will be re-amended, but the exact changes are still unclear. The new government has announced that the new amended bill will aim to expand the protection offered to prostitutes. For example, the new government believes that it is necessary to regulate all forms of professional sexual services, including the services of self-employed prostitutes.
In this paper, we examined developments in Dutch prostitution policy since the beginning of the twentieth century. By providing insight into developments in Dutch prostitution policy, the value of the analytical framework developed in The regulation of prostitution from a theoretical perspective has become apparent.
The combined use of the concepts of regulatory models, views on prostitution, and principles that justify a restriction of freedom as a result of governmental intervention, have provided a tool with which we have been able to gain a deeper and more nuanced insight into the gradual development of the prostitution policies. The application of this analytical framework has resulted in distinguishing the various ways in which prostitution has been regulated in the Netherlands since the beginning of the twentieth century, and has provided an explanation for the different attitudes of the legislator toward prostitution.
However, our analysis reveals that the administrative level at which the regulation took place has changed over the course of time as well. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the facilitation of prostitution was forbidden, and, as a result, municipalities were unable to pursue their own prostitution policy. Despite a national prohibition, local authorities quickly took steps to regulate the prostitution sector instead.
Eventually, in , they were legally entitled to design their own prostitution policy. However, this freedom is restricted when the legislator adopts the Bill Regulation of Prostitution. From that moment on, local authorities are only allowed to determine prostitution policy for themselves in a limited number of areas. This development shows that the administrative level at which the regulation of prostitution occurs — state or municipality — also influences the way prostitution is regulated.
Therefore, we believe this administrative level of governance should be added to the analytical framework as its fourth component. This framework can contribute to further research on this matter as well. It enables researchers to map and compare developments in prostitution policies throughout various national jurisdictions. By combining four different lenses i. In other words, the framework offers a basis for comparative legal research.
The table below schematically illustrates the developments in Dutch prostitution legislation from the beginning of the twentieth century onward. In the course of the twentieth century, it became clear that the partial criminalization of prostitution, as a result of the abolitionist view of the legislator, was no longer sustainable.
There was a growing belief that the existence of prostitution was a facet of society, resulting in the regulation of prostitution by local authorities to keep this ineradicable phenomenon under control. Although prostitution stayed de iure partially criminalized, de facto it was legalized. The national authorities supported these developments, but they did not morally approve of prostitution. This regulationist view of prostitution also explains why the authorities no longer based their criminal intervention on moral grounds, but instead on the idea of protecting others from harm.
It no longer considered prostitution as morally reprehensible but recognized it as legitimate work instead. The legalizationist view of the legislator resulted in the legalization of prostitution and the abolition of moralistic criminal intervention in prostitution, which had made the running of a brothel officially illegal up until that time. This change of mindset, however, did not mean that the legislator placed no obstacles in the path to prostitution.
The legislator holds that prostitution is a special profession with high risks with regard to both prostitutes and public order.
Therefore, the recognition of prostitution as legal work was accompanied by stringent administrative regulation of prostitution at the local level, with the aim of protecting the prostitute as well as the society from harm.
After , public opinion about prostitution changed fundamentally. To achieve these objectives, the legislator deemed it necessary to set national, uniform, and obligatory requirements for prostitution and the prostitution sector. Two recently introduced and amended bills are intended to provide a solution for this. The above-mentioned developments in Dutch prostitution legislation show that the Dutch legislator considers the regulation of prostitution as an important area of governmental responsibility.
The legislator tries to find a balance between the freedom of prostitution and protection against harm caused by this phenomenon. As a result, prostitution is visible in Dutch society, but the possibilities concerning prostitution are most certainly not unlimited. The authorities actively intervene in the prostitution sector in order to control it, as well as to protect prostitutes and the general public from harm. Paradoxically, the idea of this liberal dream goes hand-in-hand with a growing repression of personal freedom in the Dutch prostitution sector.
