Coffee? Prayers? Sex?: Church and brothel make for odd bedmates in Amsterdam, but tolerance is the key in the liberated Dutch society that threw out the rule books the rest of us follow.

On a cool Sunday morning, the canals and narrow streets of Amsterdam echo with the sweet bells of the Old Church, a 13th-century house of worship. Beneath its stone floor are buried admirals, war heroes, a founder of New York City and the wife of Rembrandt. One of its stained-glass windows marks a 400-year-old peace treaty. An inscription celebrates the Reformation. Staring up at the bell tower, feeling all the weight of this grand history wash over me, I fall into a pleasant reverie.

From behind, a brittle rap snaps me awake. A woman wearing only panties, bra and a come-hither smile taps on the window of the brothel across the street. It seems there is no day of rest for the oldest profession.

For the North American tourist, it's more than a little jarring to see a grand old church separated by the length of three pews from what small-town Canadians used to call a "cathouse." But the church and the cathouse have been neighbours in the heart of the city for so many centuries that you might say that Amsterdam wouldn't be Amsterdam without one or the other.

This is the red-light district, the most famous -- or infamous, depending on perspective -- symbol of Holland's renowned tolerance. Interspersed among the brothels are shops selling marijuana, and gay bars whose patrons are permitted to marry under Dutch law. Those feeling less enthusiastic about life may choose to visit a Dutch doctor's office, wherein they may, if they meet specified conditions, arrange to be euthanized.

Dutch tolerance also extends to the woman in the window this Sunday morning. Holland has always allowed prostitution in one form or another and brothels have been de facto legal for more than 30 years. Two years ago, the sex trade was formally legalized.

It's this long experience with liberal vice laws that took me to Holland. I wanted to know if there was a better way.

FROM VANCOUVER TO EDMONTON, from Montreal to Toronto and Ottawa, prostitutes are a staple of Canadian newspaper headlines. They are murdered by the score. They go missing by the dozen. And these are just the ones we know of. Street prostitutes in particular suffer robbery, assault and rape but never tell, fearing a justice system that punishes them as criminals. Their stories of abduction, rape and terror are not so different from what you hear in Third-World refugee camps.

Worse though is that the law itself may be largely responsible for this misery. Many researchers are convinced Canada's criminal law drives vulnerable women even farther into the margins, into shadows where they are easy prey. But the research has been ignored. The issue of prostitution flares now and then, usually when particularly gruesome cases come to light -- such as the nightmarish one involving Robert Pickton in Vancouver, or the recent fear of a serial killer stalking Edmonton's streets. Inevitably, a red-light district or a "tolerance zone" is suggested. Amsterdam is usually mentioned in an offhand way.

But the discussion ends when it's pointed out that any change would "legitimize" prostitution. The law, we're told, must never tolerate the sex trade. Left unmentioned is the fact that most commercial sex in Canada is conducted off-street in businesses the police know about but leave undisturbed. Also rarely spoken is the fact that many cities issue expensive licences to "massage parlours" and "escort agencies" they know offer sex. Many such cities are run by councillors who insist the law must never tolerate prostitution.

Bloodshed and hypocrisy: These are the twin hallmarks of Canadian prostitution policy. When I left for Holland, it remained to be seen by me whether the Dutch are doing any better with their tolerant approach. I knew they could be doing no worse.

THE DUTCH HAVE ALWAYS BEEN A tolerant people. In the 16th century, at a time when other Protestant majorities were driving out Roman Catholics en masse, Dutch Protestants banned Catholicism but let Catholics stay, and even let them practise their religion -- provided they disguised their churches as ordinary residences to avoid offending the neighbourhood. This generosity didn't come from a love of human rights. The Catholics were educated and skilled and a trading nation like the Netherlands could hardly afford to lose such citizens.

Driving them out just wasn't practical. And the Dutch, a people clinging to a tiny scrap of land pulled from the North Sea, are always practical.

