Why it could soon be curtains for Amsterdam's red light district

It could soon be curtains for the famous window brothels of Amsterdam where sex workers advertise their wares in the city’s red light district

Currently, red drapes are only shut when a client is being entertained or if the sex worker is absent.

But Amsterdam’s municipal council is expected this week to vote to keep the curtains permanently closed in a bid to clean up the image of the De Wallen district and make it more compatible with the "Me Too" era.

Under the proposal by the D66 liberal party, window brothel curtains will stay shut and clients will be asked to book via a QR code on their smartphones rather than directly to the sex worker behind the glass.

However, sex workers oppose the idea and argue it will make their work less safe because it will be harder to assess potential clients and any danger they might pose.

"Lucy", a Dutch sex worker, said Amsterdam was the world’s safest place to work when she spoke to the Telegraph at the Prostitution Information Centre (PIC) in the red light district.

“How can I attract clients with the curtains closed?” she said. “They say it is for my protection, but that is nonsense. If someone denigrates me, I denigrate them back. It isn’t an automatic service I negotiate. If drunk people come, I don’t let them in.”

She said window brothels helped sex workers operate independently and safely. “You don’t have to answer mails, you don’t have to pay for web adverts,” she added. “You register at the Chamber of Commerce, buy a set of lingerie and a box of condoms and you can begin.”

Nadia van der Linde, the PIC foundation chairman, said the city was restricting the wrong group in targeting sex workers.

“Nobody wants puking in the streets,” she said. “A number of sex workers live here and are residents too. The city is unwilling to take any action, except action to get rid of the windows.”

Femke Halsema, Amsterdam's mayor, has attacked the denigrating behaviour of stag parties peering at sex workers in their windows as if they were animals.

She hopes to build a multi-storey mega-brothel to replace 100 of the windows in the red light district.

“The red light district is not a lawless place,” said Ilana Rooderkerk, head of the local branch of the D66, whose motion calls for online bookings to replace the traditional window negotiation.

“Sex work has become a tourist attraction, accompanied by very undesirable, degrading behaviour towards sex workers. This does not contribute to improving the position of women in the MeToo era."

The curtains motion will be voted on this week alongside tough proposals to crack down on nuisance tourism.

These include banning cannabis smoking in public areas in the red light district, bringing closing times for bars forward to 2am from 4am and closing window brothels at 3am instead of 6am.

Diederik Boomsma, a Christian Democratic Appeal councillor, said Amsterdam needed a radically different image.

He said: “We need to get rid of this image of Amsterdam as a city where you go to do all the things that aren't allowed at home, such as drugs and prostitution.

“We need to overcome this jaded, faux-progressive understanding of freedom as liberation from all taboos and letting yourself go and return to a more mature understanding of freedom, as self-government.”