Of tadpoles, newts, and forced prostitution

Human trafficking reporting in the Netherlands has been at a stalemate for a long time. Numbers of presumed victims of trafficking were collected by a National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence against Children, who was appointed by law to be the official source for state policy purposes on the subject of human trafficking. These numbers were always hobbled by the fact that they were uncertain, and there was always question as to the value of the estimates derived. Then at the end of september 2017, the National Rapporteur unveiled a bombshell report that announced that finally, the numbers had been settled:

The ability to reliably estimate the actual numbers contributes greatly to the fight against human trafficking. This was also emphasized in the High-Level Meeting on human trafficking with UN-members on 27 September 2017. The Dutch National Rapporteur on Trafficking in Human Beings and Sexual Violence Against Children has been analyzing the numbers of registered victims for years. Thanks to the relatively efficient registration in the Netherlands, it has been possible to reliably estimate the actual number of victims. Dr. Maarten Cruyff and Prof. Dr. Peter van der Heijden, experts in producing estimates, have further developed an existing method of estimation. Specialists in human trafficking, Prof. Dr Jan van Dijk, the Dutch National Rapporteur and UNODC together applied this method for estimating trafficking in the Netherlands. As a result, the Netherlands gained insight into the actual extent of trafficking in human beings. The implications of these new numbers will be addressed in the Monitor Human Trafficking that will be published on 18 October 2017.(¹)
[emphasis mine]

Too bad these numbers are garbage, as will become clear.

The report hailed as the "reliable estimate" of the extent of human trafficking in the Netherlands is named "An estimation of the numbers of presumed human trafficking victims in the Netherlands"(²), and was released jointly by UNODC and the Bureau of the Dutch National Rapporteur. Critical examination of this report shows very little ground for the boastful claims by the Rapporteur.

The method employed in this report to estimate the number of victims of trafficking is called "Multiple Systems Estimation" [MSE]. This method has been used to estimate numbers of people infected with HIV, Hepatitis, or afflicted with neural tube defects, and to estimate the total number of deaths due to conflict in Guatemala, Colombia, Kosovo and Peru. In all these cases, the real number is unknown, but several surveys have been performed to try to chart the population - in the latter cases of the dead. Via MSE, the different lists of discovered individuals, and in particular their differences and similarities, can be used to make an estimate of the total population, including the part of the population that has never been surveyed.

The basis of MSE lies in a much older technique, employed in wildlife surveying, called Capture-Recapture. This method takes a closed habitat [a pond for newts, for instance, or an island for iguanas] and catches a number n of animals. These animals are then marked, and released back into the habitat. A second survey is then made, catching K animals. Of these, a certain number k will have been caught in an the earlier survey, and carry a mark. If we can apply a set of assumptions implying that the relations between the seen and unseen groups will be in proportion in both surveys, so that we can claim similarity between the resulting survey lists, we can then reason that the proportion k/K will be close to the proportion n/N, with N the total population. An estimator for N would then be

[The 'hat' diacritical indicates something is an estimator. There are more complex, more accurate estimators, but for the purposes of this article the simplest approach suffices. Higher accuracy estimators obscure the mechanisms at work by added complexity, without changing the underlying method or the outcome by more than a small fraction.]
Basically we're mixing into the total population a known quantity of marked animals, and then measure in our second survey what the concentration of marked animals is.

MSE is the same principle at work, with the same assumptions and logic behind it. What makes MSE different, is that more than two lists of survey results are used. If there are multiple lists, there is more information to be used towards making a thorough estimate. More lists, more datapoints, less chances of a freak accident in sampling offsetting the data and skewing the results of the estimate. Most importantly, the lists can be compared to each other to find the variability and homogeneity between the lists. The basic concept is the same, but the computation becomes much more complex. The approach taken in this case is to use a maximum likelihood estimation method: to find the number N for which the overlaps between the lists are least unlikely. This is only doable by computer. Unfortunately, that means that the actual computation happens in a proverbial black box, and we can't see the math at work.

The clearest perspective to understand the mechanics of the method is to take the total of all lists and view it as a collection of sets. The sets are defined by their inclusion or non-inclusion in all considered lists. With n lists, there are therefore 2ⁿ sets to consider. The interrelation between these sets can be computed, because all sets are known, except for the set that is not included in any list: the 'missing' set, which we are trying to estimate. If the distribution in the lists is homogenous and independent, we can estimate the interrelations between categories of sets to also hold for the 'missing set', the value of which can then be inferred.

This is a very short overview of the background of the method, and for the layman who wishes to know more about this method I recommend Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict by Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff.
People with a little mathematical background will be informed more summarily by papers like Multiple Sample Estimation of Population and Census Undercount in the Presence of Matching Errors by Ding and Fienberg [http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/12-001-x/1996001/article/14385-eng.pdf] or An exploration of multiple systems estimation for empirical
research with conflict-related deaths by Kruger and Lum [http://visionsinmethodology.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/KO-MSE.pdf]

This method rests on several assumptions. If any one of these assumptions is violated, the method derived from them is invalid, and the results are meaningless.

The least problematic assumption is independence. This is the assumption that inclusion of an individual on one list does not influence his probability of being on another list. To infer the value for the missing set requires that it adheres to similar distributions as the visible sets. If there is no independence, and one list inherently influences another, the interrelation is no longer inherent to the data set, and the estimation is no longer based on measurement of properties of the population alone. You're no longer measuring the target quantity, you're measuring your measurement.

For example: imagine we have a pond containing 100 newts. We survey by trapping 50 newts in traps baited with a specific food item. This trapping is so unpleasant that those newts now avoid the bait foodstuff. In our second list, collected with the same method of capture, we therefore only trap 1 newt captured before out of 50 newts total in the second list. The resultant estimator for the total population would then be 2500. On the other hand, if the traps were experienced as a good feed, and the nice experience makes them more likely to repeat the behavior that got them trapped in the first place, they would act opposite. If then all but one are re-captured, the estimate for the total population would be 51 newts.

The reason this is the least problematic assumption is that in MSE, especially MSE with many lists, the independence violations can be analyzed from the many overlapping interrelations in the lists and compensated reasonably well. Computer programs are available to infer relations between the sets, which rectify the dependences between the lists. These rectifications model real-life relations however, which should be investigated to check if they are accurate. The resulting models may be used to nudge the lists further into agreement. Of course, this treatment of the data must be done with utmost care. It is very easy when you mess with the input data to achieve a desired conclusion by introducing error. Sceptical review of the modeling, and what it means in the real world, is therefore of the essence.

This modeling is done in the report in different ways, with different mathematical degrees of freedom. These degrees of freedom are mostly set for computational convenience. For example:

the 3-factor interaction parameters for such pairs of registers and the variable Q with the five polynomials for modelling trends over time are numerically unstable in the sense that they lead to highly inflated population size estimates and confidence intervals. To protect against this type of inflation, the restriction that only 2-factor interactions are allowed to enter the model was imposed. This restriction implies that no corrections are made for possible higher order interactions between the lists.(²)

In the report, the modeling of dependencies is done by trial-and-error. No attempt is made to match the actual modeling with real-life behaviors or phenomena. Only complexity and numerical stability of the model is considered. The different models tried show radically different outcomes, some mutually exclusive, which demonstrates the huge sensitivity of MSE to inaccuracy in the assumption of independence:

Table 2: Results of log-linear modelling of six lists of human trafficking victims in the Netherlands, 2014
Estim Confidence Interv. Pearson p
M1. P,R,K,O,I,Z 10,542 ( 8,802 - 12,956) 577 .007
M2. P,R,K,OZ,I 15,711 (12,552 – 20,576) 226 .017
M3. P,R,K,OZ,IZ 17,812 (14,026 – 23,874) 66 .130
M4. R,K,OP,OZ,IZ 22,270 (16,871 – 32,275) 49 .175
M5. K,PR,OP,OZ,IZ 32,646 (22,299 – 56,048) 46 .173


It isn't strange that the MSE estimate of Dutch trafficking figures is so perturbed by analysis of the interdependence of the lists. For instance, National Police routinely turns presumed victims of human trafficking over to aid organizations, who then re-report the victim as a discovered presumed victim of human trafficking. This causes a large overlap between some lists.