This curious amalgam of tolerance and pragmatism is the heart of Dutch culture and it helps explain so much of what Holland does differently than others. It's not that most Dutch people approve of marijuana use, for example, but rather that they think criminalizing it is impractical. The same is true of prostitution. Dutch morality is little different than other western countries' and it's probably true that most Dutch people, now as in the past, see prostitution as immoral, abnormal or at least distasteful. But forbidding it is another matter.

In centuries past, whenever religious movements waxed and demanded that morality be expressed in law and a ban be placed on commercial sex, the authorities would shrug and point out that Holland is a land of harbours. Harbours mean sailors. Sailors mean prostitutes. Better to let the business operate in the open where it can be kept orderly than to make a mess trying to ban it. One of the earliest bylaws of the city of Amsterdam declared in 1413 that brothels would not be banned because "whores are necessary in big cities and especially in cities of commerce such as ours." Down through the centuries this attitude generally prevailed and today the red-light district is almost as old as the Old Church itself.

For much of this time, the Dutch were not alone in thinking it is better to regulate than ban the oldest profession. Under English Common Law, says Alan Young, a professor of criminal law at Osgoode Hall Law School, there were offences related to "bawdy houses" but the "rationale was nuisance, not the regulation of sexuality."

For the same reason, prostitutes were dealt with under vagrancy laws. "You could be deemed a vagrant if you were a common prostitute who could not account for why you were out on the street." In effect, if prostitutes didn't do business at places and times that bothered the public, and brothels didn't disrupt neighbourhoods, the authorities let them carry on.

The Canadian colonies inherited this approach and generally followed it until the late 19th century. So did the United States, where many big cities had flourishing vice neighbourhoods known as

The French traditionally had a similar attitude that was formally codified under Napoleon. Brothels were licensed and the women who worked in them subjected to regular medical inspections. Prostitution, in the eyes of many respectable burghers, was a "necessary evil." Prostitutes keep lustful men "from perverting your daughters and your servants," wrote one French commentator, and thus "contribute to the maintenance of order and tranquillity in society." The French system was followed throughout Europe for most of the 19th century.

Victorian social reformers found all of this appalling. Prostitution is immoral, they felt, and since the law's purpose is the moral improvement of society, prostitution must not be regulated. It must be abolished.

The abolitionist movement scored an early success in Prussia. In 1845, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV ordered all brothels closed. But what followed set a pattern that was to play out over and over: Unable to work indoors, prostitutes scattered and plied their trade on the streets. Disorder and disease spread. Most informed opinion deemed the experiment a terrible mistake and six years after the king's edict, the brothels were re-opened.

But the moral impulse fought back. Five years after Prussia's brothels re-opened, they were ordered closed again.

The struggle between regulation and abolition went on through the 19th century, but gradually abolition got the upper hand. In the late Victorian era, social reform movements surged across the western world, demanding everything from labour laws to the criminal prohibition of alcohol, tobacco, gambling, narcotics, indecent entertainment and new forms of dance.

A ban on prostitution became a central demand of the reformers. From Toronto to Stuttgart, committees of prominent citizens studied the "social evil" and, inevitably, declared the need for stern legislative action. Canada's first national anti- prostitution laws passed in 1867 and were strengthened at the end of the century. The United States and most European countries did the same early in the 20th century.

In 1913, with much of the western world horrified by the mysterious (and largely mythical) "white slave trade," Canadian lawmakers capped their legislative efforts by making pimps and brothel keepers subject to whipping.

Holland, too, was swept by abolitionist zeal, though Dutch lawmakers didn't get quite so excited as their Canadian counterparts. In 1911, Holland's brothels were closed and it became a crime for any person to arrange for a woman to prostitute herself. Local bylaws banned street soliciting. But prostitution itself remained legal, both for buyer and seller, and women could still practise the trade from home. The authorities thought it was unnecessary to go farther, says Marieke van Doorninck, a researcher with the A. de Graaf Foundation in Amsterdam, an organization funded by the Dutch government to study the sex trade. "They believed that if no man was pushing women into prostitution, no woman would prostitute herself."

