How would you describe the current situation regarding prostitution in Europe? What are the main problems and trends?

“Prostitution is a large, unwieldy, hard to pin down phenomenon. It is diverse for several reasons. First of all there are different kinds of prostitution. There is window prostitution, like in The Netherlands and Belgium. There are clubs, like in most countries, and street prostitution and escorts. These four types are very differently distributed. For example, Vienna has lots of clubs and street prostitution, but no windows. Brussels on the other hand, mainly has windows and clubs. In Stockholm prostitution mostly takes place in striptease bars. It can even differ within countries. While Glasgow has mostly street prostitution, Edinburgh has almost exclusively clubs.
Secondly, we always tend to think of prostitution as a kind of autonomous phenomenon, but that is not what it is. It is very much influenced by its environment. A very strong element in that environment is the attitude of the state and the policies that the state has towards prostitution. Those policies usually boil down into four types. I tend to call them policy regimes, because they are kind of stable configurations of beliefs, understandings, policy instruments, knowledge and networks of actors."

Wagenaar defines four policy regimes: criminalisation, criminalisation of demand, regulated tolerance and legalisation. In the criminalisation policy regime, the prostitute is a criminal and can be arrested. This regime is dominant in the United States for example. With criminalization of demand, the client is the criminal and the prostitute is the victim. This approach can be observed in Sweden. In the third regime – regulated tolerance - prostitution is still illegal, but tolerated. This approach used to be taken in The Netherlands. According to Wagenaar it might not be such a bad way to deal with the issue, because criminalisation and punishment often create more negative effects than the actual problem. The fourth regime is legalisation, which is the dominant regime in The Netherlands today.

Because of these various policy regimes, the prostitution sector looks very different, depending on which country or even which city you are in. Wagenaar illustrates the different ways European cities deal with prostitution. “In Stockholm, where they apply the ‘criminalisation of demand’ approach, prostitution is driven underground. You hardly see any prostitution on the streets, but it does exist.” In Vienna, prostitution has an ambiguous legal status, but is in practice tolerated more or less everywhere. “There is a lot of street prostitution and there are a lot of clubs, and they are not very well regulated”, Wagenaar says. In The Netherlands, all types of prostitution exist, and except for the escort services, everything is regulated. In Eastern European cities however, women often have no rights at all and the police is corrupt. “Prostitutes hardly make any money and are at the mercy of pimps and police. This is a strong incentive for them to come to Western Europe.”

“I am not sure whether prostitution has become more mobile, because prostitution has traditionally been a migration business. It is one of the sectors, like agriculture, the low-end of the hotel industry and the craft metal working sector, where you find a lot of migrants and illegal immigrants. In The Netherlands in the 19th century, most migration was from the Northern and Eastern parts of Holland into the big cities. Then, in the 20s and 30s you had the famous ‘German maids’, of which some worked as prostitutes as well. In the 60s & 70s women from South East Asia and Latin America came to work in prostitution. Now you still have women coming from those countries, but most now come from Africa and Eastern Europe. Prostitution traditionally is a business with many foreign workers. In Vienna for example, 90 percent of prostitutes are migrants from Eastern Europe, Russia or Africa. In my opinion, the migrant character of the prostitution business is insufficiently acknowledged and dealt with in policy making”

How do you think developments like the internet change prostitution?

“It changes the market structure. Many women now choose to work at home with a website. Cities struggle with this because they do not know whether to give these women licenses or not. The city of The Hague for example is debating whether this type of prostitution can be considered as home working or whether it is something else. The internet also makes escort services much easier. But that’s about it I think.”

In one of your publications, you state that the regulated tolerance approach has focused more on public order than the rights of actors. At the same time, the EU seems to mainly focus on human trafficking and the rights of women. Are these policy choice complementary or contradictory you think?