The second assumption underlying MSE is homogeneity of the investigated population. For each individual in the investigated population, the probability of inclusion in one list must be equal to the probability of inclusion on another. Assumptions of homogeneity can easily be invalidated by non-homogeneous or non-random sampling and re-sampling. Surveys set up in a limited domain can easily underestimate the total population, whereas spot checks on different domains can easily overestimate.

In our newt example, we can illustrate this assumption. Let's return to our 100-newt pond. We catch 15 newts, mark them and release them back to the place we caught them. Imagine that the newts don't travel much in the pond, and stick to one place. Then, if our second capture expedition is to the same spot in the pond, we will have a high number of marked newts in our second list. We might catch 10 newts, 9 of which turn out to be marked. This makes our estimation 17 newts. If our second trapping area is on the other side of the pond, hardly any newts on our second list will be marked. We might catch 10 newts, of which only 1 has been marked. The estimator would then be 150 newts. The population of the pond didn't change, but our estimate changes dramatically.

Once again, with multiple lists the MSE method can work around this limitation to some extent. As long as the lack of homogeneity can be deduced from either the lists or from external investigations, compensation can be performed. This requires that the heterogeneity is not so large that it dominates the outcome, and that it is well-charted. These two requirements are very hard to meet in an environment like the hunt for human trafficking victim, and almost impossible to verify.

The report considers homogeneity only as a problem of equating the multitudinous forms of human trafficking in the Netherlands, and pretends to solve the problem by splitting out the lists by type of population. This assumption is therefore not actually addressed, and quietly assumed to have been met. Considering the complexity of this assumption, this doesn't suffice to make the report credible. However, it is impossible to say what the amount of heterogeneity is in this case.

The third assumption that must be met is that the population under survey is closed. Closure means that between the generation of the various lists, there is no 'escape' from the population. If the domain to be sampled is not well-defined, it isn't possible to properly sample a single population and correlate the lists. In effect, you end up sampling 2 different but hopefully overlapping populations.

Our example pond of 100 newts is so handy because a pond is a closed system. Newts rarely leave or enter, so the system is pretty much closed. Still closure errors can be made. For instance, let's say we do our first survey and mark 50 newts. Then we come back 10 years later for the second survey, catching 50. Because most newts live for about 6 years, we find only 1 newt on our second survey. The resultant estimator is that 2500 newts live in the pond. We reach an estimate 25 times too high, and now because we ignored the closure requirement.

In the report under discussion, closure is violated. The lists consist of disparate collections of observations by different agencies sampling disparate subsections of society. There is not one population that is carefully, randomly and completely sampled, but rather a few separate, not necessarily intersecting domains. People move in and out of those domains, or bide for a while. This also means people can be counted multiple times over time, or not enter the domain shared by all lists at all. The report ignores this issue.

The previous three assumptions undermine the credibility of the National Rapporteur/UNODC report, but if they were the only problems the report could still be salvaged, if pared down to a shadow of itself and reworked to be a lot more humble in its scope. The fourth assumption however completely invalidates the whole thing.

The fourth assumption is the assumption of an error-free dataset. MSE is basically an extrapolation from existing data, and translates the observed data into an estimate by taking differences in observations between lists to be indications of missing observations. Erroneous observations are uncorrelated, and unduplicated observations increase the estimate. Most MSE applications have little trouble with this requirement. The amount of false positives in modern infectious disease diagnostics is not too high to give much trouble. Corpses of Peruvians and Guatemalans don't suddenly turn out to be alive.

The method is quite vulnerable to error. It contains no error detection, and wrong data doesn't jump out at you. Errors don't cause weird outliers or kinks in curves. An error isn't recognizable by its deviation from the modeling. It just skews the estimate. Especially if the true positives are scarce, even a modest false positive rate will quickly dominate. For instance, a 99% correct test which only yields 1% false positives, when applied to a population with 1% true positives, will give equal numbers of false and true positive results. In the case of the report under scrutiny, where nets are cast wide across all travelers, all sex workers, all immigrants and all youth to catch those few victims, this is a relevant consideration.

False positives act in two ways: They increase the amount of "confirmed" individuals considered "found", and their absence from other lists make them suggest a higher proportion of the population is unseen. As such, errors in the input show up in second order in the output. Twice the error rate in the input quadruples the error rate of the output.

This sensitivity to list error cannot be computed away. As the adage goes: Garbage in, garbage out. There is no compensation like there would be for a lack of independence or inhomogeneity. In fact, corrections for inhomogeneity or dependence are liable to throw off the end result even further if the lists are polluted with errors. If one list contains significantly more ghost individuals than the others, it will suggest a lack of independence among the lower pollution lists, which will then be compensated mathematically, adapting the non-erroneous data to the error. This can either lower or increase the estimate, depending on the implementation of the dependence modeling. The same goes for inhomogeneity correction.

Especially if there is a significant proportion of false positives, even false negatives increase the estimate unduly. This seems counterintuitive, until you realize that false negatives, especially if they are counted on one list but not all others, decrease the overlap between the lists, thus inflating the estimate.

As an example, consider our newt pool again. As before, it contains 100 newts. It also happens to contain half a million tadpoles. Instead of trained biologists, the newts are now counted by enthusiastic but unskilled school kids. They can't accurately discern tadpoles from newts. They catch and mark 25 newts and 250 tadpoles. On the second survey, they catch another 250 tadpoles and 25 newts. 6 newts and 1 tadpole have been marked. We observe that if the tadpoles would have been discriminated out in both surveys, the estimate would be 104, quite close to the real number. However, because of the false positive tadpoles, the estimate based on these lists is 10804. Now if one of the newts from the first survey would have been rejected in the second, thus introducing just one false negative, the estimator would become 12604.

The newt pool example is a easy and clear example because it is so extreme. The estimate becomes hugely overblown, because the false positives outnumber the real results by a factor 10. The resultant error in the estimator is therefore around 100. Surely, surely that is a great exaggeration? Surely that is not even close to what is happening with the human trafficking numbers in the report under scrutiny?

It doesn't take much investigation to discover that the dataset used for this report is not free of errors. The lists in the analysis are supplied by the Dutch Non-Governmental Organization "Comensha", which collects and tabulates any "signal of trafficking" sent to it. Signals are supplied by several channels, which are treated separately next.

The healthiest information is supplied by the ministerial inspectorate for social and labor affairs, the "Inspectie SZW". This institute was set up to ensure proper treatment of workers, and to check adherence to labor laws. This is a benign organization which shows no agenda to inflate numbers. It is subject to the same guidelines that all the supply channels are charged with by the National Rapporteur. These guidelines compel reporting any individual as a presumed victim of trafficking at the slightest signal. However, since the Inspectie SZW does not deal with stigmatized groups, the list of signals they are supposed to report on is based in reality.