As it turned out, plenty of women didn't need to be pushed. Barred from brothels and streets, Dutch women worked at home, alone or in small groups. "They would stand in their doorways, but the police would say that's still a form of soliciting," says van Doorninck. So the women sat in their front windows. When the police insisted they close the curtains, the women took to tapping on the glass to let passing men know they were open for business. The women who work today in Amsterdam's notorious "window" prostitution trade -- standing behind glassfronted doors that open into tiny bedrooms -- are part of a very old tradition.

The First World War put an end to the social reform movements and prostitution vanished as a major public issue. Prostitution and the laws banning it lived on but the police in country after country generally turned a blind eye to discrete sexual commerce. As they usually do when forced to choose between law and order, the police sided with the latter.

In the 1970s, prostitution forced its way back into public consciousness as the sex trade, and street prostitution in particular, ballooned in most western countries. At the same time, the surge in feminism presented a new challenge to the hypocritical status quo: Although many feminists supported prostitution on the grounds that women should be free to use their bodies as they wished, others attacked prostitution in any form as an inherently degrading activity. The trade must be abolished, they said, but not by arresting the women who were victims of this "sexual slavery." Male customers must be targeted. In this volatile atmosphere, two notorious murders in massage parlours in Toronto and Vancouver prompted demands for action. Police responded by raiding the brothels and massage parlours they had ignored for decades. The result was just as disastrous as it had been when Prussia did the same 130 years before. Women spilled onto the streets, and neighbourhoods across the country were invaded by hookers and curb-crawling johns. And because streetwalking is far more dangerous than any form of offstreet sex work, violence against prostitutes surged.

A Canadian parliamentary committee looked at the chaos in the early 1980s and decided that the law was "self-defeating" because enforcement in one place simply displaced the trade and created problems elsewhere. The committee recommended a more liberal approach. Up to two women would be allowed to work out of a single off-street location and provinces would be given the authority to license small-scale brothels.

The committee was ignored. Instead, in 1985, the law against communicating in public to arrange commercial sex was made more sweeping, including, for the first time, explicit wording to make it apply equally to women and men. Prosecutions for street prostitution exploded, with almost 10,000 charges laid every year (divided equally between hookers and johns) until the early 1990s. At the same time, enforcement against off-street prostitution was pulled back -- the old policy of the blind eye returned.

"It's very clear that the police put prostitutes on the street and they've been trying to get them off ever since," says John Lowman, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. It's working. Today, about 80 per cent of Canada's prostitutes work off-street -- in massage parlours, escort services, hotels, bars, strip clubs and private homes -- where the police and politicians pretend not to see them.
[Top]

For the prostitutes left on Canada's streets -- typically women so wretched they cannot work off-street -- an unspoken, unplanned arrangement has fallen into place. Most police officers understand that arresting hookers simply pushes them from place to place so they leave them alone as long as there are no complaints. The prostitutes know this and try to keep a low profile by never working in groups and by sticking to streets where there are few residents. As a result, a parliamentary report concluded a few years ago, most major cities now have "unofficial zones of tolerance."

Unfortunately, such zones force streetwalkers to work under the most dangerous conditions possible: alone, on dark, deserted streets. The women are easy prey and the predators know it. A 1995 survey of prostitutes working the stroll in Vancouver's downtown eastside found that 94 per cent had been assaulted; 90 per cent had been robbed; 89 per cent had been sexually assaulted; half had been assaulted with a weapon. In street jargon, these are "bad dates."

One quarter of the women reported having had one bad date in the previous six months; 36 per cent said they had two to five bad dates; and 13 per cent said they had over 20, or "too many to count." Just 10 per cent said they had not been victimized in the previous six months.

Even murder is a constant threat: Over the past 10 years, at least 73 street prostitutes have been killed in Canada. Horrific as that number is, it seriously understates the reality because it only includes women known by the police to have been working at the time of their murder. Nor does it count prostitutes who have simply vanished, including more than 60 missing women in Vancouver and similar unsolved disappearances across the country.

