Amsterdam's Prostitutes Demand to Advertise Sex In Windows

A crowd of sex workers and their disguised supporters took to the streets of Amsterdam Thursday to protest the city’s new plan to close down their windows in order to clean up the infamous Red Light District.

While the city isn’t planning to shut down legal sex work, the municipality has been changing the way that the workers can advertise their services. In recent years, the city has shut down over 100 of the district’s 500 windows, where prostitutes pose in order to entice clients to give them business.

From The Huffington Post:

The prostitutes took their noisy but peaceful protest all the way into city hall, where they presented a petition to Mayor Eberhard van der Laan and told him that the closures are depriving them of safe places to work.

Ruth Morgan-Thomas, representing an organization called the Global Network of Sex Work Projects, said the city was going in the wrong direction by closing the windows.

“Amsterdam had it right,” she said. “They enabled women and men and transgenders to work safely. Now they are closing windows. That makes people more vulnerable.”

The city has told the sex workers that it will not close down any more of the windows, but the crowd was unmoved, letting officials that wasn’t good enough. They don’t just want the shutting of windows to stop, they want the windows that were removed back. And they won’t rest until the situation is fixed.