Belgian Experiment: Make Prostitution Legal to Fight Its Ills describes recent efforts to bring prostitution into the open, where the legal system can regulate it.
It also tells stories of modern-day slavery that sound just like the White Slavery stories of 100 years ago — which turned out to have little basis in fact:
Germany, the Netherlands and Greece have legalized or expanded regulation of prostitution in the past six years, and others are considering similar moves. By forcing the business out into the open, the governments hope to make it harder for human traffickers to thrive. Nearly 800,000 people are trafficked across borders world-wide each year, according to the U.S. State Department. The victims, promised passage to and work in the West, are typically forced, defrauded or coerced into sexual exploitation, in a modern-day form of slavery. Some Eastern European countries that joined the European Union last year have become major transit points for trafficked women.
Antwerp opened a three-block Tolerance Zone — and, naturally, all the ills of illegal prostitution continue, just outside that zone:
Antwerp, a port city of 500,000, offers a case study in the benefits — and limits — of legalization. Local police say the tight controls in the tolerance zone have helped reduce prostitution-related crime — including drug trafficking, assault, rape, murder and vandalism — by 44% overall since 2001. Legalization also has brought in nearly $800,000 in tax revenue to the city.But even here, human trafficking endures just outside the zone. Police say illegal prostitutes still outnumber legal ones and about a quarter of the total are the victims of human trafficking or work for pimps. In Germany, aid groups say there are three times as many illegal prostitutes as legally registered ones. In the Netherlands, only 5% to 10% of the nearly 20,000 prostitutes pay taxes, according to the Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam.