Red light district remains closed as Amsterdam opens
Patrick Kingsley finds out its impact on the sex workers
The red lights still shine above the windows in De Wallen, Amsterdam’s main red light district, but the windows are empty.
The streets lining the canals, normally crammed with tourists, are deserted. The brothels are closed, the prostitution museum shut until further notice.
“No photos of sex workers,” reads the signs above the brothel windows. “Fine: €95.” But there are no sex workers to photograph in the windows and no tourists to photograph them.
The Netherlands is reopening. Hairdressers, driving instructors and beauticians have been back at work since 11 May, without needing to wear a mask. Restaurants reopened their outdoor seating areas at the beginning of this month. Gyms and saunas are scheduled to restart in early July.
In De Wallen, a locksmith is open, as are a few (mostly empty) bars and shops selling sex toys, whips, handcuffs and the odd latex dress. But sex workers have been told to wait until September, emptying the area and sending many sex workers into poverty – or secretly back to work.
Charlotte de Vries, the professional name of an escort working in Amsterdam, would normally meet up to seven clients a week. But the week the lockdown began, all seven cancelled, immediately costing her about £1200. “And I stopped counting after that,” says de Vries, sitting at a table on the edge of the red light district. “I thought, I just don’t want to know.”
As she speaks, the bells chime across the street at Amsterdam’s oldest church. Now that the area is deserted, she says, you can hear the sounds of the neighbourhood for once.
For now, de Vries is able to rely on savings. But many of her colleagues cannot. More than 400 have sought assistance from a new emergency fund set up by volunteers, which offers aid of about £36 to the most desperate applicants. This assistance hasn’t been nearly enough. De Vries says she knows seven sex workers who have been forced to work in secret just to pay their rent. Rosie Heart, the professional name of a second Dutch sex worker, says she knows of at least 10.
“It’s a disaster, really,” says Heart, who usually provides escort services in Amsterdam and London in addition to working as a representative of Proud, a labour union for Dutch sex workers.
Working in secret makes sex workers particularly vulnerable because they are more at risk from abusive
clients. Before the coronavirus crisis, if a client became violent, you would go to the police, de Vries says. “But now you can’t do that because what you’re doing is illegal.”
A neighbour walks past, nodding a hello. One of the few silver linings to the crisis has been the opportunity to get to know the area’s residents better, de Vries says.
Dutch sex workers now face such hardship because of patchy government support. Like many governments at the start of the crisis, Dutch authorities created emergency income streams for people suddenly left without work. But in practice, many sex workers do not qualify for the new subsidies because of the way they were registered with tax authorities before the crisis. Or they are too scared to apply for it.
Although prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, many sex workers prefer not to declare their profession to the government because the trade still carries a social stigma – or because they work without all the licenses needed for them to be completely compliant with the law.
In a survey of 108 sex workers in the Netherlands conducted online by Sekswerk Expertise, a research group in Amsterdam, 56 per cent of respondents said they had applied for coronavirus support. Of those applicants, only 13 per cent said they had received help. Of those who did not apply, about 1 in 3 said they already knew they would not qualify, and 1 in 6 said they were worried about outing themselves as sex workers to government institutions, in case their identities were leaked.
And migrant sex workers, working without a permit, cannot even contemplate applying for assistance.
Heart is one of the few successful applicants, receiving about £1,200 a month since March, roughly half her usual earnings. But she says she will not apply for help from July onward because sex workers would likely then be the only people out of work for reasons directly related to the coronavirus restrictions.
She fears that will out her as a sex worker and potentially prompt local officials to evict her from her home on the – mistaken – assumption that she uses her apartment as an unlicensed brothel. “One minute I could be applying for state support,” Heart says. “The next minute I could be fighting to stay in my home.”
Some unemployed sex workers have turned to the internet to try to make a living from online sex shows. Ten attended a recent online training session at the Prostitution Information Centre, a nonprofit that provides support to sex workers and guided tours of De Wallen to tourists. But it can take months to build up a base of paying customers online, and there are substantial costs to setting up an online business. Online sex work needs a good camera, a microphone, a strong internet connection – and a private space where you are not likely to be disturbed.
A new influx of internet sex workers could also make life more difficult for those already in the online business. “There’s even more competition, so it’s even more tricky,” Heart says.
Sex workers say they do not understand why they are not allowed to go back to work in at least some capacity in July, along with gyms and saunas. Their work doesn’t have to involve kissing, and a lot of sex work, even before the coronavirus crisis, did not involve full intercourse or face-to-face contact.
Hairdressers can now welcome clients again “and hover in front of their face to cut their bangs”, Heart says. So she wonders why sex workers aren’t allowed to perform sex acts that stop short of intercourse.
“I’m absolutely not saying we should be allowed to go back to work as normal, certainly not,” she adds. “But if you’re saying that everyone can go back to work, but not sex workers, there’s something wrong with your thinking.”