LIKE CANADA, HOLLAND REVISITED ITS approach to prostitution in the 1970s, but with drastically different methods and results. The key to Holland's reform was a very Dutch legal concept called gedogen.

Usually translated as "pragmatic tolerance," gedogen simply means that a type of crime will not be prosecuted under certain circumstances. This isn't the same as turning a blind eye. Gedogen involves written guidelines that officials must follow. It's honest, predictable and not open to the sort of abuse that discretion can be put to. Dutch officials invoke gedogen when it is felt that enforcing the law causes more problems than it solves but there isn't enough of a political consensus to simply repeal the law. In the past, it was used to suspend prosecutions under the abortion law. Today it is the legal basis for allowing marijuana sales.

Early in the 1970s, the Dutch government applied gedogen to off-street prostitution: Most forms of prostitution were permitted provided there was no coercion involved, no minors, and ordinary municipal regulations were obeyed.

Change came quickly. Brothels operating in the black market went public and expanded. New businesses set up anywhere zoning allowed on the understanding that if they operated without official protest or neighbourhood complaint for two years, they had a legal right to stay. Prostitution went public.

Critics were appalled. "It really grew out of proportion. It became so big, the whole prostitution world," says Toos Heemskerk, a project co-ordinator with the Scarlet Cord, a Christian evangelical group that helps prostitutes get out of the business.

But it's not really clear whether gedogen actually caused prostitution to grow, or if it simply made an invisible industry visible. Unlike the related issue of illicit drugs, researchers haven't studied how legal systems affect the prevalence of prostitution. For the same reason, it's impossible to compare prostitution rates in Holland with those in Canada or other countries.

The only hard data come from a 1999 survey of Dutch prostitution that found that despite 30 years of official tolerance, prostitution did not exist in two-thirds of municipalities. While gedogen may have made the sex industry visible, it did not turn Holland into Sodom and Gomorrah.

Tourists visiting Amsterdam can be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Mere steps from the city's Central Station, pedestrians find themselves in the red-light district and streets lined with red-lit windows featuring lingerie-clad women mugging like Mae West. But the district's central location is an accident of history, not a demonstration of Dutch licentiousness. When Amsterdam was a medieval village, the brothels were put at the outskirts, next to the city walls, but over the centuries the periphery became the core. It's a happy accident, too, at least for the Dutch economy. The red-light district has become an internationally famous institution, drawing 2.5 million tourists a year and helping make Amsterdam the fourthmost visited city in Europe.

Set incongruously amid ancient canals, tiny bridges and some of the most graceful architecture on the continent, the redlight district is a strange carnival of prostitutes, porn theatres, brothels, pubs, bars, marijuana cafes, tacky souvenir shops and a few rather fine restaurants.

There's a "Banana Bar" with live sex shows. Sex shops selling the most improbable prosthetics. Stores stocked with magic mushrooms and phantasmagorical bongs. Quiet, even tranquil in the morning, the red-light district surges and overflows when the sun goes down, especially on weekends, as throngs fill the street: middle-aged Germans, drunken English lads, stoned Yanks, wide-eyed Japanese with cameras, and an occasional Dutch couple with the bemused look of visiting anthropologists.

It's John Ashcroft's vision of hell. It's a Tom Waits song. And the whole spectacle is entirely in the open for all to see.

And for the police, that's the whole point, says Dirk Eeken, a 31-year veteran of the Amsterdam police who was chief of the red-light district station until he recently became head of the division dealing with illegal immigrants.

"If you suppress these things, they're Lingerie-clad women mug like Mae West in red-lit windows in the Red-Light District, mere steps from the city's Central Station still going to be there," he insists. Only then it will go on in the shadows, where the police cannot see it. "But when you create an open business, you can do all the checks you want to do. You expose what's going on. You will never see everything, but you see much more than you used to see."

Of course open commercial vice is not a Dutch invention. In recent times, many North American cities have had "red-light districts" but these have almost always been areas where the police simply pulled back and let things go.

