SEE ALSO : Letter
from Amsterdam, por António Sérgio Rosa de Carvalho ( English Version below )
Red Light Blues
Amsterdam Prostitutes Fear Corona Lockdown Could
Become Permanent
After years of being overrun by tourists, Amsterdam is
suddenly rediscovering what life is like without visitors. The city's infamous
red-light district is currently empty, and the prostitutes who work there are
afraid it could stay that way.
By Anne
Backhaus
03.06.2020,
15.15 Uhr
Charlotte
de Vries is standing on the bridge simply shaking her head. She's normally not
the disapproving type. But de Vries, a sex worker, simply can't believe what
she is seeing: complete emptiness. There are no women in the windows and no
clutches of tourists gathered around to ogle. The sex shops are open, but
there's no one inside. She spreads her arms wide, but touches nobody.
"It's
crazy," she says. She can't remember ever being able to do so on
Oudekennissteeg, the bridge she used to cross nearly every Saturday afternoon
for the past two and a half years. She always had a group of tourists in tow,
pushing past other tourists to begin her red-light district tour. Now, though,
it's all quiet.
The
coronavirus has forced people around the world to stay at home. Images of
deserted city streets have taken on a familiar, threatening feel. But the
Oudekennissteeg bridge in Amsterdam lays bare another threat by virtue of its
sudden absence: mass tourism.
"It's
as if someone pushed the stop button," says de Vries, 56, who guided
tourists through the red-light district every week until mid-March for the
Prostitution Information Center (PIC).
"I'm
afraid the city could exploit this situation to get rid of us," she says.
By
"us," de Vries means herself and the thousands of other people who
work in Amsterdam in brothels, for escort services or in the rented rooms with
the red-lit, floor-to-ceiling windows that can be seen from the street.
"Everyone
has an opinion about us. Usually it's not a good one," says de Vries,
whose name has been changed for this story to protect her identity. "I
love my job. It's important. But nobody wants to hear that. We're just
portrayed as victims."
'I Wasn't
in It for the Money'
De Vries
was born and raised in Amsterdam, spending most of her adult life working as a
nurse. "Many of the patients longed for physical contact, but hardly had
an opportunity," she says. Nearly a decade ago, de Vries turned to an
agency that hired out sex workers to customers who are physically disabled or
mentally ill. For a while, de Vries worked both jobs, but then decided to
dedicate herself full-time to sex work.
"I
wasn't in it for the money," she says. "It was the appreciation. I
can focus on a person's needs for an hour and that makes a big difference in
their life."
There are
several reasons for why sex workers like Charlotte de Vries see the lockdown
and the ongoing lack of tourists as a danger. The most obvious is that sex
workers in Amsterdam, like in many other places around the world, have watched
their income dry up completely. Many of them have no savings and can't rely on
financial assistance from the government.
But the
empty windows in De Wallen, Amsterdam's medieval city center and its red-light
district, represent more than just an entire industry that has come to a
complete standstill amid the coronavirus crisis. The collapse of prostitution
is also a dream come true for those residents and politicians who have long
sought to curb the practice -- against the will of sex workers and their
unions.
The most
prominent advocate of a realignment of the red-light district is Femke Halsema,
54. The city's first female mayor, she has been in office since July 2018 and
says she voted in parliament in the late 1990s to legalize prostitution
nationwide. "Amsterdam has a very long tradition of protecting open spaces
and being a tolerant city, and I really want to protect that," Halsema
said in 2019. "But we do not want to be known for sex and drugs. We want
to be known for our cultural heritage."
Mayhem
Until After Midnight
The city is
the Netherlands' biggest tourist magnet. Amsterdam has some 850,000 residents,
but it attracts more than 20 million visitors every year. Statistics don't
reveal how many of these people come to Amsterdam for its cultural heritage. It
is, however, readily apparent how interested tourists are in cannabis, alcohol
and prostitution. The place where Charlotte de Vries can spread her arms today
without touching anyone has long been an epicenter of those interests.
"The coronavirus is dangerous, but it's been a
godsend for us. The tourists were the pandemic."
Bert Nap,
Anwohner in De Wallen
The small
district of De Wallen is crisscrossed by two canals lined with magnificent old
buildings. There are numerous bars, kiosks, sex museums, coffee shops and
brothels -- and before the pandemic, there were around 330 windows from which
women would offer their services.
Residents
complained that it had gotten increasingly difficult for them to leave their
homes. The streets outside were too crowded with bachelor parties and other
loud and obnoxious revelers, both drunk and high, with many of them urinating
on the sides of apartment buildings at night. Some would even vomit in
mailboxes. Party boats lined the canals. It was mayhem until well past
midnight.
"The
last six years have been traumatic," says Bert Nap, 61. He has lived in De
Wallen for more than 40 years and is the spokesman for a citizen's initiative
that aims to improve the quality of life for residents. Nap likes his district
and has fond memories of what the neighborhood was like in the old days, back
when it was normal for the sex workers to wave to his daughter on her way to
kindergarten. But the place he calls home hasn't been like that in ages.
"The
coronavirus is dangerous, but it's been a godsend for us. The tourists were the
pandemic," says Nap.
