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Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

> Not once I heard of a local Dutch girl doing this.

How is this relevant? I mean in what manner would nationality change your opinion on this topic?

I read them to mean that the fact that no Dutch girl is doing it is indicative of exploitation. Dutch people generally have lots of opportunities that many other nationalities don't.

It's impossible to look at someone and tell with certainty that they are being exploited, but it's easy to look at a group of people and notice if any of them are from the local privileged peoples, and if most of them are from poorer regions.

> it is indicative of exploitation

In rich countries a lot of low paying jobs are performed by foreigners coming from poorer countries. I'm sure almost nobody enjoys any of those jobs but they do them because they need the money and have little choice.

And by the nature of these low paying jobs they only attract people with no other options, foreigners dreaming about a better life, completely unaware of the risks. This opens the door to abuse. I'm certain that plenty of locals (whatever country we're talking about) would do this job if it payed really well.

You will find dutch girls in private clubs and escort services

It's not true. Plenty of Dutch girls behind those windows. I live in Amsterdam almost my entire life

Places with legal sex work have higher rates of human trafficking

> Criminalization of prostitution in Sweden resulted in the shrinking of the prostitution market and the decline of human trafficking inflows. Cross-country comparisons of Sweden with Denmark (where prostitution is decriminalized) and Germany (expanded legalization of prostitution) are consistent with the quantitative analysis, showing that trafficking inflows decreased with criminalization and increased with legalization.

https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/lids/2014/06/12/does-legalized-...

Human trafficking exists in many industries where employing local labour is the exception; it could be that the tolerance of sex work and its unlikelihood of hiring locally sourced labour makes it attractive to human trafficking.

> Places with legal sex work have higher rates of human trafficking

Places with legal sex work have higher reported rates of human trafficking. This is not a surprise; one of the biggest arguments consistently made in favor of decriminalizing sex work is that it will make it easier to catch human trafficking, and make it easier for trafficking victims to come forward without the risk of being charged for a crime.'

Even the article you quote, if you take the time to read it all the way, doesn't draw the conclusion that the higher reported rates of human trafficking mean that sex work should be criminalized.

I believe the implication is that many of the women employed were coerced or trafficked; it not being an industry that employs locals makes that a reasonable suspicion.

It's not just a concern for sex work; manufacturing, seasonal trades and agriculture attract human trafficking, for instance.

The implications of human trafficking - it seems more likely that the industry is partaking in human trafficking if they need to source the women from out of state, since they can't find enough local women willing to engage in it.

Most of the time they are exploiting Eastern Europeans from poor countries. Many times they are trafficked by mafia types and have their passports/documents taken away.

Definitely not most of the time. In Amsterdam, window prostitutes need to be registered with the municipality, chamber of commerce, tax authorities, and with the window operator they operate at. Minimum age is 21. This operator needs a license, which requires a municipality approved plan of operation.

National police authorities do extensive research concerning prostitution because it touches key issues of organised crime, in particular illegal prostitution, human trafficking, violence, money laundering etc. The amount of problems they find with window prostitution are relatively small, because they're licensed and under supervision of various authorities. The amount of human trafficking, taking away of passports etc you describe, doesn't happen much at all in the red light district.

It does happen, but not in window prostitution (which has fixed, licensed addresses, which are supervised). Rather it happens in the shadow, i.e. various somewhat secret and temporary networks which offer prostitution services at constantly changing addresses, with front men running the operations. Almost all cases where police finds out about human trafficking, violence, money laundering, underage prostitution etc, is from this underground sector.

I'm not saying the red light district is paradise or that I'd want me or my friends to work there. But it's not really where most of the problems are. When people speak about issues in the Netherlands with respect to prostitution, it's either NIMBYism in the red light district, or the issues with illegal underground prostitution outside of the red light district. People seem to conflate the two in this thread.

You’re correct. I did some searching and most of the articles were about Dutch teens being trafficked to other places in Europe as opposed to the opposite happening.

The places that keep getting caught with actual human trafficking are hotels, usually not cheap ones, in central locations (so they can cater to "visiting" businesspeople) and they tend to not even change (meaning they catch someone imprisoning and prostituting an underage girl in Hotel X, and then 3 months later they catch another one in exactly the same spot). To me this implies that there's significant police cooperation with the abuse, otherwise why wouldn't they just go by every evening until it stops? And of course, it's the same people in the same space, so definitely the Hotel owners know and cooperate.

So in a way this supports the idea of the red light district: make it legal in a well-defined, licensed space to protect the workers. Because you can't eliminate it and the ways they get exploited in the shadows are pretty bad.

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