Not so with police. Especially vice police is very eager to hunt for false positives. Culture within the police force views all sex work as demeaning and crime related. Vice police raids and inspects sex workers aggressively, actively searching signals of trafficking, raiding for only that purpose without probable cause. The list of signals for the police is extensive and eagerly used. Signals of trafficking include being from eastern Europe, having lots of money, having no money, having new friends, having few friends, coming to the defense of ones employer, refusing to answer questions by police [vice police tend to ask impertinent questions, for example: "do you cum when your boyfriend licks you out?", which is supposed to ferret out sham love relationships, which are considered coercion], being housed by the employer, not having arranged ones own journey to the Netherlands, having clothing or condoms supplied by a third party, sleeping at the place of work, having a body guard, and a slew of other vague signals. Sex workers try to avoid giving any of these signals because apart from being listed as a presumed victim of trafficking, signals of trafficking give police the authority to perform invasive "investigations" into her situation.

The same goes for the Marechaussee, the paramilitary police that performs border control duties. Their findings have been excluded from the report because they report mostly on a behavior that has been explicitly declared "not trafficking" by the Dutch Supreme Court, even though it was included in Dutch trafficking law.(⁷):

Also Immigration services report to Comensha. They process immigrants, who are invited to volunteer stories of trafficking. Immigrants who don't stand a chance to be allowed to immigrate are told that if they report being trafficked, they will be allowed to remain in the country for the duration of the investigation, and if a conviction results - or if the amount of time the immigrant remains in limbo exceeds five years - they will get a permanent residence status. As can be expected, this regulation is vulnerable to abuse, and delivers a steady stream of presumed victims.(³)

Another source is the flourishing industry providing services to victims of trafficking. Tens of millions of Euros are turned over by companies supplying shelter to or rehabilitating trafficking victims, willing or unwilling. This industry receives most of its victims from police. However, also a surprising number of parents decide to submit their child to these companies when they suspect their child is under the influence of evil "loverboys", young men charming innocent girls into a life of vice. This rescue industry reports to Comensha, and has no problem overreporting. Most of these companies are also lobbyists against "sexual transgression" like sexting, teen sex, porn, and sex work. Overreporting is part of their lobby.

A further channel of counts of presumed victims is via health care and youth services. Healthcare services are supplied with the same hypersensitive signal sets used by police to report on suspected trafficking. An example would be a high-profile case in Utrecht, where healthcare professionals broke their professional confidentiality to report that a prostitute was pregnant while still working, and was therefore a presumed victim of trafficking. Another report showed a prostitute had reported with a broken ankle, and was therefore a presumed victim of trafficking. That this was the same woman didn't preclude reporting two presumed victims. Youth services report any unruly or runaway teen who has a boyfriend, especially if the boyfriend is black or muslim, as a presumed victim of trafficking. There are also parents who think their daughter is under the spell of a trafficker when she is displaying unmanageable behavior, because it can't be their upbringing at fault. These girls are also reported by youth services as presumed victims.

The final channel is mentioned here only because it is separately listed in the report, and that is the regional coordinators on human trafficking. These only aggregate regionally collected reports on presumed victims, and do not separately collect signals.

Notably absent is a listing of people coming forward of their own volition to report as a victim of human trafficking. This is likely because in most cases, the presumed victim disagrees about her victim status. They don't consider themselves victims because they chose to do the work under the conditions offered. They consider it a good deal, and prefer it over the alternatives. However, whether they are voluntary workers or coerced victims is not up to them; human trafficking is a crime that needs no charges by the victim, or even agreement from the victim about the victims' victim status. The prosecutor decides for the victim whether she's a victim, and whether what she chose to do was voluntary.

This is a repetitive theme in human trafficking literature. Victims don't come forward. Victims delude themselves into thinking it's what they want. Victims don't understand victimhood isn't the better option and don't want to be rescued. Victims are so destroyed by their victimhood that they are no longer capable of deciding what is their own will. Frustrated pollsters have to use "specialized" questionnaires and questioning techniques to trick presumed victims into "admitting" they are a victim, and even then avoiding the word "victim". The low incidence of people reporting to be a victim is a thorn in the side of the rescue movement, and their expectations of waves of human misery must be justified by using very questionable and misleading interrogation techniques. For the greater good, of course.

Because of stratification of victims in the report, which is somehow meant to make the report more "robust", we can immediately see some of the failures of the application of the MSE method. For instance, male exploitation outside the sex industry is estimated with a relatively low dark number. This arises from the lack of victim hunts, because of the limited interest for these non-pornographic stories. Once labor trafficking victims come forward, they make no effort to hide, and turn up on all lists available to them. But they have to be in desperate straits before they come forward, because police and rescue industry have little to nothing to offer them. They can hope for little more than prosecution of those who wronged them. We therefore should expect few to come forward, and a large dark number. MSE sees all reported individuals show up on many lists, and estimates low.

On the other hand, we have the group of minor female victims exploited in the sex industry. This consists of claims that girls are under the influence of "loverboys", psychological wizards charming hapless girls into prostitution. This category of girls is notably absent from the lists of police surveys of the sex industry, and from lists of prostitution aid facilities. The logical conclusions is that most of these presumptions of victimhood must be duds, because the girls are hardly ever actually found in their suspected sex work roles. But MSE just sees the lack of overlap between the lists, and explodes the estimate. It estimates huge numbers of invisible child prostitutes, forever out of reach of police.

Finally, the MSE method rest heavily on individuals in the various lists being matched or unmatched in other lists. The collecting agency Comensha, however, has no trouble listing individuals whose identifying information is incomplete. Exactly how they register and tabulate the data is a matter of some mystery, because there are conflicting statements by different employees, but given the vagueness of much of their statistics, and their claims not to register "personal information" which would conflict with Dutch privacy law, there is a subset of individuals of whom matching in other lists is unclear, thus again likely driving up the estimates.

With many services reporting at the drop of a hat, using a system of oversensitive rules that is biased towards gross overreporting, it isn't strange that there must be many false positives. The challenge becomes to estimate how large the overreporting is.

Each of the presumed victims is counted through direct contact, and is therefore available to police to act upon. If there is actual evidence, then a court case might follow, which in turn might result in a conviction. The number of convictions and court cases is recorded, and allows for an estimate.

It is reasonable to assume that police will take action on those cases that are the most serious, and have the clearest evidence with the highest probability of conviction. This would be the most efficient application of their resources to stem the most crime. Therefore, it is reasonable to view the cases brought before the court as the most heinous, and the ones with the most solid evidence.

It should be noted that human trafficking cases are treated by special courts. What makes these courts special is that the judges have had special training to become experts in the trafficking lore that is dogma in trafficking lobby circles. This was done explicitly to have judges view evidence in the light of many dogmatic presumptions about the situation of sex work and other trafficking backdrops, so that they would have lower thresholds of evidence to convict. To prove trafficking has been made very easy indeed.

