Last year Amsterdam City Council, led by Green Mayor Femke Halsema, made a radical proposal to relocate the city’s famous Red Light District from the downtown area to an Erotic Centre on the outskirts of the city. The move is part of a wider plan – including limits on stag parties, pub crawls, and public cannabis use – aimed at curbing disruptive tourism. But some workers from the district’s signature window fronts are not happy about the proposed changes.

Angel Fox of the Prostitution Information Centre in Amsterdam is one of them. She thinks dealing with tourists and crime is an issue for law enforcement, citing cuts to policing in recent years. “There used to be 50 officers policing the area, now there are 4 or 5.” Besides, she says, the increase in tourists coming to the Red Light District is itself the result of a tourism campaign by the city of Amsterdam. Suddenly sex workers are seen as a problem. “But,” she says, “the sex workers aren’t the problem, the drunken tourists are.”

Fox believes there is something else behind the proposals: gentrification. Developers have already started to buy up buildings in the area. Asked whether she thinks the Erotic Centre is a good idea for the workers, Fox says that it could have advantages for some workers – for example those who don’t attract the largely male, heterosexual clientele that frequents the windows. Queer sex workers, men and independent workers could benefit from being able to rent spaces in the centre. But it should be seen as a complement to, not a replacement of, the Red Light District.

For one thing, the centre will mean a longer journey for most workers. It is only proposed to house 100 workers. At the moment, there are 352 windows in the Red Light District. This would result in employment losses because sex workers are not permitted to work from home in the Netherlands.

A European debate

The controversy over the proposed changes in Amsterdam is part of a wider debate across the continent. Europe has been grappling with how to approach the issue, and some member states are headed in opposite directions. In 2022, Belgium became the first country outside of New Zealand to decriminalise sex work. The European Parliament is currently debating a report on how to regulate sex work, and is due to vote on it over the next few months. However, parliamentarians are fundamentally divided over whether to endorse the “Nordic Model” – based on Sweden’s landmark 1999 Sex Purchase Act, which criminalises the buying of sex – or the New Zealand model. The report’s author, German Social Democrat Maria Noichl, is firmly in favour of the Nordic model. But there is little consensus within Europe’s political parties, let alone between them – including Green Parties.

The Noichl report marks the first time the European Parliament will discuss sex work since 2014, when the same committee, then under former British Labour MEP Mary Honeyball, tabled a report on sexual exploitation and prostitution and its impact on gender equality.

According to a 2021 article by Lucrecia Rubio Grundell of Madrid’s Universidad Autónoma, the European Parliament is witnessing a neo-abolitionist turn, part of a wider global turn towards the criminalisation of prostitution in the 21st century. Prior to that, the EP had an “ambivalent” attitude towards prostitution. Rubio believes the abolitionist approach has gained support because leading anti-prostitution feminists inside the EU have been successful in linking the issue to violence against women and girls, defining prostitution as a barrier to gender equality.

The sex workers aren’t the problem, the drunken tourists are.

Rubio traces this shift back to Sweden’s accession to the EU in 1995 and the success of Swedish femocrats, such as former Left Party MEP Marianne Eriksson, and their feminist allies within the EU in embedding the neo-abolitionist position within the Women’s Rights Committee. By the second decade of the 21st century, the Nordic model had been adopted as the majority position within the Committee, as evidenced by the Honeyball and Noichl reports.

Defenders of the Nordic model emphasise that it criminalises the clients and not sex workers. Critics counter that criminalising clients makes sex workers more vulnerable by attacking their source of income, forcing them to engage in riskier activities and/or pushing them into the underground illicit market. According to Austrian Green MEP Monika Vana, “There has been a split on this issue for many years. At a certain point the European Green Party decided proactively not to take a position because we are so split,” Vana said. This is not because European Greens are not interested in the issue, she added. “Many members are very engaged on the topic, which has been on the table for 20 years. But it is such a difficult topic within the member parties that the EGP abstained from taking a formal position. A major concern is that taking a single position would cause a split among Green feminists,” Vana said.

Vana insists it is not only Greens who are split on sex work. All parties in the European Parliament have significant minority positions. But while the issue causes internal divisions, it also brings politicians together across party lines. When Vana was spokesperson on women’s issues for the Vienna Greens between 2001 and 2010, the Viennese Greens worked with the Social Democrats to block the Nordic model from being introduced in the city (in Austria sex work is regulated by region).

A turn towards decriminalisation?

One party that has taken a firm position is the Polish Greens. “It has been a long road because we’ve been thinking about it for some time now as a group of women within the Polish Greens,” said Aleksandra Kołeczek. The opportunity to develop a specific policy position on sex work came about as the party was developing its platform for Poland’s forthcoming elections in autmn 2023. Sex work was one of the areas that the working group looking at issues around women and equality identified as missing. “At the beginning when the party was created, and through the years since, [sex work] was considered too controversial, but I think more and more information has come up since then. Also, because sex workers are sticking up and we have more knowledge about what sex work really is and what the reality in Poland right now is,” she said.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, sex workers were particularly badly affected in Poland. The main website where sex workers would advertise was shut down. The public raised funds to support, and non-profit Sex Work Poland, which was also a voice in the campaign for abortion rights in the country, campaigned to raise awareness about the issue. There was even a very popular podcast run by sex workers that enabled them to get their message and perspective out.