“They are contradictory. For example The Netherlands followed the regulated tolerance approach until the year 2000. During this time most of the goals of policy were public order goals, like keeping down nuisance and the negative influences on public space. You can wonder how successful this was. For example in The Hague, at the beginning of the 1990s, police officers had the feeling they had to regain access to certain neighbourhoods where prostitution was taking place. The same goes for Arnhem and Amsterdam. It was very difficult for policy makers to do something about the rights of the women, because they did not have access to the brothels. That changed when prostitution became legal and most brothels were licensed. But still it turned out to be very difficult to guarantee prostitutes the kind of labour rights that you and I have. Unannounced visits to licensed sex facilities by field workers of the Rode Draad (the Read Thread; an organisation founded in 1985 by (ex)sexworkers, with the aim of fighting the rights of all sexworkers in The Netherlands, ed.) has shown that a lot of, what I call “small exploitation” is still going on. You have to think of taking in the women’s earnings, forcing women to work without condom, refusing them the right to reject clients, or an unhygienic work environment. In some of the unlicensed clubs women were more or less held in captivity ’”

In how far do you think EU policy contributes positively?

“It does not. No, with the exception of measures against trafficking, prostitution policy is very much local policy. The EU has very little impact on this. Also, most countries jealously guard their allegedly proven approach to prostitution. In The Netherlands we are now talking about creating a national law to have some sort of coherence and consistency in all of these different local policies. When it comes to labour rights for example, you regulate the relationship between the employer and the employee. But in prostitution the very notion of ‘employer’ is still an issue. Sex bosses don’t want to be called employers. They want to be seen as hotel owners that rent out rooms, with self employed women renting them. That is not how the tax office sees it though, because these women are not self employed in terms of the law.”

Prostitution policy around Europe is very diverse. Nowadays we see that for example Amsterdam is trying to clean up its prostitution areas, while Antwerp has recently created a downtown, very upscale prostitution area, which is also promoted to tourists.

“Yes, that really shows how diverse it is. But the situation in Amsterdam is a bit complicated. First of all, it became clear that the legalisation law was not succeeding. Policy makers began to have the feeling that a lot of crime was interrelated with prostitution, such as drug trade, trafficking, pimping and money laundering into real estate. But so far we did not have the policy instruments to deal with that, except for the licensing. At some point, through coupling different databases we could effectuate the so-called ‘Bibob’ law. (Bibob is an acronym for Promotion of Integrity Assessments by Public Administrators (Wet Bevordering Integriteit Beoordelingen door het Openbaar Bestuur, ed.). Now this instrument is used to deny brothel owners who are demonstrated or suspected of having criminal ties a renewal of their license. The owner of the real estate which has a brothel in it or windows therefore sees the value of his real estate drop. Then the city steps in and buys the real estate. This method also has to do with an awareness that a lot of real estate is in shady hands.”

Wagenaar also believes that the political climate has become more hostile towards prostitution. People like Karina Schaapman – a former prostitute who was a member of the Amsterdam City Council played a role in this. “Schaapman has turned into a very vigilant anti-prostitution voice. This is an important factor because prostitution policy is shaped by images as I said earlier. For example, the Dutch policy of legalisation is based on the idealized image of the strong, autonomous and emancipated woman who self-consciously decides she wants to be a prostitute. Schaapman’s image of the prostitute is that of the female slave who is forced into prostitution by sex-addicted, aggressive males. Of course the latter happens, but for a lot of prostitutes, this is not the case at all.”

In one of your publications you say that prostitution is policy resistant. What kind of approach do you think is required then?

“I do not have one clear answer, but I can tell something about what went wrong with the legalisation in The Netherlands and what could be better in my opinion. Most of the things that went wrong have to do with implementation. Administrators in cities did not really want to deal with it. So one thing that happened in The Netherlands was that almost all municipalities created a so-called maximum policy saying: this is the number of sex businesses that we have in our city and this is also the maximum. Whenever one of the sex businesses disappeared, there would not be a new one filling the gap. Because of that, the number of sex businesses has decreased quite considerably since the year 2000, when the legalisation law was adopted.”

According to Wagenaar, the fact that the sex business market was frozen at how it was in October 2000, when the law was adopted, is problematic. “When you freeze the market, you basically create an oligopoly of the old sex bosses. And those guys are not willing to change anything. They say they do, but they do something else. So there is no room for innovation. I had an interview for example with a former prostitute who was running a small sex club in Rotterdam, who really wanted to do everything the way the law prescribed. But she did not make it, because the administrators of the city council made sure she was driven out of business.”

