Even in Amsterdam, laws on prostitution are changing.
Dutch parliament is currently preparing to debate the legality of prostitution in the Netherlands. With the industry facing opposition from both the Christian right and feminist left, sex workers in the Red Light District are under pressure to protect their right to work.
One of the sex workers interviewed is a PhD student in sociology who claims that almost all prostitutes benefit when the profession is legal and carefully monitored, and that those who oppose legalization do not know what they are talking about.
Here is a very different perspective from the same newspaper, from a former prostitute who opposes legalization.
For most of her life in prostitution in New Zealand, Sabrinna Valisce campaigned for decriminalisation of the sex trade. But when it actually happened she changed her mind and now argues that men who use prostitutes should be prosecuted.Valisce began to meet women online, feminists who were against decriminalisation and described themselves as abolitionists - the abolitionist model, also currently being considered by the UK's Home Affairs Select Committee, criminalises the pimps and punters [customers] while decriminalising the prostituted person.
This is the "Nordic model" discussed and criticized in the first article, in which prostitutes are not punished but clients and pimps are punished.
In discussions about reforming the legal status of sex work, these are the two models that reformists champion: outright legalization versus the Nordic model (of punishing pimps and customers but not sex workers).
A hybrid model
Perhaps both legalization and the Nordic model could be fused.
First of all, sex work would fall under the auspices of the US federal government as a monopoly. Some states of the USA maintain a monopoly on the distribution of liquor, and this might be analogous.
Alcoholic beverage control states, generally called control states, are 17 states in the United States that, as of 2016, have state monopoly over the wholesaling or retailing of some or all categories of alcoholic beverages, such as beer, wine, and distilled spirits.
This would not be a federal agency that controlled sex work, instead it would be a corporation under the auspices of the government, much like the US Postal Service since 1970.
The Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 was a law passed by the United States Congress that abolished the then United States Post Office Department, which was a part of the cabinet, and created the United States Postal Service, a corporation-like independent agency with an official monopoly on the delivery of mail in the United States.
More specifically, it would be like the Mondragon Corporation in Spain.
The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. It is the tenth-largest Spanish company in terms of asset turnoverand the leading business group in the Basque Country. At the end of 2014, it employed 74,117 people in 257 companies and organizations in four areas of activity: finance, industry, retail and knowledge.
Sex workers who work outside the monopoly would be subject to the Nordic model, in which bosses and customers could get arrested.
(A little mentioned issue is that polls show that it is women who most oppose the legalization of sex work, not on moral or religious grounds or out of a concern for the welfare of women, but because they do not want their husbands and boyfriends spending money on other women. Law is based on public opinion, and in the case of the prohibition on sex work in the USA, the bulk of public opinion might have less to do with religion, morality and ideology and have more to do with material self-interest and jealousy.)