This is illustrated by a court case from 2014(⁴), where the Court of Appeal overturned a trafficking conviction in first instance because the original verdict was based only on the contradictory statements of the purported victim, without any other evidence. This is no exception. Convoluted suspicions of organized groups of criminals making girls fall in love with them to exploit them sexually in Dutch prostitution, and committing hideous acts of coercion and exploitation upon them, are considered proven by producing snippets of snooped telephone calls, or by fragments from months of interrogations of the victims. Whether or not the victims are willing to act the part of victims.

Convictions become even easier when minors are involved. A minor in sex work is always considered coerced, no matter any evidence that she herself took initiative and did the work voluntarily. She is automatically a coerced victim, even if there is nobody in sight to convict for the coercion. It's enough for a trafficking conviction to find a minor prostituting (and how easy this is, is borne out by recorded minors in sexwork being found in a matter of days from starting operations) and showing that someone facilitated her. Automatic conviction for forced prostitution.

Even with these special courts, there is only a 70% conviction rate. This seems respectable, until one considers that the usual conviction rate in the Netherlands is 90%. The courts are usually a police-to-prison pipeline. Acquittals in human trafficking are therefore at triple the usual rate. Prosecutors blame this on the extreme difficulty of proving human trafficking, even though the threshold for coercion has been lowered to "has a boyfriend" or "comes from a less affluent country".

Considering all this, it is interesting to note that there are 10 times as many presumed victims than there are human trafficking court cases. In 2015, over 1321 presumed victims, only 139 convictions resulted. The rest was even weaker than what is already tried. At what point should we call a presumed victim a red herring?

One can also wonder how many of these convictions are accurate. Quite apart from any discussion which behaviors should or should not be punished, and quite apart from the discussion how harsh this penalty should be, the decision to consider a case proven could be examined. When reading verdicts it is remarkable how far judges stretch interpretation of vague items of evidence to justify a conviction. Prosecutors speak of worrying trends in "beautiful convictions" getting overturned on appeal.(⁸) This happens in highly hyped cases that were brought out in the press in the trial in first instance. Something is rotten there. Which proportion of cases should be considered overturned is unclear, because appeal cases can drag on for years, the rules change every few years, so data on original verdicts issued in 2015 will not solidify this decade. Older cases don't offer solace, because partial acquittals are not recorded as acquittals in reports by the National Rapporteur, and compiling ones own index of acquittals on appeal requires cooperation from the Justice department. Quite apart from this, many accused will not want to go through an appeal procedure, to avoid further pillorying in the press and years in limbo. However, we will not pursue this line any further because we simply don't have the numbers. The report gets a free pass on this one.

To treat vague signals as if they were confirmed cases of human trafficking is misleading. Suspicions must survive Occams Razor to be taken seriously. Considering the lower conviction thresholds for trafficking cases, the low conviction rate can be generously said to stem from the good cases being used up, and bad cases without a chance of success being tried against all odds. It implies we've seen pretty much all cases worth a trial. In other words, the best cases are being tried, listed from best to worse, and as the viable run out, even nonviable cases get sent to court. If instead the limiting factor would be police or court capacity, as is often claimed by the Rapporteur, we would see a higher than average conviction rate, as police only has capacity for the cream of the crop, and doesn't get around to the questionable cases.

If we take all this together, we see 139 cases with any chance of conviction, and the rest of the presumed victims don't come with enough evidence to meet even the lowest standards of proof. That would mean that only 10% of signals at the very most should be considered valid, even when viewed through the heavily biased eyes of the modern human trafficking courts, even when pretending that overturning in appeal never happens.

It's always important in mathematics to keep track of what the quantity you're working with represents. If we're starting our analysis with one quantity, it doesn't magically change into another quantity through the computation. The numbers we have available are events which lead to a conviction in Dutch trafficking courts, and do not metamorphose into actual cases of trafficking by any other standard.

Now as a gauging exercise, we can try to very roughly estimate how wrong the report is, based upon this derivation. We ignore all fitting and adjusting. Because of reasons given in earlier paragraphs, we may assume this to be erring on the side of caution, since we are allowing all modeling applied to get a "desirable" result. We know the error rate in the estimate is the square of the error rate in the input data. We can see that the input data is systematically 1321/139 = 9.5 times too high. In first order, this means that the estimate would be 90.3 times too high. If applied to the number of trafficking cases per year, claimed to be 6250 by the National Rapporteur, the result would be a tepid 69 cases per year. That's about half of the actually convicted cases. Since we are estimating the number of events which would lead to a conviction if spotted by the authorities, this is an obvious underestimate.

But let's take a look a little further. As can be read in the report, in 2014 an earlier attempt at MSE estimation had been made. This didn't make much of an impression, because the numbers it generated were too large for the tastes of the Bureau of the National Rapporteur, so it was quietly ignored. Not because they balked at unreasonably high numbers, but because they would look silly claiming that 140% of the estimated number of sex workers was being coerced. Let's take the 2014 estimate into consideration instead, where far fewer MSE-related adjustments and compensations had been applied. This "more pure" MSE application estimated between 14000 and 23900 victims were out there. Applying the same haircut to this earlier pure application of MSE, we get an estimate of 155 to 265 victims total. These numbers are far more believable; between 53 and 90 percent of actual cases are prosecuted and lead to convictions.(⁵) That is what you would expect for a crime which harms the victims a lot, and is hunted with great policing effort and great police powers.

What has been shown here is a crude comparison, a quick and dirty manipulation of the results based upon some basic mathematics of error dynamics in MSE. It is merely meant to illustrate the flaws and inconclusiveness of the report under scrutiny. The clunkiest modeling available is used, but the principles hold true also for more refined and complex modeling. Using R packages on dummy datasets doesn't show significant deviation from these basic approaches. Basic enveloping math always works, no matter how obfuscated and overly complex models get.

Consider for a moment what establishing a number of victims would be good for. It is currently only used to cause shock in the press. In years that the number went up, that was cause for concern, and government was urged to ramp up the fight against trafficking. In years when the number went down, that was cause for concern, and government was urged to ramp up the fight as well. The actual numbers make no material difference.

No matter how you view it, this report is in no way a breakthrough. It isn't even useful. Tabulating how many victims there are is already of no utility, but if the data is made useless for any conceivable genuine purpose by introducing so much noise to the signal there is really no point to the entire effort. Extrapolating from this senseless data set is just masturbation. Mathmagicking garbage data into breakthrough truth doesn't happen. If the numbers were indeed important, the effort would be to find the right level, not just jack them up. If a high but incorrect number is a great thing in itself, why not just declare the entire Dutch population victims and be done with it?

One does not push the collection of polluted, inflated, biased data for years if the purpose of the collection is to use a modeling tool like MSE to find the sober truth that has been hidden by all the pollution. The MSE operation was meant to push the same line as the original collection of data. The entire reason for the collection of these pointless high numbers, the reason the bureau of the National Rapporteur even exists, is to lend credibility to a moral panic. Mull over the following quote, for instance:

The number of reported victims of human trafficking has decreased greatly over the past five years, from 1287 in 2012 to 952 in 2016. In 2016 the count decreased by 17 percent from 2015. National Rapporteur Corinne Dettmeijer: 'I seriously worry about the decreasing number of reports. Human trafficking doesn't, indeed, decrease: we now know that the number of victims per year is 6250. That means that an ever greater proportion of human trafficking remains out of view. This should occasion the police to release extra capacity to combat human trafficking.'(⁶)

The law is a tool in the hands of people who want to steer society to conform to their ideals. These people can use the law to repress phenomena in society that they don't like. Whether it be people who find sex outside boundaries that they are uncomfortable with icky, or people who want to please their God, or people who just want to feel like the savior or bane of some poor immigrant, the law is the most powerful tool for the self-righteous. Human trafficking policy is their playground. It can be invoked against immoral sex, immigrants, capitalism, the shadow economy, and other liberties that are viewed with suspicion. That means very many activist groups can get behind laws repressing human trafficking, even when they have very little eye for real situations where people are being coerced and exploited. Whether they do it out of conviction or to make money off the whole circus, they are willing to make up whatever story is necessary to get their way.