The government and the Lower House of Parliament can both submit legislative proposals. Usually, the government takes the initiative to do so. During the legislative process, the government will give an explanation of its proposals.
If the majority of Parliament agrees with this explanation, we will refer to these explanatory remarks as those of the legislator. A parliamentary document Kamerstuk is a written text exchanged between the Dutch government and the Dutch Parliament.
The proceedings Handelingen of the Dutch Parliament contain the minutes of its sittings. Parliamentary papers and proceedings from the year to the present day are available on the website of the Dutch state authorities www. Parliamentary papers and proceedings from before can be found on the website of the Dutch Parliament www.
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Crime, Law and Social Change, 2 61 , — Jakobson, N. In the parliamentary debates on trafficking around that period, foreign women were portrayed as victims of unscrupulous traffickers tricked into prostitution. At the same time they also started to argue that all women from non-EU countries working in the sex industry were victims of forced prostitution. Therefore in their view, the best remedy to stop trafficking was to prevent non-EU women from working in the Dutch sex industry in the first place.
This reasoning eradicated the figure of a woman migrant deciding to work as a sex worker in the West and who might make use of intermediaries to enter the country—with her consent. Successive cabinets continued to refuse work permits on similar grounds, also arguing there was no national interest at stake which normally justifies extending work permits to non-EU persons.
They were backed by a recurring majority in parliament; the parliamentary records show many references to the fear of foreign prostitutes entering the country which would subvert immigration policies. The refusal to grant work permits was also generally justified by the aim of stopping the trafficking of women; permits would encourage traffickers to transport women into the country.
Subsequent implementation of the act resulted in the construction of no less than four categories of prostitutes. First of all, there is the ethnically undefined Dutch sex worker who willingly chooses to work in prostitution and is the bearer of civil and social rights.
Secondly, there are the prostitutes from other EU countries who can move freely in and out of the Netherlands and work in the sex industry. This category split into two categories after the accession to the EU of the Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in , making a third category who could only legally work as prostitutes if they were independent sex workers and not employees.
This distinction did not apply to the Western European sex workers. In , sex workers from the new EU members were accepted on an equal footing with the older EU member workers, but the third category was now filled with sex workers from Bulgaria and Romania when both countries joined the EU in that same year. Like their predecessors, these women are allowed to work as independent sex workers, but to date not as employees.
Fourthly, there is the category of non-EU women in the sex industry, working illegally with no rights, but they can be victims of trafficking or clients of human smugglers or tourists who stay after their visa run out—the enterprising migrants. They have no rights or protection, and because of their undocumented status, they are open to blackmail by employers and pimps.
The number of sex workers has always been open to debate. Vanwesenbeeck estimated that there were about 20, to 25, in the Netherlands and in parliamentary debates of the s, the figure of 30, circulated. Asante and Schaapman estimated there were around 15,—20,, half of which are of foreign origin. In , there were an estimated number of 5, to 7, sex workers in Amsterdam Van Wijk et al.
The debate about the effects of the new act started almost straightaway, given the necessity of working out the details of the implementation. A first evaluation was already conducted in — The researchers of the Centre for Scientific Research and Documentation WODC of the Ministry of Justice, and their associates took care in pointing out that it was too early to say if the legalization was having a positive impact Daalder , but generally they were moderately optimistic.
Some orthodox protestant councils refused to license any sex business. Many prostitutes had little idea of their rights or duties, and attempts to reach them were inadequate.
The licensing system was not yet in place in all municipalities, leading to displacement of criminalized prostitution such as under-age or undocumented prostitutes to tardy municipalities.
Fieldwork in the non-licensed sector noted instances of human trafficking and coercion, but the most frequent infringement of the law was the prostitute without a work permit, required by law for non-EU citizens Goderie et al. Looking specifically into the social position of prostitutes working in the licensed sector for the evaluation, Vanwesenbeeck et al. If the women are independent workers, brothel owners do not have to deal with income tax or social insurance contributions for disability and unemployment.
