The situation off Trafficking
Trafficking turned up towards the governmental plan once stress off feminists and you may brand new federal women’s rules company. To start with, female was indeed trafficked of The southern area of China (significantly Thailand and Philippines), Latin The usa (Columbia and also the escorts Geneva State Dominican Republic and you can Africa (Ghana); after the slip of your Berlin Wall structure, change paths managed to move on so you’re able to Central and you can Eastern European countries. Political means was basically defining the fresh new offense alot more broadly in order to support prosecution and increasing the penalty regarding five to six ages, so that culprits might possibly be kept from inside the remand custody. The fresh new articles from the penal password on the peoples trafficking was in fact revised inside 1993, that have a very precise concept of the offence and higher punishment having traffickers (Outshoorn 2004a: 195). The fresh new stuff was framed in a beneficial gender-natural ways, and trafficking stayed defined as pressuring one toward prostitution.
In the 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.
Kinds of Sex Pros
Subsequent implementation of this new act led to the building of no less than four categories of prostitutes. First and foremost, you’ve got the ethnically undefined Dutch sex worker exactly who willingly chooses to focus in the prostitution that will be the new holder away from municipal and you may personal liberties. Subsequently, you’ll find the brand new prostitutes from other European union countries that will flow freely in and out of the Netherlands and you may are employed in brand new sex business. These kinds divided in to a few classes pursuing the accession towards Eu of one’s Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, the new Czech Republic and Slovakia in 2004, making a 3rd class just who can simply legitimately behave as prostitutes whenever they was in fact separate sex professionals and never teams. In 2007, sex specialists regarding the fresh European union players was basically accepted for the an enthusiastic equivalent ground to the older European union affiliate experts, nevertheless 3rd class are now filled with sex professionals off Bulgaria and you may Romania whenever both regions entered the fresh new Eu where same year. Like their predecessors, such women are allowed to work as independent sex pros, however, yet notably less employees.
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