Amsterdam's red-light district is entirely different. The Dutch policy, says Eeken, is for the police to "get in the middle." In the red-light district, the police are so "in the middle" that they probably know more about its streets than any other neighbourhood in the city. Officers are always walking around, smiling, chatting and watching. They talk to the brothel owners. They talk to the prostitutes. They talk to the bar owners and marijuana merchants. The police know pretty much what everybody is up to. "You might say that the red-light district is a little village," Eeken says. "All the people working there have been there for ages. The businesses have been there for ages. So have the prostitutes, the bartenders and the junkies."

Bigger issues are dealt with in official monthly meetings with the brothel owners. Individual problems are often handled with a quiet conversation. If they persist, a business can be quickly and easily closed, whether temporarily or permanently. Criminal charges are a last resort.

It seems to work. For all the district's weirdness and hordes of inebriated tourists, it's remarkably orderly. Even in the late hours of the night, the streets are safer than in the downtown cores of most major cities. When I asked one American if he felt secure here, he burst out laughing. "I'm from Detroit!" he said. "This is Disneyland."

The open atmosphere is critical in fighting what the Dutch do not tolerate -- particularly juvenile prostitution. "There are 600 window spaces for prostitution," Eeken says, and the police know the women in every one of them. "So if there's a new girl, we can talk to the person who owns the building and say what's happening there?" Owners have to see a woman's passport before renting a window to her and they are responsible if a minor gets in, even with forged documents. "He can lose his licence for a few months, or for a longer period. We can expel him for 10 years out of this area. So we have all kinds of grip on the situation."

Even critics concede the system has been effective in keeping minors out. "I don't see any women under 18 behind the windows," says Toos Heemskerk. "The brothel owners are very, very scared of that."

A special Dutch police unit dedicated to juvenile prostitution finds about 100 girls a year in all of Holland, says Eeken. And those are usually girls aged 16 or 17. The 12- and 13-year-olds who turn up in the business in Canada are virtually unknown in the Netherlands.

Another virtue of the Dutch approach is trust, a critical issue for police everywhere. If prostitutes don't trust police, police cannot protect them or help them find a better life. Canadian police officers know this and some work hard to earn that trust. Unfortunately, they usually fail. How can a woman trust the very people who have arrested her in the past, the people she fears and hides from every day, the people who call her a criminal?

In Holland, trust remains a problem. Prostitution tends to attract women from fractured homes. Many have been physically or sexually abused. Most are socially disconnected, isolated and suspicious. Trust does not come easily.

And even where prostitution is legal, it still has a strong social stigma that makes women feel like "you're doing something wrong," says Mariska Majoor, a 34-yearold author and activist and former prostitute.

"You try to solve your problems yourself first, before you go to the police."

But Majoor insists that the barriers between police and prostitutes are less than they would be if the sex trade were criminalized. "It's legal to work as a prostitute in Holland so prostitutes don't have to be afraid of the police."

And Dutch police build trust by taking prostitutes seriously -- unlike many Canadian police officers. "In my experience," says Majoor, if a woman complains about a customer "the police always take the side of the prostitute first. And then later they will hear the story from the other side. But first they want to protect the prostitute." That attitude helps thaw the ice. "If you have proof that somebody will help you if you're in trouble, you will open up easier about all kinds of things." When she worked in the red-light district, Majoor says, "most of the prostitutes had quite a positive feeling about (the police) because they knew they were there to help them."

This trust is particularly valuable in the fight against pimps. In all countries, pimping convictions are almost impossible without the testimony of the woman involved. And no woman will do that unless she trusts the police.

"We call them 'wrong boyfriends,' " says Majoor. "You have a boyfriend and before you know it he's acting like a pimp. He's telling you I'm jealous, I don't like what you're doing, but he's taking her money."

The telling moment comes when the woman says she wants to get out of the business. "Then he is acting aggressive. Or he is telling her we don't have money anymore. That's happening a lot." But it often doesn't last. "Many girls are lucky because the guys are often doing other things besides this -- like robbing banks or dealing drugs. They do something illegal besides this. And then suddenly the police pick them up, throw them in jail and you're free to work for yourself again. That's a very common story."