Given abundant evidence of control by managers e. Most sex workers and managers were in favour of work permits for non- EU workers. It noted market shifts; there was not so much a displacement of prostitution from licensed brothels to street prostitution, as a burgeoning of escort services and services provided by sex workers in their homes.
Both types of sex work were hard to tackle under the new licensing system. Rotterdam and Amsterdam also had notorious zones for street workers where organized and petty crime was rife and numerous signs indicated that many of the prostitutes working there were undocumented and sometimes victims of trafficking.
These zones were closed in and In the later reports of the National Reporter on Human Trafficking, there is a noticeable increase of the cases of trafficking. In , cases were reported, and in , Mensenhandel : The higher figures are partly due the broader definition of the offence since , when the incidence of forced labor in sectors such as horticulture and the restaurant business were included.
The new article a penal code also recoded forced prostitution as human trafficking, regardless of whether national borders had been crossed Mensenhandel The research showed that the legalization led to the construction of two sectors of prostitution. Firstly, there was the licensed sector of prostitutes where under-age prostitutes, and undocumented workers were generally disappearing because of the licensing system and inspection by the police or local authority.
Although the WODC evaluations were amply reported in the press, public indignation was first roused by several popular publications in the mids, which cast doubts on the official findings. First of all, a social democrat member of the Amsterdam City council, Karina Schaapman came out as an ex-prostitute by publishing a book about her past Schaapman She made the case that most prostitutes do not choose to go into prostitution, but are more or less pressured into it because of drug addiction, debts or a past sexual abuse.
With her colleague Amma Asante, she published a policy report for her party Asante and Schaapman that denied the existence of voluntary prostitution save for a very small group of sex workers idem, 3. Exiting prostitution is difficult, as many have debts or do not speak Dutch. There is considerable drug abuse and many prostitutes have no health care insurance, while they run the risk of STDs and unwanted pregnancy. Her work set off the campaign of the leading social democrat alderman Asscher and his fellow party member Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam, to clean up the Red Light district under the guise of fighting forced prostitution but also to gentrify the area and attract more upscale tourists Asscher ; Weitzer : — The Amsterdam party had direct access to the national government when the social democrats formed the new cabinet Balkenende IV with the CDA and the Christian Union in In its coalition pact, the new cabinet promised a new and stricter prostitution law Regeerakkoord Secondly, public concern was fuelled by a series of publications.
Her study is a strong indictment of how the authorities, notably the police, fail to deal with the trafficking of women.
Work permits for migrants who want to work in prostitution is, in her view, the best way of stopping trafficking of women, and it would dissolve the categories of the innocent victim and the guilty prostitute. A serious anthropological dissertation, based on extensive fieldwork among Latin American women who migrated to the Netherlands to work in the sex industry for economic reasons Janssen , received scant attention in the media.
The phenomenon led to much media attention, and a book by a victim Mosterd sold more than , copies it was later exposed as a fraud. The research of Bovenkerk et al. The researchers argue that pimping is no longer the preserve of white Dutch men who have moved on to more profitable criminal activities such as drugs trading.
Bovenkerk et al. Finally, two researchers of the Red Thread, Altink and Bokerman did extensive fieldwork in licensed brothels but also irregular locations as Thai massage parlors, escort services and pick-up bars, to see if the working conditions of sex workers had improved.
The Red Thread collected addresses of of the estimated sex businesses in operation; the researchers visited about half of those still in operation in idem, Their results show that proper working conditions are nearly non-existent and prostitutes still very dependent employees and hardly ever independent workers.
Many have no legal residence, making them vulnerable to coercion and blackmail. The Red Thread still supported the legalization, but only under strict conditions, such as the upholding of labor law, proper monitoring by municipalities and stopping criminals from investing in the sex industry, and the right to bodily integrity.
