Elise works for El Roi Netherlands, and she spends her days with women in Amsterdam's red light district who want to get out, or who are not in a position to want anything.
We started with language, because she corrected me almost straight away. I had been saying prostitutes. She has her reasons for the words she uses and I have left that exchange in the film rather than quietly tidy it up in the edit.
The numbers she works with are hard to sit with. She puts the share of women in the district facing violence, physical or emotional, at around ninety-eight per cent. She puts the share who are trafficked at between half and eighty per cent. Those are her figures from years of doing this work, and the film is where she explains how she arrives at them.
Behind the numbers are the things she has been told. A pimp threatening a woman's baby. Women whose hair falls out from the stress of it. Women who dissociate so completely that they are not really present for their own shifts and cannot tell you afterwards what happened during them. She talked about how slow the police can be, and about the fact that most of the women being exploited are immigrants, which is not a coincidence and is not treated as urgent.
I asked her the question everyone asks, which is whether any of the women are happy, and I asked why they cannot just go and get a normal job. Her answers are better than mine would have been. The one that stuck with me was simple enough: nobody dreams of being a prostitute.
We also got into whether this is Dutch culture, what taxing the work actually does, the gap between the legal and illegal ends of it, and the drugs.
Filmed in De Wallen with El Roi Netherlands.