This blog deals with the red light district of Amsterdam. There is disturbing information contained within, so you are forewarned.
After my sister and I visited the Anne Frank house we headed back to the central train station. I was surprised to find that what looked like a normal city street coming into town was in fact part of the red light district. This became apparent when we passed a house with actual red lights around the now un-curtained window and a scantily clad woman was standing in it.
Prostitution has always been a part of this busy port city, but it was officially made legal almost one hundred years ago. The red light district is one of the tourist magnets to this city and it is even highlighted in the local hotel magazines under "things to see and do." The quaint house and charming canals cannot hide the seediness of soul of this part of town.
I recently watched a BBC special about Amsterdam and heard a lot I already knew and a few things I didn't know about this 100 million pound (about 150 million dollar) per year industry. That is just the overt money brought in by the sex industry. It is does not include the millions more spent on hotels, restaurants, museums, canal tours and other more traditional tourist expenditures. It was interesting to hear the British presenter refer over to Amsterdam over and over again as Sin City. This is the perspective of a man from a country that has had pornography in its daily newspapers since the mid-70's. They are called the Page Three Girls. My own country has its Las Vegas which is our biggest Sin City. We're a big enough country to have more than one such place, but Vegas stands out, since it, like Amsterdam, it has legal prostitution and encourages most every vice. It was founded by criminal gangs who built the city in the middle of a desert because it was one small place where prostitution was never made illegal in the US. There girls don't stand in windows advertising themselves like shop goods as in Amsterdam. In the US they are kept on ranches, like cattle. Sin knows no national boundaries.
There are 10,000 legal prostitutes and an estimated 1000 illegal ones in Amsterdam alone. The legal ones pay taxes and have semiannual health examinations. The illegal ones are mostly drug addicts who are trying to make money to score their next drug hit. They usually work in and around the central train station. The legal workers average 9 customers a night. They work seven days a week. That is an average of 3,385 men a year.
Eighty percent of all the prostitutes are foreigners. Seventy percent of the women have no legal immigration papers which means they have probably been brought in by traffickers, mostly from eastern Europe. Girls are lured with offers of respectable work in the west where they are told they can make good wages. Once caught in this trap they are too ashamed to return home. I do not know of any help they receive from the western countries they are kidnapped into. The problem is so big that the United Nations has sent out teams to perform a short play in the towns and villages of Eastern Europe showing people what is happening and as a warning to the women.
Eighty-nine percent of the prostitutes have been assaulted on the job by customers or their pimps. One in seven visitors to the red light district will be the victim of a crime - purse snatching, pickpocketing, robberies and mugging. However, there are also more serious crimes and last year (2009) 43 of the 157 murders for the whole country were committed in Amsterdam. There are 90,000 criminal incidents in this area of town alone and 50,000 arrests. Their own police chief called Amsterdam the drug and crime capital of the European Union.
It is illegal to pimp the prostitutes and the police say they know it occurs, but without proof there is nothing they can do about it. I suspect in Dutch fashion, they do not look for evidence, thereby saving themselves, time, trouble, jail space and maintaining a veneer of low hard crimes in their country. A see no evil, sort of philosophy. I am sure part of it is the lack of cooperation of the prostitutes themselves. Violence, shame, coercion and need can form a tight bond of loyalty with a pimp. This area is governed by hardened criminals.
To combat the crime,(can't let things get too out of hand or they will scare the tourists off with their millions of dollars) they have a very visible, gun-toting squad of police who patrol the area.They have twenty police officers walking the streets in the district each night. These men have to qualify with their firearms twice a year to maintain their place on this coveted beat. Apparently there are many who are jealous of them getting this plumb assignment.
So what can get you in trouble with the law in the red light district of Amsterdam? Selling fake drugs for one thing. The legal drug trade has ironically spawned a black market for them in Amsterdam. I watched the police chase a man, who was trying to get rid of fake drugs in the way you'd see someone deal with the real stuff in the US. Selling the real thing is fine, but no snookering the tourists with fake drugs. It is illegal to sell hard drugs, but if caught you will get a 50 Euro fine and an order to stay out of the city central for twenty-four hours. I got a 36 Euro fine for riding my bike by mistake in a pedestrian-only alley. If you violate the order not to return, then you will be arrested. But an arrest usually means a two week stay in the local jail. This is the sentence for selling hard drugs.
Let's see what else constitutes a crime? You cannot urinate on the street or be naked on the street in this area at night. Other times, other place, nudity is not a problem, but not in the sex district at night. However, it is not uncommon for prostitutes to kick johns out of their place naked if they give them some sort of trouble, so a little nudity is not a problem. Even with these lenient policies, there will be 40 arrests per night on average.
I thought of the US as the crime capital of the western world and the Dutch crime rate as very low, but when I went to search for statistics I found this link. US verses Netherlands crime rates I was surprised to see that the Dutch rate right below us per capita in levels of crime and actually have twice the rape rate of the US. We beat them in murder, of course, but if guns were as readily available in the EU I suspect the murder rate would rise considerably. It is so much harder to plunge a knife into someone or hold your hands around their throat for three to four minutes or other up-close-and-personal ways of killing someone. But I digress.
The Netherlands, as well as a growing segment of people in the US, view prostitution as a victimless crime. That would be true if there were no wives or children back home. No sexually transmitted diseases to pass onto innocent and unknowing partners. No violence against the prostitutes and if they were all, willing participants. If people did not have souls and bodies made for a higher purpose. What little girls says, "When I grow up I want to be a prostitute." No one does this by choice. One prostitute when interviewed said she would like to say that the sex workers are not desperate and drug addicted, but she said the truth is 99% of them are. Drugs are the only escape they have, however temporary, from the hell they are living in. Even the men who pay for prostitutes are robbed in their souls in more ways than one. How can it good for someone to indulge themselves selfishly, to transact an act of intimacy and to treat another human being as a commodity?
Prostitution isn't the only sex-based attraction in Amsterdam. There is the Sex Museum and the Drug museum to visit as well.
There are also periodic "events" at local nightclubs such as one held recently for Fetishists. Couldn't get in without a fetish costume, unless you arrived completely naked. Then there are the sex clubs where you can sit and watch people having sex with each other. One neon sign advertises every form of sexual behavior you can think of, including teens and bestiality. One small plaza sports a phallic fountain and a popular paving stone in the walkway depicts a pair of breasts being manhandled. And there are the usual peepshows and strip clubs. It is hard to imagine how completely sex-saturated so much of Amsterdam is.
And worst of all are the eighty thousand tourists who visit the red light district every week. They walk past and try to take photos as if they were visiting the zoo. (Not a good idea since you are likely to get roughed up and your camera taken or broken. This is a business after all and you need to pay for your privileges.)They gape and stare and point. They see it as a sort of exotic vacation and they do not recognize the sickness in their own souls.