“We were approaching this as an issue that we have to explore further to put it in our program, to formulate an opinion,” Kołeczek said. The group worked with an expert who could answer those questions and give the group resources to help them develop their position. When it was put to the board of the party, the policy statement was adopted without significant opposition. Kołeczek said this was because the statement itself was relatively moderate and was designed to be as reasonable as possible.

The Polish Greens are now the only party in the country who expressly support the decriminalisation of sex work. “I think it’s a question of the choice that you have,” said Kołeczek. “We believe that it’s your body, your choice. So, if we believe that you can decide about your body when it comes to abortion, it’s only logical that we would extend that to allowing people to work as they want to, if they choose this line of work, voluntarily,” she said.

“I’m personally quite proud of our Green Party,” Kołeczek said, “it means that the issues are understood that safety comes first; prevention, violence prevention and discrimination prevention comes first.”

The French Greens have taken a similar stance. In 2014, the party passed a motion reaffirming its opposition to any form of direct or indirect repression of prostitutes, including the penalisation of clients. According to Charlotte Minvielle, co-chair of the party’s feminist committee, although the French government outlawed the purchase of sexual services in 2016, the Greens remain committed to decriminalisation. “On this issue of sex workers,” she says, “the agreed line is that we shouldn’t be criminalising. Within that, there are some who are in favour of full legalisation, and others who want to focus more on the problem of trafficking. But there’s broad agreement on the party position.”

On the other side of the issue is the Danish Green Left, which supports the Nordic model adopted by its Scandinavian neighbours. Danish MP Rasmus Nordqvist says his party recognises the need to listen to sex workers, and not to impose policies that will affect them without consultation. But he stresses that the status quo does not work. Clients have an unrealistic image of sex workers’ realities, he says, and they tend to glamourise prostitution. Sex work is currently legalised in Denmark, and there is little political debate on the issue these days. But, Nordqvist says, the Danish Greens support the criminalisation of clients because “if we want to do something about trafficking and other problems facing sex workers, we need to do something.”

Vana also sees trafficking as a serious problem that needs to be tackled at European level. But she insists that trafficking and sex work are not the same thing. In contrast, the Women’s Committee report emphasises the strong relationship between human trafficking and prostitution. It also claims that “[sexual] consent can only be given freely when there is no power imbalance between the people involved,” implying that prostitution is a de facto form of violence against women. Vana disagrees. But opposing the Nordic model does not mean ignoring the problems facing sex workers. “Even if we don’t like prostitution in the sense that it’s not a phenomenon that we want, it’s a phenomenon that we have to recognise. We have to shelter those that are in it, the weakest. Our position is to grant shelter, including working rights, including social security, to decriminalise at least the sex workers.”

Clients have an unrealistic image of sex workers’ realities, and they tend to glamourise prostitution.

But she insists that she does not want to focus only on divisions among feminists: “I want to say something positive about the debate in the EU parliament: we have many positions in common with the other progressive feminists in the party. For example, being very strong against trafficking of human beings. And against exploitation. For the rights of women, against stigmatisation and marginalisation.”

For Vana, the report could be an opportunity for member states to work together. “We should also be talking about what should or can be done at EU level. We could use EU structural funds to help sex workers find pathways out of sex work and counter poverty. We need to give more legal shelter to those who speak out against traffickers, and not to indirectly criminalise them from the beginning.” But she’s not optimistic: “At the moment, to be honest, it doesn’t look like a we can reach a compromise.”

Sex work as work

Back in Amsterdam, there are signs the Red Light District’s days may be numbered. The Netherlands was one of the earliest European countries to legalise prostitution back in 2000. But today Fox is worried that the local government will close the windows and that the proposed Erotic Centre will not materialise. She cites similar situations in other Dutch cities, including Rotterdam and Arnhem, where red light districts have been closed down over the past two decades. She says that sex workers generally lack support among the major national parties in the Netherlands, but that at the regional level the GreenLeft does a better job.   

Mayor Halsema recently visited Fox and her colleagues at the PIC. But Fox says that while she claims to listen to the concerns of sex workers, the mayor’s plans to shut the Red Light District continue. And while she says she is looking out for the sex workers, Fox is sceptical: “She is always talking about ‘vulnerable foreign women’. They are not vulnerable. They can stand up for themselves.”

Fox’s observation that Greens offer an alternative to criminalisation reflects European Greens’ commitment to promoting social and economic justice and public health as solutions to controversial social issues, including sex work. Rubio notes that while the Swedish femocrats were defending the criminalisation of clients at EU level in the 1990s, Green MEPs such as Nel van Dijk (Netherlands) and Patsy Sörensen (Belgium) were defending the labour rights of sex workers. More recently, as demonstrated by the positions adopted by the Polish and French Greens, as well as Vana’s work as shadow rapporteur on the Women’s Committee, European Greens have positioned themselves as important voices on the issue of prostitution, recognising the need for coordinated efforts to combat trafficking while highlighting the risks of criminalisation and recognising sex work as work. This is the position advocated by the PIC, which is working with European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance, Red Umbrella Fund and other sex workers organisations to oppose further criminalisation of sex work at the EU level.

While the European Green Party has so far refrained from taking a position on the issue, that decision may well change in the coming years given that older and newer member parties in both Western and Eastern Europe have recently taken stronger positions in favour of decriminalisation.

This would be welcome news for sex workers’ rights advocates. Asked what she would say to the MEPs discussing the Women’s Committee report this month, Fox is unequivocal: “Decriminalise sex work all over Europe. That is the best solution for sex workers. We pay our taxes and we need the same rights as any other working person.”