Screening process for Amsterdam prostitutes

In an attempt to reduce the number of women forced into prostitution, unexperienced working girls in Amsterdam’s red light district are to be interviewed and must answer a bunch of questions about why they want to get into the ‘oldest profession in the world’. Bordello owners will have to inquire about identity, age and nationality of the girl, her family, any criminal record, education and language skills. The first three you can get from a passport, unless it’s fake. It sounds like questions immigration usually asks even though they have 20 copies of the info already.

The girls will also have to divulge how they get to work (bicycle vs. some big guy in a BMW who tells me to shut up all the time?) and demonstrate ‘some knowledge’ of the Dutch language and of Amsterdam. Speaking Dutch, fine, but I bet they do have to speak a lot of English with those shy Japanese businessmen. Knowledge of Amsterdam? Like what, where you can get food at 2 am? The local government can barely get taxi drivers to show off their knowledge of Amsterdam.

According to the article, many employers already take the time to check out their future employees, but not all of them. The idea is to get everyone to weed out forced prostitution. If I remember correctly, I once read that 70% of all prostitutes in Amsterdam were foreigners, which I imagine makes the city ripe for exploiting women. But I don’t know, and hope this is all for the better. Oh, and only if this screening works will it be applied to other places in Amsterdam were prostitutes work.

(Link: parool.nl)

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 5:28 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Amsterdam, prostitution, screening