The Red Thread also investigated Thai massage parlors, often a cover for prostitution Altink Despite its uncertain funding, the Red Thread has kept up lobbying parliament on the issue of the pending legal changes, notably on the point of the registration of sex workers and the criminalization of the client. However, it lost its ally STV, when the latter had to merge into a semi-state centre of expertise on human trafficking, CoMensha, thus losing its independence to lobby and its status as a part of the feminist movement.
Feminist lawyers of the Association for Women and the Law Clara Wichmann have stepped in the protests by actively lobbying against the proposed Law regulating prostitution Brief aan de Eerste Kamer, 11 April The second evaluation by the WODC took place in —, and it concluded that the licensing system was now in place, regularly monitored, with little indication that the sex trade had moved to the non-licensed sector Daalder a : 11, b.
The researchers did not rule out that the market was shifting to the Internet or that the more traditional venues of prostitution, such as brothels, were in decline because of the weaker economy.
Daalder concluded that some of the aims of the repeal had been achieved, such as the disappearance of under-age prostitutes and undocumented workers in the licensed part of the sex industry.
At the same time, however, some of the reports on which she based her conclusions, showed that there was still much amiss Dekker et al. The rights of sex workers had not improved; forced prostitution and pimping were still recurring phenomena despite the fact that trafficking had become more difficult by improved law enforcement. Prostitutes had not become independent workers, although the majority of them maintained they were Dekker et al.
This was to oblige the club owners and managers wanting to avoid the legal responsibilities of employers. Pimping occurred in the escort services, in window prostitution and among women working from the home—all types of sex work in which it is easy to control women—and did not seem to have declined. A major loophole in the new regulations is that non-licensed sex clubs and escort services can easily move to municipalities where licensing requirements are non-existent or lenient, and the existence of shady businesses such as massage parlors, swing clubs and sauna clubs is hardly covered by local regulation.
Dekker et al. Biesma et al. Street prostitution did not increase. They encountered some undocumented prostitutes from outside the European Economic Area, but little evidence of a larger underground illegal sector or any large contingent of minors working in the sex industry. The findings on trafficking concurred with those of the National Reporter of those years. Although the research noted the countries of origin of prostitutes, making it possible to chart shifting patterns of migration, it did not comment on the racial or ethnic composition of the work force, nor did it question the categorization of sex workers resulting from the legalization.
This most likely reflects the interests of the commissioning agent, the Ministry of Justice, and not the quality of the research, which is up to academic standards. It should be noted that none of the researchers, including independent academics such as Bovenkerk et al. From the academic research, one can also draw the conclusion that not granting work permits to non-EU sex workers leaves them open to blackmail and coercion into poor working conditions and bad pay.
In this way, policy actually creates the bad working conditions. Symptomatic is the scant attention these issues received in the recent parliamentary debates on the proposed Law regulating prostitution see paragraph 5. At least 78 women can be regarded as the victims of the gang idem, Notable was that the majority came from the Netherlands and Germany; the others were generally from EU countries such as Ireland, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic.
The investigation reported many instances of severe violence against the women, including forced tattooing, coerced cosmetic surgery and even cases of forced abortion. The traffickers had operated quite openly in the licensed sector for several years, leading the researchers to investigate how this could have happened. To analyze this question, the researchers examined the entire process from the first signals of forced prostitution, for instance by a prostitute in a contact with a social welfare or health care worker or a client, to local authority granting licenses and residence permits to workers, the police who take up a signal of trafficking and report to their superiors, and finally the public prosecution and the courts.
The report shows how there are barriers to signaling abuse at each stage of the entire process. Intriguing is a tentative explanation provided by the KLPD team for the failure to signal coercion and force; any potential observer may be cross-pressured by conflicting interests and turn a blind eye idem, The KLPD report stressed that legalization had not ended abuse in the prostitution sector. Monitoring and regulation were no guarantee that women do not work under threat of coercion.
