Imagine walking through a historical district on a pleasant evening. You pause at a storefront to view a painting through the window or to admire the display of a young fashion designer. Two shops down, men stop to inspect a window filled with the long, bare legs and busty assets of a sex worker.
This is Amsterdam’s red-light district, where shops sell high-tech adult toys, the shows are rated triple X and women in fluorescent, stringy lingerie beckon from rows of long windows.
Businesses unassociated with sex also thrive in the popular area, and traditional families live in apartments above the glowing red windows.
Legalized prostitution requires a culture of open and tolerant attitudes toward sexuality. It needs cooperation and communication between the government, the community and members of the sex industry.
There’s no chance the United States could successfully emulate this model.
But state lawmakers and human rights organizations could learn how to curb the crime and risks of prostitution by observing a broad-minded city that acknowledges and regulates the practice.
Prostitution is inevitable and hazardous, but the decriminalization of prostitution gives sex workers an opportunity to have a safe and legitimate practice. Women are allowed to work from windows but not on the street, which helps prostitutes to avoid the control of pimps and the danger of shady back rooms.
Established sex workers in Amsterdam are independent entrepreneurs. They register with the Chamber of Commerce, pay income taxes and rent window space by the shift. Surveillance cameras watch over the district, and uniformed and plain clothes police patrol the area, ready to step in if a sex worker needs help.
Working conditions are regulated and some women join a small labor union. They have access to health services, social work resources and STD checks.
These working women aren’t perceived as criminals or victims.
The ideals of this system stand in stark contrast to the chaotic and violent reality of American prostitution rings, where abuse is common, help is hard to find and law enforcement sweeps can result in a hundred arrests at a time.
A lack of strong regulation doesn’t help the danger of this institution, which often means defenseless children or foreign nationals are subject to human trafficking around the country.
Though reliable statistics are difficult to calculate, Trafficking Hope is a Baton Rouge organization working to promote public awareness locally about human trafficking, and Tigers Against Trafficking is a student organization aimed at educating and fundraising to end sex slavery.
The progressive Dutch arrangement isn’t perfect either. Some complain it was only developed for the government to collect money. Illegal activity in the city has adjusted and grown since the legalization of brothels in 2000.
But in response, organizations are conducting research, the government is considering reform policies and groups have resolved to change the image of the red-light district. Entities disagree about the best approach to problems in the industry, but dialogue is taking place between them.
But there is a distinct lack of such dialogue in the United States, where people involved in these activities are deprived of resources, mental and physical attention and support for their rights because of their criminal status.
I don’t need to see ladies of the night renting storefronts in the mall next to Abercrombie, but prostitution isn’t going away. People are violated and exploited for sex without any avenue of complaint. We need to shift our perception of marginalized sexual subcultures to relieve the injustice surrounding the world’s oldest profession.
Morgan Searles is a 21-year-old mass communication senior from Baton Rouge studying abroad in Amsterdam.