Street prostitution gone from Amsterdam; Sex trafficking may be more hidden

Soliciting and street prostitution is almost non-existent on Amsterdam streets, Mayor Eberhard van der Laan wrote in a recent letter to the city council. But that doesn't necessarily mean that street prostitution died out in the city, only that its more hidden, a spokesperson for sex workers' organization Proud said to the Telegraaf.

According to the mayor's letter, in 2014 the police only filed 17 reports of soliciting and sex prostitution. In 2015 that dropped to 9 and last year there were only 6 reported cases, all in the city center area. And those six cases weren't all confirmed forms of street prostitution - suspicions and reports of commercial sex are also reported in this way. Only a few cases involved an actual sex worker found working on the street, Van der Laan writes. He adds that it almost always involved drug addicts who needed quick cash.

"The police figures show no increase in registrations of street prostitution compared to recent years, but a decrease", the mayor writes to the council. "The cases of street prostitution that they do encounter are always drug related and the location depends on the changing locations of dealer territories."

But according to Proud, this does not mean that soliciting and street prostitution died out, only moved more to the background. "You still hear that women make appointments per text at Central Station, get picked up there and satisfy the client in the customer parkin. That is invisible and therefore unsafe."

Proud calls on the municipality to set up a solicitation zone where prostitutes can work safely.