I went to Amsterdam expecting to make a fairly positive film. Legal, regulated, out in the open, windows on a public street instead of a flat somewhere nobody can find. That is the argument for the Dutch model and I thought I was going to watch it hold up.
De Wallen is the oldest part of the city and it is now one of the biggest tourist attractions in Europe. Groups walk through it every night of the week. Almost nobody on those tours is thinking about who is behind the glass or how she got there.
I spoke to two women who have worked there. Chiela Rosa has been in different kinds of Dutch prostitution for ten years. Jesslin was in it for fifteen, and she was being exploited before she was old enough to consent to any of it. I also spent time with three people who work on the other side of it: Renate van der Zee, a journalist who has spent more than a decade on the Dutch sex trade; Frits Rouvoet, who runs the Bright Fame charity and has been knocking on those windows for eighteen years; and Elise Lente of El Roi, who helps women get out.
What they describe is not the system I expected to find. Pimps are everywhere and everybody knows it. A lot of the women come from Eastern Europe and did not arrive under their own steam. The people I spoke to put the share who are trafficked or controlled at somewhere between half and eighty per cent, and not one of them thought legalisation had fixed it. Several of them think it made trafficking easier to hide, because a trafficked woman standing in a legal window looks exactly like a woman who chose to be there.
The part I keep coming back to is the trauma, and not the dramatic version of it. Women dissociating to get through a shift. Women whose hair falls out. Women who have been doing this so long that they cannot picture doing anything else, which is its own kind of lock on the door.
At the end I told some of the tourists what I had found out and filmed what they said back. I think that is the most useful two minutes in the film.
I went to Amsterdam expecting to defend the Dutch model. I did not come home able to.