The KLPD report had two important effects. Firstly, it questioned the distinction between the licensed and non-licensed sector, one supposedly clean and the other criminal. Secondly, it also overturned the distinction between the emancipated prostitute from the EU and the sorry victims from non-EU countries, as most of the trafficked women turned out to be EU citizens, notably from the Netherlands and Germany.
The report received widespread publicity; later one of the KLPD team further fuelled public and parliamentary debate by publishing a book about his experiences in investigating forced prostitution Werson Another recent publication by two journalists, although extending its scope to forced labor in general, draws extensively on the KLPD reports and comes out in favour of better implementation of existing regulation as well as supporting the higher age of consent for prostitution and controlling the escort services Roessingh and Ramesar Although there is no recent public opinion poll on attitudes towards prostitution and its regulation, the recurring media attention to all the reports, books, articles, events and incidents have in all likelihood led to a shift in public opinion about the regulation of prostitution in the s.
TK —, , no. Brief Minister van Justitie , 21 February The legal age for defining minors in the Netherlands is 18, which is also the age of consent for sex work, while for sex in general it is 16 years.
Brief Minister , 13 May , p. No evidence, however, was found for this claim. Given the publicity and parliamentary pressure, prostitution returned to the cabinet agenda in , when the christian democrats, social democrats and christian unionists formed a new cabinet Balkenende IV and included the issue in their cabinet pact.
This opened the debate on revising the act. Interestingly, the new articles on human trafficking in the penal code of formulated to comply with the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons redefined forced prostitution as forced labor and no longer tie trafficking to the crossing of national borders.
The promised new bill was introduced in parliament in by the cabinet Balkenende IV TK —, , Wet regulering prostitutie en bestrijding misstanden sex branch e, 11 November To achieve this, it proposed a licensing regime of all forms of prostitution with uniform regulation across all communities but keeping the option of a local ban open and the registration of prostitutes.
Licensing is also to apply to the escort services. The bill also proposed to raise the age for sex work to 21 years. A more liberal regime to allow non-EU residents to work in the sex industry was opposed on the familiar grounds that it would make for more trafficking.
The registration of prostitutes, with penalties for failing to do so—an unprecedented shift in Dutch prostitution policy—and several measures to clarify the difference between self-employment and wage work, were included to enable sex workers to work independently. Finally, the bill proposed extra measures for exit options for those who want to leave prostitution. Although both cabinets have made revisions of the text following committee debate, the major intentions were more or less unchanged by the time it was debated in plenary by the Second Chamber in spring There was consensus about the purposes of the bill among the parliamentary parties, none of which contested the dominant framing.
The parties differed in their opinions about the act: the religious parties held it to be a failure, while the secular parties still supported the legalization and ascribed its shortcomings to failing law enforcement and loopholes in the original.
The major bone of contention during the debates was the registration of the sex workers which aimed at preventing forced prostitution by establishing a contact between local authority and sex worker to check whether she was doing the work out of free will.
All the secular parties objected to registration on the grounds of the right to privacy. Clients have to ask for the registration pass of their sex worker, otherwise they are also liable to prosecution. This leaves open the question how a client is then supposed to check whether the sex worker was registered or not; an issue which has been left to later regulation.
The raising of the age of consent for sex work to 21 years was less controversial, although the left-wing parties and the Social Liberals had doubts about its effectiveness in curbing forced prostitution.
A, Gewijzigd voorstel van wet, 29 March The social rights of sex workers were only discussed at the last stage of the debates, during which the cabinet promised to take away the obstacles to their right to work. It also promised to extend exit programs for prostitutes, a favorite of the religious parties, but also supported by the social democrats. Despite the reservations of the secular parties, only the Green Left party and the Social Liberals voted against the bill, so that it received a generous majority TK, —, 26 March Noteworthy is the shift in position of the Socialist and the Social Democrat party, who had both voted in favor of lifting the ban on brothels in , but now went along with the new framing.
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