(¹): https://www.dutchrapporteur.nl/current/news/reliable-estimate-reflects-true-numbers-of-victims-of-human-trafficking.aspx
(²): https://www.nationaalrapporteur.nl/binaries/An%20estimation%20of%20the%20numbers%20of%20presumed%20human%20trafficking%20victims%20in%20the%20Netherlands_tcm23-282232.pdf
(³): See for instance https://www.mensenhandelweb.nl/taxonomy/term/2364
(⁴): https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:GHARL:2014:3064
(⁵): This is a comparison of an MSE estimation from 2014 to conviction data from 2015. Not strictly correct, but enough for a decent ballpark estimate.
(⁶): https://www.nationaalrapporteur.nl/actueel/2017/minderjarige-meisjes-vaker-slachtoffer-van-seksuele-uitbuiting-dan-gedacht.aspx
(⁷): https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:HR:2016:857
(⁸): https://www.trouw.nl/home/in-de-strijd-tegen-mensenhandel-is-elke-veroordeling-een-overwinning~ac0ffa45/

Dutch Model - War on sex work

One very alarming development of the last few years is the organized persecution of sex work. After a tentative start, very hostile actions against prostitutes have become not just accepted by the general public, but are actually viewed as productive efforts to combat trafficking. Instead of executing these actions in silence, they are boasted about in press releases, and actual action footage is released. This is highly unorthodox in any other kind of policing in the Netherlands.

It started out with police raids on window prostitution areas. The neighborhood would be closed down, a huge police force would storm the streets, with a ratio of more than 8 policemen per girl. This enormous show of force was explained away by the organizing prosecutor as "making absolutely sure order would be maintained." He then claims that this goal was attained, and therefore shows the approach worked.

These policemen would force their way into the work areas and take the sex workers to detainee vehicles to be transported to government buildings for an all-night interrogation. Meanwhile, police ravage the working areas and adjoining rooms, destroying any closed lockers, boxes, suitcases or bags. Communications equipment like telephones or computers are taken, mostly never to be returned, and money is impounded likewise.

Police claim the women are free to go during these raids. However, when you say you want to leave, they say that you might be free to leave now, but if you do try to leave they can order you to stay, and you'll be arrested if you don't comply. Then you won't be free to leave. All they want you to do is answer some questions, and if you try to get away, that is highly suspect and cause for harsher methods.

The questions are variable. It depends very much on the interrogator what he is trying to get from you. Most just want to do the standard interrogation I will go into a little further down, but during these raids many interrogators are less standardized, and will take the interrogation in different directions. Most will try to get statements from you concerning abuse, violence and trafficking.

During these raids, however, there is also great emphasis on tracing your money. If they can track down where your money has gone, it will be impounded, and never be released. This is supposed to strike at the heart of trafficking. If you don't have a pimp to siphon off your earnings, you can lose much. Hiding it at home doesn't help you, because while you're being interrogated, police has broken down your home door and is ransacking the place.

They try to bully you into submission, want you to sign pre-made statements, and want you to accuse your friends, family or especially your partner as traffickers. The methods chosen show how little they know about whores. We are confronted with unruly manhood on a daily basis, and we know by experience that to certain attitudes one must never submit. Results are therefore scant.

Every raid is claimed to be a success. Often starting even before it is launched. However, only a few cases and very few arrests are attributed to raids - and on closer inspection, this is always found to be false. So far none of the raids have started any investigation ending in conviction. They have succeeded in scaring off clientele, who are also interrogated by police, and in impounding vast sums of money.

Police are not above lying. Not just in your face, by telling you that laws exist that actually don't, telling you that they have rights to do stuff to you they actually don't have, but also in the reports they write about you. You always have to be very careful not to give them anything they can edit or abuse, but you're never safe from suddenly appearing statements they claim you made.

After some raids on window brothel areas, where the results were zero and the public exposure heightens the risk of people figuring out these raids are pointless, similar actions started in the license-free home sex work sector. Here the tools are different, and the approach more hostile.

Not only is police milling about in front of your house very bad for your standing in the neighborhood, and does the police wreck and impound as they do in the window brothel raids, but they exploit your vulnerabilities as a social outcast as well. This is a process they call "ketenaanpak" (chain approach) where as many problems are brought to bear as possible. All to "help" you, of course.

The municipality is informed you're working without a license. Whether you need a license or not, now you're in trouble, because since you've been raided, you're now suspected to be involved with trafficking, and therefore you can't work anymore. It doesn't matter if you got off clean. You haven't been careful enough to keep the suspicion of crime-related activity off yourself, so you're now contaminated. I'm not sarcastic, this is how judges rule.

What's more, police will officially inform the municipality that you're working commercially, because otherwise they wouldn't have been allowed to raid you, would they? So you must be commercial, which does need a license, so you've been in violation during your whole career, and they're able to fine you tens of thousands of Euros. Unless you submit to some other stipulation, like leaving the municipality or joining a licensed brothel.

Police will inform your building society, landlord or mortgage bank that you're "running an illegal bordello" in your house. This very often means eviction. Especially sex workers with foreign roots or sex workers with any kind of troubled history don't stand a chance. If the work was provided in a house registered to a third party, then this third party is automatically a trafficking suspect.

If you're the owner of your house, and it is not mortgaged, there is still the option of evicting you because you're in breach of zoning laws. Apparently this is a costly or difficult affair, because municipalities and police lean heavily on the other eviction options, before trying zoning as a tool to make you homeless. I haven't been able to get further information on this issue.

Many independent sex workers do the sex work part time, in addition to a regular job. Sex work is variable, and it is flexible enough to allow it to be tucked in outside of office hours. If an independent sex worker is caught by police, and they manage to track down where you work, they commonly inform your employer. This very often ends in dismissal, and judges tend to side with the employer. Independent part-time whores don't like LinkedIn.

In rare cases, insurance companies and banks have been informed their client was a sex worker. Even those few financial institutions that don't flat-out refuse services to hookers will do so after being "warned" by police. Whether this is done intentionally to further ruin the sex worker or is a side-effect of police trying to track down money to impound is unclear.

The tax office is often used as a boogie-man, but rarely gets involved. This is a strange fact when compared to all those other people who are so willing to add fuel to the fire of the witch hunt, especially because their behavior towards sex workers is generally all but benign. The threat is otherwise realistic, because claims by police of any kind of foul play, including impossible turnovers, are indisputable to the tax office.

Of course, police will try to take your money. And often they will be able to find it, or to track it down after you sent it elsewhere. As long as it's been moved legally, they can easily find it and take it from you. They claim you could get it back if detective work shows it to be clean, but so far I haven't heard from anyone who actually had any returned. Procedures to get anything returned are a waste of effort.

