Contact Admin. The experiment is over. After 12 years of legalised prostitution organised crime in Amsterdam has risen, not fallen. Amsterdam, often hailed as the sex mecca of Europe, is to have a major facelift. After 12 years of legalised window brothels, attracting hordes of customers from all over Europe, politicians, police, citizens and even many of the prostitutes themselves are admitting that state-sanctioned prostitution is a failed social experiment.
Given almost ten years of evidence that criminal gangs control the red-light area of De Wallen, the local council has announced plans to clean it up in an attempt to transform the reputation of the city. Loverboys have the same modus operandi as another group of sex exploiters — the Asian grooming gangs, first exposed in Standpoint December — that operated with impunity in the northern towns of England.
Then they start to run them as prostitutes. The girls, now emotionally and financially dependent on their loverboys, find themselves locked into a cycle of abuse, sometimes made to work in windows in official red-light districts or being handed from flat to flat. They put their victims to work in a window so that they can keep an eye on them day and night.
Because it is not an offence under the legalised regime to profit from this form of prostitution the loverboys appear invincible, and the young women feel they have little chance of proving the abuse. Most will have been trafficked by criminal gangs or individual entrepreneurs promising them a better life and the chance to earn a lot of money.
Trafficking, and a sharp rise in heroin and crack cocaine abuse among prostitutes, means the women are increasingly desperate, resulting in customers getting what they want. I can barely make a living. A few feet from the windows, men resembling bouncers stand chatting and checking their merchandise.
