Man seems to be an animal whose capacity for lies is only equalled by his credulity; it does no good to let battalions of cats out of bags, to produce whole harems of naked facts, people eat the same three meals daily deception, and are always ready to turn with fury upon the purveyors of bagless cats and facts undraped. – John Dos Passos
For some time now, anti-sex politicians have been working to undermine the Netherlands’ legendary tolerance of sex work. Using the “trafficking” hysteria as an excuse and branding almost any male who has a relationship with a sex worker a “pimp”, these stealth-prohibitionists have made it much more difficult to get a brothel license, and in 2006 tried to revoke the licenses of 30 established brothels. In September of 2007 the city closed more than a third of the famous windows (by buying the buildings) and commissioned a study, which was published in 2010; it’s 232 pages long and available only in Dutch, but here is the conclusion and summary in English. Among its more interesting findings: underage prostitution is essentially nonexistent in Amsterdam, as are coercion and other wrongs among the roughly 20% of whores who are independent escorts and the roughly 40% who work from clubs or private incalls. It estimated the fraction of window prostitutes who were coerced to be 8%, and the fraction of the entire sex worker population involved in “wrongs” of any kind to be about 10%.
Of course, prohibitionists insist that this is a lie (or the result of “brainwashing”, “Stockholm syndrome”, “false consciousness”, etc), and proclaim (without any evidence whatsoever) that a whopping 90% of all Dutch whores are somehow coerced, exploited or otherwise harmed. Thanks to their efforts a massive police raid in search of “trafficking victims” was launched in April 2011 and found…none. Not a single blessed one, despite the detention and interrogation of 157 women. But prohibitionists never let little things like facts stop them, so they continued to push for “reforms” and “action”, all the while desperately searching for any kind of flimsy rationalization for their demands. But then they got what must have seemed like a godsend:
In the Fall of 2011, Parool and Algemeen Dagblad published the first stories of prostitute “Patricia Perquin”. She described the ways of the Amsterdam Wallen from the inside. It is her “true story”, as she later stated on the cover of her book…In revealing articles she led her readers into a world of sex, violence, humiliation, and exploitation…[she described herself as] tall, slim, blond [and] D-cup…[and] says she got into prostitution after having built up a 150,000 Euro debt due to shopping addiction. She…managed to pay it off in four and a half years…working through ten thousand clients. Her record is thirty-one in one day.
Patricia Perquin’s articles made a deep impression. Publishing house Prometheus contracted her for a book. In March 2012 the bestseller Achter het raam op de Wallen (“Behind a Window in the Wallen”) was released…[and soon] producer Talpa developed a TV series…The stories attracted the attention of Amsterdam Alderman Lodewijk Asscher, now the Deputy Prime Minister…[who was] very busy with [a project to] clean up the Wallen area. He took Patricia so seriously that he had a number of long conversations with her. “If one wants to get a realistic picture of what is happening in the Wallen all you need is to read Perquin’s book,” he said. Her tale strengthened him in his mission: stricter actions against exploitation. Perquin penetrated deeply into the world of Amsterdam policymakers…meeting with Mayor Eberhard van der Laan. “Her book moved me and it gives a very clear picture of what is happening on the Wallen,” he said in the Senate in June 2012, pleading for a quick introduction of a new prostitution law…
Perquin was instrumental in developing some of the “reforms” I’ve recently reported, such as raising the legal age of prostitution to 21 and demanding fluency in the Dutch language of the 70% of sex workers who are not Dutch nationals (thus dramatically expanding the illegal hooker underclass and facilitating exploitation). Needless to say, the Amsterdam sex work community wanted to know who this prohibitionist shill really was:
The first cracks in her story begin to show when prostitutes call Metje Blaak, former spokeswoman of the prostitution advocacy organization, De Rode Draad. “Nobody had ever heard of her. They asked me where Patricia worked. They wanted to work where she worked because she made such good money. She had sometimes seven clients in one day, whereas if you do well on the Wallen, you might get four.” There was also suspicion on Hookers.nl…
Of course, the politicians couldn’t be bothered to check up on her; if they had, they might not have been so quick to lionize her. After giving a lengthy radio interview, she was recognized by people who knew her in the past not as a sex worker, but rather as a disgraced journalist named Valerie Lempereur:
Lempereur…has worked in both the Netherlands and Belgium, among others for Nieuwe Revu, Story, TV Family, and Het Laatste Nieuws. Many…well-known people…accuse her of lies and deceit. In the Nineties Lempereur was fired on the spot by crime reporter, Peter R. de Vries, on account of “fraud and deceit, committed more than once,” he wrote in an open letter to Trouw…She was born [in Zeeland] as Daniël…[and] had [gender-reassignment] surgery many years ago…she was addicted…to heroin…for eight years…and…sentenced to prison for several months, for drug theft…[after she] sneaked into hospitals…to steal the goods, dressed as a nurse…A well-known window owner who wants to remain anonymous, says he knew Valérie around 2000 as a prostitute in the Singel area. That contradicts the [claim] that Lempereur began working only five years ago, in all innocence. From the four and half years she [allegedly] worked in the cribs, she also managed for two years a publishing company in Belgium. It’s not clear how she did that with simultaneously working ten thousand clients on the Wallen. Her book also doesn’t say a word about the effect of her transsexuality on her work in the crib…
Though the story has been building since March of last year, it was only broken at last by the newspaper De Volkskrant on March 9th, with the following note:
De Volkskrant has repeatedly asked Valerie Lempereur for a reaction on the veracity of her book and articles. She has neglected our requests. Instead, she applied twice for a temporary injunction to prevent the revelation of her identity. Friday night…the judge decided that De Volkskrant can publish this article.
