The problem away from Trafficking
Trafficking arrived into the governmental schedule immediately after stress out of feminists and you will the newest national ladies rules agencies. In the first place, women was in fact trafficked away from Southeast China (somewhat Thailand together with Philippines), Latin The united states (Columbia in addition to Dominican Republic and you will Africa (Ghana); after the fall of one’s Berlin Wall, exchange paths managed to move on to Main and you may East European countries. Governmental needs have been identifying the latest offence a great deal more broadly in order to facilitate prosecution and you may raising the punishment away from 5 to 6 decades, with the intention that offenders was stored for the remand child custody. The brand new content in the penal code to your human trafficking was revised inside 1993, which have a exact concept of the brand new offence and higher punishment having traffickers (Outshoorn 2004a: 195). Brand new content have been presented within the a gender-natural method, and you may trafficking remained recognized as forcing a man for the prostitution.
In the how to get a prostitute in Tyrol parliamentary debates on trafficking around that period, foreign women were portrayed as victims of unscrupulous traffickers tricked into prostitution. This framing was tied into a discourse about the divide between the rich and poor countries: female prostitutes from the ‘Third World’ were driven by poverty. Gradually, a more insidious edge crept into this discourse when Christian Democrats in parliament linked trafficking to illegal migration, opening a space for ‘false’ victims, who used the loopholes in the law to work illegally as a prostitute in the Netherlands (HTK, 1991–1992, TK 81, pp. 4994, 4995, e time they also started to argue that all women from non-EU countries working in the sex industry were victims of forced prostitution. Therefore in their view, the best remedy to stop trafficking was to prevent non-EU women from working in the Dutch sex industry in the first place. This reasoning eradicated the figure of a woman migrant deciding to work as a sex worker in the West and who might make use of intermediaries to enter the country-with her consent. But then she was ‘illegal’ and ought to be deported.
Successive cabinets continued to refuse work permits on similar grounds, also arguing there was no national interest at stake which normally justifies extending work permits to non-EU persons. They were backed by a recurring majority in parliament; the parliamentary records show many references to the fear of foreign prostitutes entering the country which would subvert immigration policies. The fear resurfaced in the memorandum to the bill to lift the brothel ban, as one of the aims of the bill was to halt ‘the stream of foreign prostitutes’ (HTK 1996–97, 25437 (Opheffing Algemeen Bordeelverbod), no. 3 (Memorie van Toelichting), 1 July 1997, p. 13). The refusal to grant work permits was also generally justified by the aim of stopping the trafficking of women; permits would encourage traffickers to transport women into the country.
Categories of Sex Pros
Next implementation of new work contributed to the development out of no lower than five categories of prostitutes. To begin with, there is the ethnically undefined Dutch sex worker whom voluntarily determines to the office in the prostitution in fact it is the latest bearer regarding municipal and you may societal rights. Subsequently, there are the fresh prostitutes off their Eu countries who will circulate easily in-and-out of your own Netherlands and you will are employed in the brand new sex community. This category split up into one or two groups after the accession toward European union of one’s Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, this new Czech Republic and you can Slovakia from inside the 2004, while making a 3rd category who is only able to legally work as prostitutes whenever they had been separate sex specialists rather than group. Inside 2007, sex professionals regarding the brand new Eu players was in fact approved to the a keen equal ground on the older Eu associate gurus, although 3rd classification is actually today full of sex gurus regarding Bulgaria and you will Romania when one another countries joined the brand new Eu in this same seasons. Just like their predecessors, this type of women are permitted to behave as independent sex experts, however, to date not as group.