As if all the above weren't enough, they go after your loved ones. Not only do they tend to inform parents if you're still in your early 20s, but if you have kids, those will come into the sights of youth services. If they get involved, the suffering multiplies. At the smallest provocation, you can lose your kids. They make that abundantly clear to you. They often offer to take your kids right away, to spare everyone the trouble.

Given that many independent sex workers work from home, a raid will often find her not alone. In the press statements this is always put forward as a clear sign that something fishy is going on. Men in the house must mean violent pimps, another woman must mean that this was a crowded brothel where clients are tag-teamed, and when a 15-year old girl was present in one case, this caused quite some press buzz.

The press, of course, doesn't question in what capacity that 15-year-old is found in the house. Prostitution to them is a world of cardboard cut-outs, who don't have relatives, who can't babysit for a neighbour when between clients, who don't live in houses where they also have a family, so anyone near them must be part of the misery porn story. Especially if it makes that story more juicy.

There is a way to make this all go away. Once they've threatened you with all they're willing to do to make you miserable, childless, homeless and jobless, they explain that if you would turn out to be a trafficking victim, then all this would disappear. You would even get help, if you wanted. All you have to do is claim that you were coerced, and accuse somebody. Then everything will be right.

You'd think they would have gotten used to it, but every time a sex worker doesn't want to give enough information to actually put anyone in prison, the cops are baffled. They just can't get your head around a victim not wanting her perpetrator in prison. And they got you to admit you're a victim, that's something that they just will not doubt. Or maybe vice cops are extremely good actors. They keep pressuring you, because you must just not have understood the choice you got, right?

In fact, the National Rapporteur in her reports calls for even more explicit explanation of the choice between the government ruining your life or you coming up with an accusation. Because if it isn't because we're too stupid to understand the decision we're making, then she doesn't understand why we would choose bearing the brunt of what government can throw at us over falsely accusing an innocent. It can't be morals, whores don't have any, right?

The police is pretending to be fighting the battle they lost in the 90's. They're fighting gangs that don't exist anymore, mafia structures that never did exist, claiming success after success, but never getting any real gangsters. They use excessive violence to force whores to help them shore up their fantasy war on trafficking. They're not making anything better. They are the cause of untold misery. The material damages caused by police alone are, after taxes, the most significant cost of doing business for many independent girls.

It is interesting to see how the trafficking mythology gets a new twist every time a raid, which is meant to bag more than 100 coerced prostitutes, going by the numbers the police purports to believe, ends up with zero sex workers "rescued." There is always a new explanation, always a new insight. And they make it look like this was expected, and they knew beforehand they wouldn't find anything. Whatever the justification was in advance.

Sometimes "this action was only meant to map out the criminal infrastructure." Sometimes "Coerced prostitution has moved to the illegal sector." Sometimes "we never expected any woman to come forward immediately, but you never know how many women will be made to think in the coming months about their situation by showing we care." Sometimes "this is a signal we don't accept human trafficking, which is modern slavery, and which happens here in our country."

Even though many actions, especially after showing no results, are justified as "getting a grip on prostitution and retrieving information," police really isn't interested in any information about how things really are. When confronted with their lack of results and lack of insight, they either deny the problem or lament that it's actually impossible to get any reliable knowledge of our shadowy business.

Knowledge does exist, although it is scarce and sometimes naive. There are university researchers like Hendrik Wagenaar or Dina Siegel, and there used to be a wealth of knowledge in advocacy group De Rode Draad (the Red Thread), before it was bankrupted for not kow-towing to Amsterdam municipality. Still well-informed researchers like Sietske Altink try to educate, but because their information doesn't paint the desired picture, they are largely ignored and considered troublemakers.

Partly this is because the media are completely uncritical of government. They go to great lengths to toe the government line. But partly it is also self-serving behavior by those same media. Dry truth doesn't sell, whereas misery porn does. So again and again Dutch media choose to be complicit in hoaxes. It is unlikely that a journalist worth his salt would not be critical enough to see that something isn't right.

It happens over and over again. One time it's a fake ex-prostitute who is the only one agreeing with Amsterdam municipal policy, another time it's a girl who works in window prostitution in a city without window brothels, and is in a leadership position in a drug and gun running syndicate at 12 years old, every time they fall for the same stories. And they act surprised when, time and time again, it turns out to be a hoax.

Misery is news, and sex sells. No wonder the media relish in horrific slave girl stories, often with slightly more sexual details than would be strictly necessary. The pornographic element in the stories is camouflaged by pretending it is a story of heroism and courage, even though it requires careful screening from any critical question to keep that facade intact. The tales are shocking, and shockingly fragile.

A small number of semi-professional victims dominate the soft news, misery porn books and documentaries. They get new fake names for each publication, and because their stories change each time to fit prohibitionist fashion, the public tends to view each appearance as a new case. Any comment on internal inconsistencies or plain impossibilities in their story is dismissed as "heartless," and proven lies are justified by assuming something really horrible must underlie the need to deceive.

Nor are the media ever disillusioned when large scale police raids fail, over and over, to uncover any significant amount of trafficking, let alone coercion. The carefully crafted evasions by politicians and police aren't followed up on or questioned. The stories have to be in line with the slavegirl fantasy that passes for common knowledge about prostitution. But unfortunately, it doesn't end there.

In the Netherlands, there is an explicit rule for judges that they don't need evidence for any fact that is well-known. This becomes a real problem when trafficking cases are judged by judges who have been selected and trained to be specialist "experts" by the rescue industry. They literally take rescue industry dogma over actual evidence. The waves of hysteria used to break on unimpressed judges, but they have become part of the problem.

Dogma states that trafficking is extremely hard to see, because the pimps are very clever and have completely brainwashed their victim. That is a blank cheque to dismiss anything the "victim," "perpetrator" or in fact any witness says, and fill in the whole story from the preconceptions learned from rescue industry rhetoric. Since the prosecutor acts in the same way, and sometimes edits the statements and evidence to fit this narrative, it all slots right into place.

The fable of the Emperors New Clothes springs to mind whenever a prohibitionist official solemnly states that trafficking can only be seen by those who have become "capable" by having been vetted and instructed to fit the facts of the case to a mold of expectations and preconceptions. They call this "expertise." Those critical of this way of working are denounced as naive, romanticizing sex work, possible clientele, heartless towards victims, or ignorant.

For prostitutes, it is very important to notice when the police stops trying to find reasons to subject you to an investigation, and when the investigation actually starts. The signals of trafficking used to decide that you are to be investigated are not the same as the items of evidence that are commonly used to convict your friends or your partner.

Evidence judges think proves your partner is coercing and exploiting you can be many things that a sane person wouldn't even consider. If your husband picks up your work phone, he is obviously controlling you. If you both testify you love each other, then that is an obvious lie, because no real loving husband would tolerate his wife doing something so vile as prostitution, so he's faking it to coerce you.

If you work during your period, you're working while sick, and that's proof of coercion. If your friend spots for you by calling for security words before and after bookings, that's controlling your work and therefore evidence of coercion. If your man bought lingerie or condoms, then he is supplying your work and this is proof of coercion. After all, if you give a whore lingerie, you know it will be used in her work, so private use is no excuse.

Having your husband in the house during dates is damning. No real loving husband could stand being around while his wife is doing the horrible deeds in the next room. If he carries your handbag, he's controlling your documents, that's evidence too. If there are deeds to his name, that's evidence of him exploiting you - and if the deeds are to your name, that's evidence he's using you as a shield. Both are evidence of trafficking.

