http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6178793.stm
How the Dutch protect their prostitutes
By Patrick Jackson
BBC News
As the murder of prostitutes in Suffolk grips the UK, BBC News looks at some of the safety mechanisms being used in the Netherlands to protect local sex workers there from violence.
Campaigners for EU "street walkers" use a red umbrella as their symbol
This Sunday, campaigners in North America and Europe will be marking an End Violence Against Sex Workers Day with vigils, demonstrations and posters.
The murders in Suffolk "are another horrifying chapter in a long history of violence towards sex workers", says Petra Timmermans, a Netherlands-based campaigner for the human rights of prostitutes.
For Ms Timmermans, the coordinator of the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe (ICRSE), the vulnerability of prostitutes to violence is inextricably bound up in social attitudes.
She was kidnapped, tied and driven to an unknown location in fear, threatened with a straight razor and barely managed to talk her way out
Pedro
BBC News website reader from California
Prostitution in the Netherlands involving Dutch or other EU citizens is a legal occupation, and a recent report by the foreign ministry shows that most work in brothels or sex clubs.
They can openly advertise their services in newspapers and on the internet.
However, a small number of legal prostitutes still solicit on the streets, government statistics show.
In response, a number of cities have created official "street walking zones" which feature special car parks for prostitutes and their clients.
Condoms and coffee
These car parks have privacy screens - "a bit like stalls", says Ms Timmermans - between which prostitutes can conduct their business in their clients' cars.
PROSTITUTION IN EU STATES
Netherlands: prostitutes treated as self-employed persons; street prostitution in managed zones; brothels legal but subject to licensing
Germany: similar rights for prostitutes to those of the Dutch though prostitution subject to VAT; legal brothels and recognised red light zones
France: prostitution legal - soliciting and procuring are not
Sweden: prostitution legal but buying sex is not, so clients risk prosecution
UK: prostitution not officially illegal but soliciting, procuring and brothel-keeping are
Security cameras monitor the car parks and social services provide advice, medical information and condoms.
"You can talk to a social worker, you can get a shower, a cup of coffee, things like that," says the ICRSW's coordinator.
"I have never heard of anyone ever being hurt, or at least seriously hurt, in a zone."
According to the foreign ministry, "the introduction of these zones has significantly increased the safety of street walkers".
Government figures from 2004 showed that people driven into high-risk prostitution by drug addiction - a phenomenon common among EU prostitutes - made up only about 10% of all prostitutes in the Netherlands.
This is thanks to good drug outreach programmes, Ms Timmermans suggests.
And she adds that the attitude of the country's police - "they are great in general" - is also an important factor.
Preying on the 'worthless'
End Violence Against Sex Workers Day came about in 2003 in response to the Green River serial murders in the US, in which 48 women, most of them street-walking prostitutes, were murdered around Seattle over some 15 years.
"Violence is not part of the job description" - campaign slogan
The Suffolk murders will be in the minds of Sunday's protesters along with the trial of a Canadian man for the alleged murders of at least 26 sex workers in Vancouver.
Petra Timmermans believes that if our social attitude to prostitutes changed, there would be less risk of such crimes occurring.
"We decide that some people aren't worth our time and violent people know that," she says.
Prostitution is a reality, she argues, and in order to protect those women and men who engage in it, it should be given equal status to other occupations.
"We know, for instance, that there is exploitation in the textile industry but we don't scream 'Stop buying clothing' - we talk about labour rights and working conditions," Ms Timmermans says.
"We need to start talking in that way about prostitution."
Dutch prostitutes do still get hurt, she adds, but the Netherlands has made "many more women's lives safer and gone a long way in challenging many long-held biases that have let killers off the hook".
I went to Amsterdam for a day on a train with my father on some business trip about Ports and Waterways or something when I was 19 , it was an eye opener. When you get off the train and start to walk over the foot bridge thing go right it had a coffee house and a pot leaf painted on the sign. It was a shock. I remember pidgeon poop covered over every inch of bicycles outside the train station. It was also the first time I saw a homeless woman with a little baby. I was in shock. guys had crazy glue in their hair spiked up .
I guess they have one thing down if there is going to be drugs and prostitution , they better protect them.
I the red light district during the day. They had a door and A picture window with a woman inside sitting on a chair in undies. Swear!!!!!
At that point of my life I had only been to NY PA FLA CT MD IL
LOL my father flustered with the map. :laugh:
Was glad to get out of there and go to Rotterdam. It was very pretty until the sun went down and I split to the club by myself Downstairs and then ventured off to this huge club down on the corner(we were Staying at the Hilton) safe enough? you needed plastic chips to buy a drink , like poker chips. No money transactions at the bar. 8 different rooms with bands playing with see through safety glass sound proof. It was really cool and something I'll never forget . I do think Holland has been light years ahead of us. Maybe they are onto something here.
I just don't think people would go for the security camera angle. As if cameras arent everywhere already.
This is pretty insane AC killings,UK killings. So much money already wasted on investigating the deaths of these women when it could have gone to drug treatment . Thousands of hours of man power going into this the cost is crazy.
Sometimes things just never seem to make sense. I have never met anyone who stated while growing up ,I want to be a drug addict and a prostitute.These girls all had hopes and dreams and then life happened to them . Very sad.
Okay now this is the sickest of the sick. Foot Fetish??????