And a good thing, too; the anti-whore momentum has been building so strongly that a socialist representative named Myrthe Hilkens has even been able to start pushing for the Swedish model. Will the exposure of this fake be able to stop the descent of the Netherlands into prohibitionist madness, or will the busybodies just find a new sock puppet (perhaps they can borrow Justine Reilly from Ruhama?) Only time will tell.
(I wish to express my deep appreciation to regular reader and die-hard sex worker ally Frans van Rossum, who not only called these articles to my attention but also invested a great deal of time and effort in preparing English translations for me. Thank you so very much, Frans!)
Abolitionists have set their minds to certain goals and there’s seemingly nothing we can do to stop them. I foresee a dark future for sex-workers. The Swedish model is likely to spread to several European countries and whatever bad effects it has will be swept under the rug as stories like the one you posted gets retold over and over again.
i dont understand what exactly they mean by ”private house”.they mean a house that a woman rents to do her job,because she doesnt want to see clients neither at her own house nor at his own place or a hotel?also,as far as home prostitution is concerned for one hour and 90 minutes as they say the rate of 130 euros,which is the equivalent of 170 dollars is average or low?
It’s probably “average”. I think I checked into this one time and found the rates in Germany and Amsterdam to be roughly equivalent. 50 Euro’s per half hour – which is 150 Euros for 90 minutes. Now of course – elite escorts would demand much higher rates.
the difference between a club and a private house is that a club has an alcohol license and a private house doesn’t. Otherwise they are similar. For 90 minutes @ 130/hour the client would pay 195-200 Euros or about $260. For Amsterdam it’s medium level.
A “private house” in this context is a kind of brothel (“Privaat Huis”). Sex workers working out of their own homes or some other shared flat would be doing so against the law.
Here’s a link to a brief interview with Mariska Majoor founder of the Dutch Prostitution Information Centre.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt3Jcrc-XIg
She debunks the myth that most prostitutes working in the Red Light district are pimped.
the summary of the study that Maggie’s column links to debunks that same myth, but more cautiously. Reliable researchers must always leave room for the error margin.
“but more cautiously”
How so?
“Reliable researchers must always leave room for the error margin.”
How can extrapolation ever be reliable?!!!
In the physical sciences, it’s pretty darned reliable. When it doesn’t work, it’s a big surprise and the focus of attention.
Very different domain, yes, but you asked…
You really believe that extrapolation is reliable?!! Wow!
In Europe, anyone studying applied maths or statistics would be expected to know that extrapolation (inferring unknown values from trends in the known data) is always dangerous because guesses are by definition unreliable.
When they built the LHC, it was a gazillion dollar gamble that special relativity continued to apply at energies that high. They used pure extrapolation to get there. We’d never seen anything that high energy with two time points to actually observe that it held.
No one was particularly concerned that it wouldn’t hold…
… and it held.
That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, not ‘this data set of local provenance suggests a trend, and let’s follow that out to infinity on a guess’
It occurs to me that one reason we can get away with extrapolation is that we generally try to use short chains of inference and check everything experimentally – the role of extrapolation is to generate expectations, and not an iron-clad mathematical or logical proof. In this sense, being right almost all the time is sufficiently reliable to be considered actually reliable.
If such were to be used in long chains of inference or there could be no ready experimental check, this degree of reliability would be inadequate.