These are actual pieces of reasoning used by judges to reach a guilty verdict on human trafficking, lifted from the verdicts. Many verdicts aren't easy to find, but they can be a treasure trove to learn what you must avoid in order to make sure you don't get trapped. The amount of evidence that suffices is very low. But even with the lowered thresholds, there are still cases where they go too far.

A while ago, a conviction of a trafficker, who had been sent to prison for seven years, was overturned on appeal. It sent a modest shockwave through the world of prostitution politics. It turned out that the original court had convicted based only on the statements of a single accuser, without any supporting evidence. This was such a violation of due process, that even in a trafficking case this could not hold.

The judges were lambasted in national newspapers by the head of the human trafficking division of the national prosecutors office about demanding evidence and adherence to basic rules of due process, saying they are ignoring the realities of trafficking. He lamented that human trafficking should only be adjudicated by specialist judges who had been properly indoctrinated in trafficking theory.

In the same newspaper, a number of judges wrote that the court overturning the conviction had consisted of indoctrinated judges, but that there were limits to how far they were willing to go. This is a rare crack in the machine where probable cause for investigation may be assumed, where powers for detection purposes are granted very easily, where common fiction is allowed as prejudice, and where the minimum requirements for evidence are lowered. And still the prohibitionists bay for blood.

Now to taxes. In the Netherlands, prostitution is taxed. There are two ways to pay, one is to be a registered enterpreneur, in which case all regulations apply, but everything is scrutinized down to the last detail, and any error is taken as fraud. The result is that slip-ups cause the Tax office to estimate your turnover three to ten times too high, and after-tax and fine you into poverty. If they don't know you earn your living by hooking, this doesn't happen.

The other way is via a so-called "opt-in" system, where taxes are levied via your operator. This means you pay taxes like an employee, but you don't get the concomitant rights. This is treated as if it's a concession towards prostitutes, but the benefit is mostly for the operator and the tax office, who have a lot less paperwork to do to get their money from you.

It shouldn't be surprising that the tax office gets chummy with the brothel operators. "To polder" is a verb coined in the Netherlands to indicate that extensive compromising is used to obtain compromises in policy that will avoid future conflict. This "polder model" is proudly viewed as a better way to do things. And from the perspective of policy makers, it probably is.

The best example of poldering is government, representatives of entrepreneurs and labor unions meeting to decide upon labor regulations and wages to avoid the messy series of conflicts that usually accompanies finding an acceptable balance. It is of course impossible to have everyone affected represented, but the important thing is that those forces too great to suppress are satisfied.

In prostitution, the concept was the same. Government, NGO's, political pressure groups and the licensed operators decided on policy. Any consultation with "the sector" is never with the girls, always with the licensed operators. It should come as no surprise that rules were made that were quite easy on the licensed operators, and very harsh on independent sex workers. Current and future regulations all push sex workers to subject themselves to an operator.

From our perspective it looks like the tax office lets itself be used as a tool to wipe out the competition of the licensed operators in exchange for the convenience of the licensed operators doing the extorting of taxes without the tax office getting dirty hands. In a direct economy like prostitution, proving turnover is a problem, and the tax office values not having to do that.

Whores in the illegal sector often pay taxes under creative euphemisms for their job. This allows them to be treated as normal single-person enterprises, with all the discounts and advantages that entails. They pay their taxes and assume that this fulfills their fiscal obligations. Unfortunately it doesn't, and it is considered fraud. Whether the tax office actually enforces it is impossible to say in any single case. Some get away with it, some are bankrupted.

Finally, government also tries to get the general populace mobilized in their crusade against trafficking. They sponsor anonymous tip lines, they place ads in press, TV and online media encouraging suspicion, they try to make clients report the slightest and most ridiculous hints of trafficking. They try to erect a boogie-man and then look good fighting it.

Years of trying to make whores turn each other in have not been very fruitful. Trying to convince someone of obvious falsehoods about something they experience every day does not work well. As a result, recently the anonymous snitching line M bowed to realism and stressed in their latest campaign that by turning in colleagues as trafficked, you cut down on the competition.

Another example is the hotel business. To combat trafficking, a new rule has been "voluntarily self-imposed" by the hotel sector after significant government pressure. It entails making a firing offense for any hotel personnel not to expel guests when suspicions of prostitution arise. In the Netherlands, this is a draconian measure. It came after newspapers speculated that by closing down many of the legal brothels, whores would start working in hotels.

Similar things happen in housing. A building society not evicting a known prostitute is not quite accused of facilitating human trafficking, but we're getting close. It is considered suspect if it shows that it doesn't care. People and organizations are expected to display their allegiance in the fight against human trafficking by ostracizing sex workers, no matter what the actual consequences.

These articles sketch the Dutch model in broad strokes. It is not portrayed like this in media, but this is the drill-down of what actually happens at the sharp edge. I hope everyone who doubts any point in what I write will investigate for themselves. Skepticism is the only means to get to a realistic view of the Dutch model, and to see that it is nowhere close to the image portrayed about it by anyone.

Claims about the Dutch model exacerbating trafficking rely entirely on data from our rescue industry. There is hardly any coercion in Dutch prostitution, and there has never been any to speak of. The only comparisons made are between one set of fantasy figures and another. There is no actual information about Dutch prostitution in mainstream media, and there is great pressure to keep it that way.

Sanctimonious prohibitionist media personalities are already claiming that decriminalized sex work had its fair chance, but it blew it. They're getting no push back from moderates. People are very hesitant to question trafficking dogma, even if they can see that it defies facts. The problem is that they will not start to doubt the overarching mythology despite seeing it conflicts with reality in any part they can actually see for themselves.

People like getting their preconceptions reinforced. They view us as bizarre caricatures, and find it difficult, inconceivable, embarassing, painful even, to consider that we might be people in charge of our life, with different choices and different values. They find the discussion awkward, and are rarely game to get some information from somebody on the inside. Those that do, usually aren't the ones that need it.

I have a hard time dealing with people believing misery porn so readily. I have an even harder time with people dismissing my experiences with the Dutch system as irrelevant compared to the huge suffering in their imagination. I get told that I'm lucky, because in other countries, like Sweden, the UK or the USA, the situation is worse than here. But that they make a bigger mess of it than we doesn't excuse a single thing that's happening here.

The Dutch model is not a failed experiment in liberty for sex workers. When I read about Dutch legalization and what people think it entails, I despair. The actual situation is so far from what people think it is, and so much farther from how the Dutch government likes to pretend it is, that a quick answer just doesn't suffice. The fact is that we went from pretending it wasn't criminalized to pretending it's been decriminalized. Currently we're pretending we gave equitable treatment an honest try. In fact, the amount of government repression has only ever increased. Of course then the Dutch model works badly - but not as badly as the Dutch government would want it to.

Series on the Dutch Model:
Introduction
History
Legal history
Legal developments
Daily reality
War on sex work

Dutch Model - Daily Reality

The image foreigners have of Dutch prostitution is usually either of a utopian candy shop atmosphere where benevolent government has made a safe haven by taking a stance of solidarity and just rule, or of a cesspool of immorality where white slavery is condoned by a hippie government that doesn't want to face facts about the horrors of prostitution and human trafficking. Neither image comes close to the truth.

In the previous English articles on my blog, I have detailed the history of Dutch prostitution, and the political developments around "the Dutch model" of legalization. All these are important in order to understand the background of the current situation, the real reasons behind the so-called legalization, and the way things are escalating, but it doesn't explain what the current state of affairs is for the average prostitute.