This lack of innovation is a big problem, in Wagenaar’s opinion. However, some enlightened administrators have come to realize that innovation is needed, he says. “They came to realise that maybe it is better to deny some old sex bosses their license, and give them to more innovative people.”

Another issue is that (local) governments do not have much control over migration waves. “If tomorrow, for whatever reason, women in let’s say Georgia, decide to come to Western Europe to work in prostitution, you have almost no control over that. You can try to close the borders, but they will get in anyway. So, what do you do to regulate prostitution?”

Wagenaar is still mildly positive about the way things were done in The Netherlands, because it did bring some good things in his opinion. “First of all, a Dutch woman does not have to work in prostitution with a pimp anymore. They have become more independent. In addition, there is now a framework of administrators and police officers who are knowledgeable about prostitution and who are not corrupt at all. Prostitution has become a kind of normal policy field, just like other policy issues.”

“Yes, it is, but there are other unpopular policy fields as well. But at least it is out of the shadows in policy terms. In general I think there is a kind of ethical understanding in The Netherlands that prostitutes are people like you and me, and you have to treat them as such. That is, we have to take the slogan of prostitution as sex work seriously and grant prostitutes the labour rights that we all have. That is very different if you compare it to countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey, or even the United States.”

The next step, according to Wagenaar, is to bring more innovation into the policy field. “In Amsterdam we are working on a facility for socially responsible prostitution. It is a kind of foundation that rents out rooms and is run by a board with ex-prostitutes on it, but also people who are knowledgeable about the hotel industry and real estate. An important element of the model is the intake to ensure that the women who apply are not forced by traffickers or pimps. That kind of innovation might be important.”

“Well, this project still has to be tried out. We are still finalising the design of it, and it is not even completely sure that it will happen. It is now being debated in Amsterdam.”

Could you mention some good practices in Europe?

“There are not that many good practices, because in most countries prostitution is a rather secret affair. It is kind of tolerated, and then left to itself. Like in Sweden, there is strong enforcement of the criminalisation of clients, but some Swedish cities do not stick to this kind of enforcement. For example, the city of Malmö hardly arrests clients because they do not think it is useful. In my opinion, the criminalisation of demand just drives prostitution underground. Or people simply cross the bridge to Copenhagen.

I do not know what best practices would be. I think a ‘not-so-bad practice’ was the creation of so-called ‘tippelzones’ for street prostitution in The Netherlands. What I liked about them were the low threshold services that were available to the women. You can do that anywhere with street prostitution.”

You do not think there are really good practice in the field of prostitution. What do you think is needed in this policy area?

“Strange as it may sound, there is no such thing as an international comparative study of policy effects on prostitution. Every country claims its effects, but they have never been studied. We do not know the real effects in The Netherlands, though I have tried to write that down now. But we certainly do not know the effects of the Swedish approach, or the criminalisation approach. Therefore we are really in need of such a comparative study. Luckily that is now also being acknowledged by administrators.

Sadly the European Union does not pick up this topic in its studies, because the EU is in the grip of Swedish activism. Prostitution policy is also plagued by bad numbers. There are lots of bad numbers based on wild estimates. They say there are millions of victims of trafficking in Europe, but no one has ever counted them. The whole prostitution debate is driven by emotional numbers, as I tend to call them. We counted the number of illegal prostitutes in Rotterdam, and numbers really were not that high. Each one is one too many, do not get me wrong, but the numbers are not that dramatic. We have about 400 cases of trafficking per year in The Netherlands. A lot of people say that this is just the tip of the iceberg, but no one has ever shown the iceberg, or proven that it exists. I have heard things like ‘more money is made in trafficking worldwide, than in the drug trade and arms trade combined.’ That is complete baloney. Really. You don’t make that much money in trafficking. But it is that kind of stupidity that drives the discourse.

Every country has its own policy and doesn’t want to let go of it, because the whole issue is so morally charged. And then some countries feel they have the key of success in their hands and they go on crusades. When you talk to Swedish experts, they see The Netherlands as totally crazy. There is no dialogue at all. Therefore I think the best thing to do is to do some real good objective research of effects, so you can show people ‘this is what happens when you do this.”