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Sex workers may lose jobs
12/01/2007 14:36 - (SA)
Amsterdam - Amsterdam has launched a crackdown on "crime" kingpins in the city's red-light district that threatens to leave hundreds of sex workers out of a job, and has solicited help from a slightly bemused sector - Dutch banks.
The city authorities have no quarrel with prostitution, which was legalised in 2001 in this country that has historically prided itself on tolerance.
And they have no desire to shut down what is also a thriving tourist district and a "must" on the itinerary of one-third of all visitors to this city of canals, Van Gogh and Rembrandt.
"This is a frontal attack" aimed at cutting ties between prostitution and the underworld that uses the sex industry for laundering money, Mayor Job Cohen said in comments to the Het Parool newspaper.
"One third of the businesses have been scrutinised, the other two-thirds will follow," Hendrik Wooldirk, a spokesperson for Cohen, told AFP.
The banks' part, in the eyes of city officials, would be to finance "honest entrepreneurs" to keep the sex business transparent and break the stranglehold a handful of powerful bosses now have on the district.
"The banks are not really chomping at the bit to finance sex businesses," said a spokesperson for the Dutch association of banks (VNB), Hein Blocks.
"Just because prostitution is legal now does not mean it is a respectable field."
Undaunted, Mayor Cohen is urging banks to step up and approve loans for "honest" businessmen and women who want to set up their own brothels but now have no alternative but to borrow money from the district kingpins.
Clubs have filed appeals
So far, only one-third of the companies investigated have been deemed above-board and allowed to keep their operating licenses. The other two-thirds, or some 33 sex businesses that represent 20% of the total in all of Amsterdam, lost theirs.
This last group runs about half of the estimated 200 storefront windows where prostitutes ply their trade - and draw curious onlookers to the red-light district.
Many of the sex clubs have filed appeals. They remain in business pending the court rulings, expected in February. If the municipality wins, they will be shut down permanently.
For more than a century, Amsterdam's sex trade has centred on this district near the city's centre and known locally as De Wallen, after the ancient city ramparts that once stood there.
Its picturesque canals lined by quaint 17th-century houses vie for attention with peep-shows, sex shops and the ubiquitous store-front rooms where sex workers in skimpy lingerie sit behind red neon-lit windows offering their services.
The district is so famous it has its own listing on the city's official tourism website.
Not everyone supports the crackdown, notably the prostitutes' union The Red Thread.
"Some 200 jobs are threatened," a Red Thread spokesperson, Metje Blaak, told AFP.
- AFP
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