Red Light

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands—At the age of 16, Mariska Majoor started what would turn out to be a five-year career in prostitution. Before she made the decision to sell her body, Majoor’s teenage life was defined by ultimate indigence: She was living on the streets of Amsterdam, dabbling in hard drugs when she could afford them, suffering from a lack of healthy food and adequate clothing, and really desiring one thing. A pet dog.

A couple weeks ago, during an interview with Majoor—the founder of the Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam’s Red Light District—the former sex worker told me that the one reason she decided to become a full-time prostitute was simply because she wanted a dog, a constant source of companionship on the streets, and could not otherwise afford one. But that reason seemed to belie her insistence that the decision to begin a career in prostitution was one she made “as an adult.”

“I considered myself old enough to choose to do things. I saw that it was my decision, and mine only,” she said, when I asked her whether or not she retrospectively resented the fact that she was able to easily enter the sex trade as a minor.

“If someone were to have told me I was too young, I would’ve been angry—really, really angry,” she continued. “And I would’ve said to them, ‘Fuck you. I’m old enough to make my own decisions.’”

Even in the regulated Dutch sex industry—prostitution was legalized nearly nine years ago in this country, in October 2000—sex workers have to be at least 18 years of age in order to legally work in brothels and behind windows. Through the course of my research on the situation over the past two weeks, I discovered intense opposition among a slew of Dutch academics, women’s rights advocates, and former prostitutes to a recent proposal to increase the age standard for sex workers from 18 to 21.

“If you’re a child, 15 or 16 or 17 years old, and you’re helping your family to survive—well, what is a child in this context?” said Marie Louise Janssen, a lecturer on cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam who teaches a course called “The Commodification of the Human Body. “If it’s the difference between surviving and not surviving, who am I to say that you should not be allowed to help yourself?”

Among the people opposing an age increase, most voice reasons echoing those of Janssen, who added that she actually supports lowering the minimum age standard to work in prostitution. These advocates say that young girls in dire economic circumstances, like Majoor was years ago, should be allowed to enter the get-rich-quick industry—as long as the minors are not forced to do so.

But how are these girls not forced into prostitution, I wondered, sometimes aloud, oftentimes visibly frustrated, during the course of my interviews. I couldn’t understand the logic of people like Majoor and Janssen, who argue that minors can make the informed decision to enter the sex industry—even when their choice is, quite literally, between indigence and significant wealth. Isn’t the fact that Majoor decided to become a prostitute principally because she wanted a pet dog reason enough to conclude that minors, particularly those living in extreme poverty, can’t make a rational, informed decision?

After asking myself that question, I had to take into account my own cultural biases. In America, the teen abstinence movement—at the helm of which currently sits Bristol Palin, the unwed teen mother and daughter of soon-to-be ex-Governor Sarah Palin—is alive and strong. And I think it’s safe to say that the potential for legalizing “the world’s oldest profession” is virtually nonexistent in our country. So maybe the issue of minors working in prostitution is a purely Dutch problem, I thought, one that Dutch society would have to confront itself.

I once again had to deconstruct the implications of such reasoning. Are legal minors in The Netherlands somehow less worthy than American children? Is there some cultural norm about sex in Dutch society that makes children mature enough to rationally decide to sell their bodies to men double, triple, even quadruple their age?

Obviously not.

The rights of children transcend culture. And even if the Dutch are progressive enough to have fostered the legalization of prostitution and to have promised to regulate it, then Dutch society should also be responsible enough to ensure that minors are not working in the brothels and behind the windows that police are (evidently inadequately) monitoring.

According to the Dutch Institute for Social Sexual Research, 1,500 girls under 18 are working in these places. I don’t want to state the obvious or oversimplify the situation, but something is seriously wrong in The Netherlands—a welfare state—if impoverished minors are incentivized to become sex workers.

And the fact that pet dogs aren’t distributed for free is no excuse.


Ahmed N. Mabruk ’11, a Crimson news writer, is a history concentrator in Mather House.