My brother and I first went to Amsterdam in ’96 as guests of a famous Dutch kick boxer. He was well connected and gave us a tour around Amsterdam’s Red Light district. At the time a lot of properties were run by the Dutch Hell’s Angels, who in my experience were nice guys and legitimate businessmen. I thought it would be violent but it wasn’t but the place was incredibly seedy.
I met a prostitute in the VIP bar after a kick boxing show she had been working as a ring girl (topless, which I thought was really tacky), she was asking my brother about doing some promotional work in Ibiza. No one was pimping her she was self-employed.
I think Project 1020 has nothing to do with any alleged link between trafficking, organised crime and prostitution. I think it’s purely about driving the prostitutes and cafes out to increase the value of the properties.Quite frankly, I think it’s a big mistake because the red light district is what tourists come for. I don’t think many people go to Amsterdam for the Tulips, the galleries and museums.
All I have to say about your comments above especially the last paragraph is AMEN!!!!!!!
” I don’t think many people go to Amsterdam for the Tulips, the galleries and museums.”
Well, I’d go to see Rembrandt. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp is in Den Haag, but that’s only a short trip away. (We had a copy at home when I was a kid, I’d like to see the original.)
And after the culture, you could certainly take me to the alternative scenes!
I find it curious, and possibly significant, that the hysteria focuses on prostitution in the West, and manages to ignore the (I believe) very real human trafficking and general abuse of women going on under various Islamic regimes. What’s your take? I’m very tempted to say that the hysterics are trying desperately to distract from the fact that they are too scared to take on a culture that DOES routinely treat women like farm animals.
The “trafficking” meme is a part of the drive for the suicide of Western Civilization. The Mohammedans – they are also a part of that drive – as is the entire Global Warming meme and the effort to drive the West away from efficient power sources and towards pitifully inefficient and costly ones. This is the way Socialists and Marxists (and some Anarchists) intend to collapse the greatest, most enlightened, most properous, and most humane civilization that has existed on this planet since the first human stood up right upon it.
Of course – no is going to criticize the Mohammedans and their treatment of women. No one is going to criticize the practice of the current Iranian government to rape teenage girls before they are executed – to ensure their virginity doesn’t give them entrance to “Paradise”.
You’ve highlighted the key hypocrisy here. If these people were so concerned about women’s rights – where the fuck are they when it comes to women in the Muslim world?
I’ll tell you where they are – standing in support of the Mohammedan Patriarchy.
They need to own it.
If we think that there is sex trafficking going on in England or Italy or Spain, we can have our diplomats talk to their diplomats and either make an honest effort to see if we can help or, more likely, try to flex our economic and cultural muscle to get England or Italy or Spain to do what we want.
If we see something horrible in Iran or Pakistan, what do we do? We’re not on good terms with a lot of these countries and don’t have the pull with them we have with Japan or Australia. Short of invading and making their laws for them and threatening additional military action if they don’t do as we say, what can we do? The American people have had quite enough of trying to remake Middle-Eastern countries over in our preferred image, thank you very much.
I guess we could stop buying so much of their damned oil OOPS I just became a Marxist Socialist Anarchist trying to destroy Western Civilization!
Saudi Arabia is full of horror stories:
“A Sri Lankan woman who said that her Saudi employers drove hot nails into her body after she complained about her work as a maid underwent surgery on Friday to remove 13 nails and 5 needles from her body, Arab News reported. Doctors in Sri Lanka decided not to remove another six needles in the woman’s hands because of concerns about damaging nerves and arteries.” — http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/saudi-employers-hammered-nails-into-maids-body-sri-lanka-says/
However, there was no dirty, dirty sex involved. (I always tell my Asian friends to avoid work in Saudi Arabia, no matter how well it claims to pay.)
Also, it’s not fear. The Saudi Government plays ball with the US (and is an “ally” although that really means an ally of US oil concerns not the American people,who they hate), so they turn a blind eye.
They put a picture on the cover of Time of an Afghan girl with her nose cut off, because we’re currently at war with the Afghans, so I can’t say that our media is hiding it. (Or maybe you meant Europe… no clue what goes on in Europe.)
The little Afghan girl who had her nose cut off by the Taliban is only the tip of the iceberg. Her case got attention because of how extreme it was. The media (in the U.S.) is still not painting a full picture of the horrors there for women.
We need only ask ourselves … what is the bigger problem? Human Trafficking and modern slavery or the abuse of women in Muslim nations. A third grader could answer that question.