Awful as "wrong boyfriends" may be, they're not pimps as police know them in Canada. Pimps are organized professionals with their own subculture. They operate elaborate recruitment schemes and control several women at a time.

This sort of pimping scarcely existed in Holland until it was "re-invented in the 1990s," says Marieke van Doorninck of the A. de Graaf Foundation. Men from migrant groups, particularly Moroccans and Turks, victimize women from within their own, socially isolated migrant minority communities. They also control foreign women smuggled into Holland to work illegally. Only in these hidden market niches does the most vicious sort of pimping flourish.

Another risk prostitutes have always faced is sexually transmitted disease. But Marianne Junker of "De Rode Draad," the Dutch prostitutes' association, says rates of sexually transmitted diseases are no higher among Dutch prostitutes than the population at large -- rates are highest, in fact, among ordinary teenagers. Health care is readily available for prostitutes. In the red-light district, there is a walk-in clinic that is free and anonymous. But prostitutes are never forced to havethe checkups, in keeping with the idea common to most Dutch social policies that mandatory requirements do more harm than good by driving people away. Besides, Junker says, prostitutes don't have to be forced to take care of themselves. "They're professional."
[Top]

Aggressive customers are also a risk, but not a great one. "It seldom gets out of hand," says Dirk Eeken. In the red-light district, "I think twice, three times a night we arrest a guy who is being a nuisance to a prostitute."

It's not hard to see why the women are relatively safe. In brothels, customers know they are seen coming and going and there is always somebody nearby to hear a cry for help. Brothels also have doormen, closed-circuit cameras, panic buttons and other security measures. "You have to be responsible for everyone who is in the club, even for your clients," says Andre van Durst, a brothel owner and spokesman for the owners' association. "If he hits a prostitute, it is very quickly the end of the line for the whole club."

The red-light district's "window" prostitution is also relatively safe. Each window is really a glass-fronted door that opens to allow customers into a tiny bedroom where the curtains are drawn and business conducted. Narrow corridors connect all the rooms and so the women are never more than a few feet away from co-workers and a busy sidewalk outside. Each room also has a panic button and each building has an office where managers keep watch on the streets with closed-circuit cameras. Mariska Majoor says she never felt at risk working in a window, something she credits most of all to being able to work with other women. "You work together. You're never alone. We don't hide at night."

Twelve Dutch cities and a few in Belgium and Germany have window prostitution. Zoning regulations restrict it to a few approved blocks.

Marieke van Doorninck says a major benefit of allowing prostitution indoors, first in women's homes, then in brothels, was its effect outside. "We never had extreme amounts of street prostitution," she says. Today, between five and 10 per cent of the Dutch sex trade is on the streets.

Even with legal off-street options, many prostitutes remain on the streets. Some just don't like rules or don't want to pay rent for a room. Others have mental problems and can't get themselves together enough to work indoors. And many, addicted to illegal drugs, are unwanted in brothels and can't afford to pay even the smallest rent for a room. These women have no choice but to work the streets and Holland, like other countries, has struggled to deal with them.

In the 1970s, as a wave of heroin addiction swept through most western nations, Holland found its streets filling with junkies and the johns and disorder that follow. It was an unfamiliar problem and the Dutch responded in an unusual way. The police cracked down.

The tactic was no more successful than it was in Canada. The sex trade simply moved from street to street. Neighbourhoods were disrupted. Angry residents protested. And the streetwalkers did their best to become invisible by scattering, working alone, hiding from social workers, and getting in cars quickly without sizing up customers. Robbery, assault and rape of prostitutes all increased, accord according to a report by the A. de Graaf Foundation.

Police departments demanded alternatives. In Utrecht, a small city outside Amsterdam, the vice squad urged the city council to create a tippelzone -- an official "zone of tolerance" -- where streetwalkers could work without fear of arrest. After much debate -- consensus is another Dutch value -- the council agreed.

