Renate van der Zee has spent more than a decade researching the Dutch sex trade, including a stretch working in a shelter for trafficking victims. She used to think legal brothels were the sensible answer. She does not think that any more, and this film is mostly me asking her what changed.
She starts with the history, because the Dutch model was not an accident. There was a real argument for it and she used to make that argument herself.
Then the cases. A pimp setting a woman a target of two thousand a day and feeding her dog food when she misses it. A woman from Uganda trafficked in, starved, and kept in place with video. A woman forced into a bondage brothel. Renate is not telling these as horror stories, she is telling them as the ordinary output of a system, and that is what makes them land.
Her figure is the same one I kept hearing from everybody else: somewhere between half and eighty per cent of the women are trafficked or under a pimp's control. Most of the pimps are foreign. The Dutch government knows all of this, which she says plainly and can show her working on.
We got into who is actually buying, whether the women have any other option, why leaving is so hard, and the fact that this is the country's single biggest tourist attraction.
She ends up at the Swedish model, where buying sex is the crime and selling it is not. I am not going to pretend I came out of this with a settled view of my own. I would rather you watched her make the case and decided for yourself.