Why isn’t the media spending as much effort (or more) on the cause of Muslim women as it does the human trafficking issue?
out of the many different types of immigrants that live in Greece i find afghans to be the worst.im not a racist.im not the type to say that every immigrant should be deported and there are very few things that i hate more than stereotyping but i find so many of them have no regard for human life.there are many that will rob you to survive,which is natural because its not like we are the type of country that can take them in and give them jobs.but unlike other theives who will threaten you and take your money,they attack,kill and then take what youve got.someone who was raised to beleive it is ok for people to get stoned to death,even for minor things how is he supposed to value life?then,there is a huge problem of many muslim immigrants,which is a big part of why Europe has become so xenophobic.(netherlands is also a very xenophobic country,which im sure plays a big part in the trafficking hysteria).the problem boils down to increased rape offences. european women dont usually find theese immigrants appealing and their religion forbids extramarital relations with muslim women but it is ok for them to have them with ”infidels”.(thats the reason that harem concubines were christian slave girls in the ottoman empire).since they are also tought no respect for women,especially ”infidel” women nothing stops them from rape.
Because the position of Muslim women is not much better than in any other third world developing nation and there is right now, no way of making a nation developing any faster than it is now. Everyone is familiar with the problem, there’s still no solution, so the media doesn’t report on it because nothing has changed.
I’m not fan of calling the Saudis “allies”, but there is a very good reason not to treat them as enemies until we absolutely must. If we fought them we would win, and then WE would be stuck administering Mecca and Medina. That would mean we would be administering the Hadj, which has to rank high on the worst recurring administrative headaches of all time.
you would go against the emirats and think you have a high chance of winning?they are the richest people in the world,if they were easy targets with so much oil they have they would have followed the fate of Iraq a long time ago,instead of the u.s striving to make them allies.
The Iraqi army was the fourth largest in the world, the largest in the middle east, and of a type much admired by the local tyrants. It took us about two weeks to run over it like Patton running over the south of France, and we were using what military we had after the Clinton administration, a total of about 300,000 troops.
yes,but you were using much fancier weapons.
No wise person trusts anything in print or visual media these days, let alone the internet, without independent verification. God knows publishers have little interest in worrying about details such as truth!
It’s easy to be skeptical of things that confront our worldview, but when something appears that supports whatever notions we hold dear, it is can be hard to maintain that skepticism. No doubt your identity has been called into question by those who hold opposing views. But honestly Maggie, when I stumbled across this blog I was skeptical, because you seemed too good to be true! That’s one reason that I went out of my way to catch your recent public appearance.
It’s really very simple, but these dullards don’t seem to want to know and understand. Most men who are the customers engage in the acts of prostitution by renting the time and services of prostitutes because there is little to no sexual outlet for them. Most women who are the prostitutes engage in prostitution because they usually need or to a lesser extent want the money in order to be able to pay for their necessities and to a lesser extent luxuries. For both there are few or more likely no other options for the customers, johns, to have a sexual outlet and for the prostitutes, whores, to be able to provide food clothing and shelter to themselves and their families if they have them. They would rather have men suffer psychological torment and women suffer without the three most basic necessities of life thus being in danger of dying without these. Most men and most women would not engage in prostitution if they had better options which these dullards never seem to provide viable alternatives to their plight. The dullards never seem to understand that prostitution is usually their only viable option for an outlet out of their plight even though it is only temporary. Men need to learn how to seduce women if they can, and I know some can’t no matter how hard they try. Women need to find a better means of provision and protection eventually especially if they are prostitutes. It’s nice to have a fantasy of a better world, but often we must do the best we can in the real world. The dullards have no true concept of harm reduction. Believe me when I say that if most johns if they could successfully seduce women for all the sex that they want or need would do so, and most prostitutes would do another job like being the President of the United States of America if they could, but that is usually either not an option for both groups or they have almost always justifiably found the alternatives to be lacking in comparison to prostitution. For that matter, most (single never married, divorced or widowed) men would seriously consider being prostitutes if they thought they could get paid for having sex and would consider it a dream job, but that is almost never an option either. The dullards begrudge whatever genuine relief the johns and prostitutes might get by engaging in prostitution, then provide nothing in return.
There are plenty of wealthy, handsome, charming men who prefer hiring prostitutes to playing the dating game.
Pouring over the study; looks to be quite well done.
Doclove;
I have to say I think your observations fit nicely with my feeling that there’s an awful lot of “How DARE you not fit into my neatly categorized preconceptions!” in this Crusade.
31 in a day? Why do people buy into that? Let’s say she didn’t sleep (seems unlikely without drugs), that’s still more than one an hour. Of course, I suppose she could have held a gangbang party, but the phrasing is “31 clients in a day,” which suggests individual clients.