Locating a site wasn't easy. It had to be away from residential neighborhoods. But it had to be close enough to the city centre that prostitutes and customers could get to it fairly easily. And it had to be be safe for prostitutes. In 1986, a decision was made and Holland's first tippelzone opened.

Just a few minutes drive from the medieval heart of Utrecht, the tippelzone is a curious thing. By day, it doesn't exist. Go looking for it and all you find is a sprawling commercial zone that could be in Kanata, Scarborough, Surrey or any other Canadian suburb. There are parking lots the size of football fields. Shoppers filling their mini-vans from shopping carts. A giant "big-box" hardware store identical in every way but name to Home Depot. It is the very picture of middle-class virtue -- until the sun goes down, the shoppers go home and another form of commerce takes over.

On a cold Saturday night, Peugeots, BMWs, Volvos and Mercedes crawl down a long, straight street bordering the empty parking lots. Now and then a car pulls out of line and a driver leans over, rolls his passenger window down and eagerly waves.

About 25 women stand on the sidewalk in little groups of three or four, chatting, smoking and shivering. The air is thick with North Sea humidity, making the cold bite. There are no thigh-high boots or mini- skirts, just sensible winter jackets and gloves.

Rita, a tall blonde woman in her late 30s, wears a heavy wool greatcoat. With her booming voice and boisterous laugh, she looks like an elementary school principal, or an office manager. But she's been working the streets for seven years, first in Amsterdam and now here. "I know everybody," she says. Tonight she's working with her friends, Tanja and Tina.

For streetwalkers, there is safety in numbers. "We keep an eye out for each other," says Rita. "If I get a look from a girl as she's getting into a car, maybe she looks a bit frightened or something, I will write down the car's licence number." The johns know they're being watched: The street is wide open and lit as brightly as a football stadium.

There is still danger but it's far less common than on illegal strolls. In 11 years working the zone, Tanja has been victimized just once, when a man forced a sex act she didn't agree to. "I feel very safe," she insists.

Tanja also did something about the one assault she suffered that many Canadian women in her position would never do: She complained to the police.

"I trust the police," says Tina. "We know every policeman by name. And they know us." Officers patrol the zone often and "they stop and say hello."

Utrecht's police still enforce the city's by-law forbidding street prostitution outside the zone, but there's so little of it that when they find a woman breaking the ban they'll simply give her a lift to the tippelzone.

While the police have a better relationship with the women, social workers, nurses and doctors are even closer. Literally: Parked across the street from Rita is a tractor trailer used as a mobile drop-in centre with a living room, shower, toilet, kitchen and examination room. Nylons, makeup, tampons and condoms are sold. Needles are exchanged. Nurses and social workers are always present, and a doctor attends twice a week. These people have earned the trust of the women, Tina says, "because they're here. They ask how you are doing. Is there anything you want to tell us? Can we help you with something? They don't look at you like, oh, it's just a hooker."

This approach provides more than health and safety to the streetwalkers. It also helps those who want out to get out. "When you look at an addicted prostitute, they're not prostitutes by interest or because a guy is sending them," says Dirk Eeken. "They're just prostitutes to make money. And the moment they have some money, they stop being a prostitute." Close contact with social workers helps connect prostitutes with Holland's extensive social welfare system and that's often enough to get them off the street. "Even addicted girls, most of them are convinced that it's the lowest kind of job you can have, so the moment they can stop with it, they stop." Eeken credits this system with a steady drop in the number of drug-addicted prostitutes over the past 15 years.

Unfortunately, addicted prostitutes also have close relationships with drug dealers. Junkies have to score, so they stick closely to dealers. Dutch officials had a serious dilemma: How do you get drugaddicted prostitutes to move to a tippelzone?

The answer can be seen at the far end of the street, slouched in the driver's seat of a parked car. This man is a dealer and everybody knows it. The three women with gaunt faces I watch buy drugs from him certainly know it. So do all the other women on the stroll. And the police know it, too. Though they won't say so officially, the police allow a few dealers to work the tippelzone on condition that they conduct business quietly and honestly.