Little More
Than an Attraction
Even sex
workers found the onslaught problematic. "Very few tourists came to
actually take advantage of our services," de Vries says. "Many of
them behaved badly, were disorderly and spat against the windows. Some verbally
assaulted the women or took unauthorized pictures of them." Security
guards hired by the city to maintain order "were nowhere to be seen in the
crowds," de Vries says.
The mayor
described the "humiliation of sex workers by large groups of
tourists" as "unacceptable." In comments she made last year,
Halsema said: "For many visitors, the sex workers were nothing more than
an attraction to look at."
In order to
stem the flow of visitors and to create more living space for permanent
residents of the Dutch capital, the city moved to prohibit renting apartments
through online platforms such as Airbnb in some parts of the city center
beginning on July 1, 2020. Tours of the red-light district, like the ones de
Vries gave, have also been subject to restrictions since April.
But the sex
workers themselves have also become a problem. Mayor Halsema has pointed to an
alleged increase in underground, unlicensed prostitution in Amsterdam and has
suggested four scenarios to deal with the overcrowding of De Wallen and to
protect legal sex workers -- including the closure of all windows and the
ending of prostitution in the red-light district altogether.
Were that
plan to be adopted, the mayor said, she would create new jobs elsewhere. There
is talk of an "Eros Center," a kind of shopping mall for sex, a place
where brothels, individual workplaces and sex cinemas could be located
alongside beauty salons and tanning studios -- though it's not clear where in
the city there would be room for such a complex.
A Safe
Space
"The
tourists are being used like a stick to pound on sex workers," says Rosie
Heart, which is a pseudonym she uses at work. The 35-year-old is the
spokesperson for PROUD, the Dutch trade union for sex workers. "We've been
here for hundreds of years. Mass tourism has only been around a few
years," Heart says. Many of the women, she adds, would be afraid of an
Eros Center out in the suburbs or next to Schiphol Airport for the dangers they
would otherwise not be exposed to.
"De
Wallen is a safe neighborhood, precisely because prostitution doesn't take
place behind closed doors, but is part of public life," she adds. In her
view, the city's discussion of illegal prostitution is a distraction. "We
reject human trafficking, but no one knows exactly how many women are really
lured to Amsterdam and forced into sex work. It's probably none of the women
sitting in the windows at De Wallen," Heart says. "We like to work.
We are independent businesswomen and have chosen this profession."
Many of
Amsterdam's sex workers say they feel safe in their job, and especially in De
Wallen, but they're worried the government could force them to work in
conditions that frighten them. That concern has grown ever since a new law has
been in the works that would force sex workers to forfeit their anonymity.
An
additional concern is that, because of the coronavirus crisis, a large number
of sex workers from other European countries have left and the brothels and
windows have been shut down. They are fearful that the situation could become
the status quo and the businesses will simply remain closed. And their concerns
aren't all that far-fetched: In Germany, 16 conservative and center-left
parliamentarians recently called for the sex business to be shut down
altogether -- preferably forever.
"An
Old Stigma"
So far, the
city of Amsterdam has only announced that sex work would be prohibited until
Sept. 1. People who work in other so-called "contact professions,"
such as hairdressers and masseurs, have been permitted to work again since
mid-May. "It is completely absurd that we aren't trusted," says Rosie
Heart. "Health and caution are our job. It's an old stigma that
prostitutes spread disease. We have a lot of ideas for how to continue our work
safely."
The mayor's
red-light district scenarios were supposed to have been debated at a city
council meeting in early May. But the meeting was postponed due to the
coronavirus. The mayor's office would rather not answer questions about mass
tourism and sex work at the moment.
"She's
not saying much," says Bert Nap. Thanks to the pandemic, the De Wallen
resident can finally sleep through the night again, and he no longer has to
clean the feces off his house's exterior walls first thing in the morning. He
welcomed the mayor's plans at first, but now he feels left in the lurch by her.
"This crisis could be a new beginning, but we have to act," he says.
Meanwhile,
the empty streets in De Wallen also reveal the mistakes made by the previous
government. The reason that so few residents can be seen there is because there
are hardly any left. Many of them moved away because they no longer felt
comfortable or because the neighborhood became too expensive for them.
In one
previous attempt to rid the red-light district of crime, 125 of the sex
workers' windows were closed. The consequence was that more people have simply
gathered in front of the ones that are still open.
Waffles,
but No Bread
These days,
Bert Nap has to hop on the subway anytime he needs to buy a loaf of bread.
"There's no bakery in the neighborhood, but there are waffles with Nutella
and souvenirs everywhere," Nap says. "If the sex workers and clients
came back, there would be no reason to complain. But if mass tourism returns,
all hell will simply break loose again. We should focus on the real problem:
the global tourism industry."
He's not
alone in this view. In late April, European Commissioner Thierry Breton told a
committee of MEPs: "We must find an answer to the excesses of mass
tourism."
The absence
of tourists in many major European cities has allowed residents to dream of a
new -- or old -- quality of life. These include cities like Barcelona and
Venice, where locals have long complained of being overrun by hordes of
visitors.
The form
tourism could take once countries around the world relax their lockdowns and
lift travel restrictions will depend, not least, on economic interests. This is
especially true now that many cities and businesses are starved for income.
Indeed, it will likely be difficult to insist that tourists, with all their
disposable income, not be allowed to come.
In
Amsterdam's red-light district, financial considerations are hard to ignore:
Sex sells, after all.
This piece
is part of the Global Societies series. The project runs for three years and is
funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
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