Frits Rouvoet has been knocking on the windows in Amsterdam's red light district for eighteen years. He has never bought anything. He runs a charity called Bright Fame, and what he does is turn up, over and over, until the women behind the glass know him well enough to ask him for something.
Hundreds of women have got out of prostitution with his help. I wanted to understand how that actually works, because helping women leave is an easy thing to say and I had no real idea what it involved.
A lot of it turns out to be money. Frits walked me through the economics and they are worse than most people assume. A woman rents her window by the shift whether she earns anything in it or not. If there is a pimp, and he says there usually is, the money moves straight through her hands and out again. Debt keeps people in place far more often than locks do.
We talked about how women get recruited, how trafficking works when the destination is legal, and why the police response is what it is. We talked about the violence, which he has seen a great deal of, and about the trauma that is still sitting there years later in women who did get out.
The thing that stayed with me is how slow the leaving is. It is not one dramatic exit. Frits described women who get out and go back, get out and go back, and the ones who make it tend to do it on the third or fourth attempt with somebody still turning up for them each time. He has been at this for eighteen years because eighteen years is roughly what it takes.
Filmed in De Wallen with Bright Fame.