Dutch pragmatism has also dealt with another thorny problem: Where do hookers and johns go to have sex? Apparently, few considered this when the tippelzone first opened. Cars parked in any dark spot within several kilometres, including residential areas, sparking more angry protests. The city responded.

Half a kilometre away, next to a canal and far from any residence or business, the city built 14 stalls with concrete dividing walls. Each is large enough for one parked car and it is here that johns and hookers conduct business. This being Holland, there is also one stall for bicycles.

It's not pretty. But the stalls have kept the sex trade from spilling into residential neighbourhoods and complaints "quickly dried up," according to a police report, and the tippelzone is now an accepted part of the city. The stalls are also far safer than parking in dark, isolated places where there may be no one around. "There's always someone you know next to you," says Tina. "And there's always police around."

Almost all major centres in Holland have a designated street-prostitution zone, but they all have different approaches. Unlike the Utrecht zone, some have uniformed police officers on-site constantly. The Amsterdam tippelzone even has a small police office and, as a result says Dirk Eeken, "customer violence is zero."

Unfortunately, other aspects of the Amsterdam zone make it a good example of what city councils should avoid. Built at great expense in 1996 on empty land far from the city, the zone was simply too hard to get to for the drug-addicted streetwalkers it was meant for. They remain on Amsterdam's inner-city streets, annoying residents and suffering abuse. Instead, the tippelzone became crowded with illegal migrants.

Until the late 1990s, most Dutch authorities let women who entered the country illegally work in the sex industry and they were usually found in off-street venues, including the windows of the red-light district. But Holland, like every other prosperous member of the European Union, has been flooded with women from Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. Traffickers trick some into prostitution. More leave their homelands expecting to work in the sex trade but find themselves brutally exploited by smugglers and pimps.

For these women, Holland's famous tolerance has been withdrawn. Police have driven them from legal off-street venues by checking passports. Now they work most often in socially isolated immigrant communities where the sex trade is controlled by organized crime. Or they work on the streets and tippelzones. Police sweeps net scores of women who are deported but are often back within months or even weeks. Activists are pressing for temporary work permits to be issued to foreign prostitutes, just as they do for farm workers and other foreigners whose labour is in demand, but the government has balked.

As a result, there are now two separate sex industries in Holland: one legal, the other illegal. The illegal sector is almost as large, perhaps larger, than the legal. And because it is a black market, the women are at just as much risk as prostitutes in countries that criminalize prostitution.

"On average each year, maybe two or three girls a year get killed in the wider city of Amsterdam in the prostitution business. And if you think about serious assaults or other violence, maybe 50 a year," says Eeken. But the victims overwhelmingly come from the illegal sex trade. "Maybe 90 per cent of them are working on the wrong side of the prostitution business. They're probably 75 per cent illegal immigrants."

The grim contrast between the legal and illegal sex industries may help explain why, more than three decades after prostitution was de facto legalized, Dutch popular opinion remains solidly in favour of the liberal approach. In October, 2000, Holland formally legalized prostitution. Polls showed three-quarters of the public supported the move.

Formal legalization remains controversial, mainly because complicated labour and tax issues haven't been worked out. But this is really just a debate about varieties of legalization. Critics like Toos Heemskerk, who would like to criminalize the sex trade much as Canada does, concede they're a tiny minority. Only two fringe Christian parties support criminalization. The Christian Democrats, the dominant right-wing party that won the last election, won't even consider it.

That's fine with Dirk Eeken. After 31 years as a police officer, he's convinced that legal prostitution empowers the police, keeps order in the community and protects women. Most of his fellow officers agree, he says. They're even pressing Dutch politicians to try bolder experiments with liberal vice laws, especially around drugs.

I tell him this is quite a contrast with North America, where the police tend to push in the other direction. "I know," he grins. "That's why I like living in Holland."

Dan Gardner*'s column appears Wednesdays and Fridays.
E-mail: dgardner@thecitizen.canwest.com

Back to Archives

Home

Copyright © 2005  Dan Gardner
Website Design & Management by:  GRA Web Site Design Ottawa