Also, “shopping addiction” is a thing now? It’s not difficult to spend that much shopping, just buy a couple of Cadillac Escalades, or a house.
If she means rather that she was a compulsive shopper (buying thousands and thousands of small inexpensive things), that would mean she was mentally ill, and therefore not a reliable witness. Otherwise, it just means she went into prostitution to support an expensive lifestyle that lots of people would envy.
Ah well, Europe seems to have gone insane. It wasn’t that many years ago that it was more sexually liberated than the US. I guess neofeminism is a better fit, religion wise, for Europe than Puritan Christianity, but with the same basic result.
Asscher is one of the most slick and cynical prohibitionists in Europe. He used to say that he is not against prostitution; that he only wants to protect the women involved (while not consulting them, of course); and that legalization is the best way to deal with it.
However, in his book Nieuw Amsterdam (2005), Asscher wrote: “Wat mij betreft wordt de raamprostitutie in Amsterdam actief ontmoedigd” – As far as I’m concerned, windows prostitution in Amsterdam should be actively discouraged.
By 2011, he was suggesting full criminalization as an option.
In my opinion the most serious concern for the long term future of the Red Light District is not directly related to anyone’s opinion about the prostitution branch as such; it is the degenerating condition of the real estate in this oldest part of the city. Particularly since it’s part of the downtown area that’s on the nation’s (and Unesco’s) Cultural Heritage list, the city government at some time will have to let the reality of that horrible deterioration prevail (socially and economically) over the interests of the trade. But how to tackle this problem with business open 24/7 the year around, with the least damage for the tourist industry? Relocation is no option, because it’s the location and “oldness” of the area that frames the sex trade and together they make it so attractive. This chimera looms larger and larger over the area for already two or more decades.
By law every municipality in the Netherlands must license a prostitution enterprise if there is demand for it, but it can determine where and how. So in the worst case Amsterdam could expand clubs, private houses, and escort service in order to justify the closure of the window brothels. The problem is that the administration sets its policies without involving the sex workers or their representatives in the planning. So it’s all the more telling and scary on all levels that they do take advice from some ‘Patricia Perquin’ because of her stories, and pay her also as an adviser for the.P&G 292 (Prostitution Health Care Center). Since the story broke, no comment from city hall, as far as I know, except that the issue is “under consideration”.
First, an observation to Maggie: the Neofeminists are not only influenced by the worst parts of Marxist-Leninist ideology (and you have to add Lenin in there, because Marx was far more pro-women’s rights than any of his Communist successors), but also the Puritan Protestantism that held so much of the U.S. in its thrall for the first 300 years after the Pilgrims landed.
Two, the attempt to kill prostitution is an attack on women’s rights, something that the Neofeminists deny, but is completely self-evident: either a women has control of her body, or she doesn’t. If she does, that means that the question of abortion is between her and her physician; it also mens that the question of being a sex worker, OF HER OWN VOLITION, is between her and her God/conscience; no one else counts. If she is being coerced into the life, it falls into the same category as any sort of coerced employment, and the person coercing the woman should be charged with some form of kidnapping. As a society, we must do what we can to ensure that no coercion is going on–within the limits of human beings to do so–and help provide a safe working environment for her and her customers, within those self-same limits.
Thank you! It just seems so obvious to me sometime it’s hard to put into words. Women should have rights. Sex work is up to them. Forcing a woman into any work should be punishable. These are separate things. But you said it better. Just reiterating how baffled I am sometimes when people make points trying to connect sex work with trafficking or some other crime.
Glad to help.
Reblogged this on respectsexwork.
I know some can’t no matter how hard they try. Women need to find a better means of provision and protection eventually especially if they are prostitutes. It’s nice to have a fantasy of a better world, but often we must do the best we can in the real world.
It’ll be interesting to see how this of all cities deals with the trafficking panic.
It depends how they keep voting. When they were voting conservative (briefly) they started to take away some of the good laws protecting sex workers, and starting putting in restrictive laws that really seem to only punish sex workers and never help trafficked persons.
I think the solution is not going to be punishing the people who are abiding by the rules and just trying to do their jobs, but when you start electing people because you believe their “trafficking panic” rhetoric you essentially start voting for people with no plan and no idea of what’s really going on, who only want to treat an industry that isn’t the problem because they don’t understand how things are related.
Overall I will be paying attention and I’m interested with what they do as well.
I like the sex workers in Nevada. They are nice and smell good, especially the males.
[…] list for an activity which is legal, but still stigmatized in some quarters. In the Netherlands, ever-tightening requirements (such as closing window brothels, raising the legal work age to 21 and demanding that the 70% of […]