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# Is Legal Prostitution Better?
- URL: https://offbeatshow.com/is-legal-prostitution-better/
- Published: 2025-03-11T12:01:15.000Z
- Updated: 2025-03-11T12:01:15.000Z
- Description: Renate van der Zee spent a decade researching Amsterdam's sex trade. She used to think legalisation worked.
- Author: Tommie McDonald
- Tags: Films, #Import 2026-09-03 15:01

I went to Amsterdam expecting to make a fairly positive film about legal prostitution. I worked with journalist Renate van der Zee, who has spent more than a decade researching the trade and some of that time working in a shelter for trafficking victims.

Her figures are hard to sit with: somewhere between 50 and 80 per cent of the women working in those windows are controlled by pimps or have been trafficked. She told me about a woman from Uganda who was trafficked, starved and blackmailed with video. She told me about pimps setting nightly targets and what happens when the targets aren't met.

Renate used to believe legal brothels were the sensible answer. After years of listening to the women inside them, she changed her mind entirely. That shift is the thing this film is really about.