Dutch prostitution is a diverse and healthy sector, in which indoor work dominates strongly. Street prostitution exists, but is a very small part of the sector, and is often viewed as the least healthy. To be honest I don't know much about it, as it is a pretty separate branch in which I have no acquaintances. There are more lewd horror stories about street prostitution than there are street prostitutes.

Coercion is vanishingly rare. Apart from some widely publicized excesses, this has always been the case. The few actual investigations that have been done into prostitution show that levels of violence and coercion whithin prostitution are approximately equal to those in the general population. This is largely ignored in favor of alarmist reports based on hype and gut feeling.

There is a regulated and licensed circuit, and separately from that a large and healthy unlicensed, often called "illegal," circuit. The moniker "illegal" is a misnomer, because this term is used to collect both illicit brothels and prostitutes that perform in ways that are not (yet) required to be licensed. This is no accident, since the association between not being under government control and crime is one with which the government has long been indoctrinating the populace.

In the licensed circuit, prostitutes are completely dependent on operators who provide locations and, most importantly, have a license. Due to the highly restrictive licensing policies of the municipalities, licensed operations are scarce and can use their oligopoly position to extract large sums of money and impose strict working rules. Opposing them means losing your workplace, and once you've been expelled by one, the others treat you as contaminated goods.

The illegal circuit, by contrast, contains many small operations who have to fight for the good girls, and who compete by pricing and value for money. Everyone is equally vulnerable to being informed on, so there is much more mutual respect and agreement. Not only the operators are very different in the illegal circuit, but also the clientele is different, and usually more pleasant.

Pimps are uncommon, but some girls will always want a pimp. If they can't find one, they'll make one. It is easier to work without a pimp than with one, by no means are pimps a menace to the industry since the gangs lost their foothold. As things are, finding a pimp is harder than avoiding them, and most girls who want a pimp have to resort to creating their own.

Dutch clients are generally well-behaved and pleasant. Even the tourists are no big issue, because they know they're coming into an established business. Dutch prostitution culture, like in most places, is one of businesslike transactions where the professional sets the boundaries. This means a pleasant and safe experience for both sides of the transaction. Protection against clients by guards is practically superfluous.

Prices in the Netherlands are relatively low. This is because legality means clients don't expect to pay danger money, and because the Dutch prostitution sector has been swamped by girls from Eastern European countries with low wage standards. Eastern European women completely dominate most branches of Dutch prostitution as a result. Despite the low margins, a hard worker can still make the job pay.

These factors make the Netherlands an unlucrative but pleasant place to work. There are, however, problems, all of them stemming from government.

It is unknown how many prostitutes work in the Netherlands, since they have strong incentive to stay out of view of the government. Even if there were openness from the prostitutes, there is still the issue that actual data is not welcome. Official reports take care only to include data from prohibitionist-controlled sources that don't actually have any basis in reality. Real attempts at assessment by social scientists are practically ignored.

There are two sources of information popular in press and parliament about the number of coerced prostitutes. The first, and most common, is a number published in a report by police. The report claims that 50-90% of prostitutes are coerced. On closer inspection, this turns out to be a collection of guesses by vice policemen of total number of prostitutes where some police matter might be involved. Most of the policemen interviewed declined to guess, because they thought it was irresponsible to do so. It has no further substance.

Second, there is the NGO Comensha, which keeps track of all signals of trafficking. Any signal of trafficking picked up by police, border guards, municipalities, or reported by panicky parents is unquestioningly registered as one victim. They pay lip service to the fact that this concerns possible victims, but after this remark tucked into the introduction of their report, the treatment of the accumulated number is as if every case were confirmed.

The bar is set low to be called a victim. If you have a tattoo, or you have new friends, or you are from an Eastern European country, or you have nice clothes, or you seem hesitant to talk to the cop, or you didn't buy your own ticket, or you have new friends, or the cop gets a hunch about you, you're registered as a victim. And there are many more bizarre and spurious "signs of trafficking." Here is an illustrative quote from a recent report by the National Rapporteur Human Trafficking:

The "sluice team" of the Royal Marechaussee (paramilitary police) has, in line with its checks on so-called risk flights from Bulgaria, spoken to a Bulgarian woman. Multiple times this woman has been checked when arriving in the Netherlands and indicates that she finds this objectionable. She claims she ("still") has nothing to do with prostitution. This time she claims to have come to the Netherlands to visit a number of friends for three days. From further observation by the reporting members of the Royal Marechaussee attempting to spot any person picking her up, it emerged that the woman had gone to the Netherlands Railway (NS) informations desk, then tried to contact someone via public telephone, and again contacted someone by mobile telephone. Following this she has left the airport by train. The Royal Marechaussee has submitted a notification about the woman to Comensha for registration.

This is presented uncritically, as if it's a laudable effort to combat trafficking! I have taken no relevant context away, I have not twisted any meaning. This is considered right by the Rapporteur. This is the kind of background the Dutch public doesn't dig up, they only read the ever increasing number of trafficking cases in the news and think that there's an epidemic of victimhood, and something ought to be done.

Quite apart from what constitutes a "signal of trafficking," it is important to know what the law considers trafficking. The Dutch trafficking law is one of the most convoluted and ill-defined laws on the books. This stems from the fact that it is mostly dictated by anti-trafficking treaties written by other countries' diplomats for other juridical situations than exist in the Netherlands.

The vagueness and equivocation in the text of the law creates great opportunities for activist judges and prosecutors. On superficial reading, it seems relatively benign, if somewhat misguided. In its application, it is more a blunt instrument. The fuzzy phrases have been interpreted in the widest possible sense by the ministry, and as a result many more people are threatened by this law than the public knows.

It would take too much time and column space to point out every flaw in the trafficking law and its application, so I will only point out some of the main issues.

The basis of trafficking, according to the law, is an element of coercion and an element of exploitation. Neither of these is well defined. An added complication is that "exploitation in prostitution shall always be considered exploitation," ast the law phrases it, which is interpreted by the judiciary as meaning that every case where anyone profits from prostitution is a case of exploitation. Judges reluctant to go along with this are disparaged, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Second is the element of coercion. While everyone agrees that a thug imprisoning and drugging a girl for rape is obvious coercion, the law extends much further. Any situation of "dependency" is sufficient to satisfy the requirement for coercion. Being in love with a man who profits from the proceeds of your sex work is a factual dependency sufficient to prove dependency and therefore coercion.

The ministry states that coercion and exploitation should be measured by comparison with "the situation an emancipated prostitute in the Netherlands is supposed to have." Unfortunately, this is judged by people who don't have the least notion of, or interest in, any information about or from prostitutes, emancipated or not. They call it a fiction, and frankly that is the best word for it.

But the same ministry who wants emancipated prostitutes to be the benchmark for judging coercion also puts forward explicit examples of coercion, for instance the sex worker coming from an economically weak background, or being informed of the fact that quitting their sex job will cause them to have less income. One specific ukase by the ministry defines "to demonstrate to a prospective prostitute the income that can be earned in prostitution" as coercion.

Excluded from any requirement of coercion, weak as it may be, is the clause about involvement with any prostitute crossing any state border. As long as you somehow profit, you are trafficking her. This is an easy score for prosecutors, and is used a lot. Despite its obvious conflict with the purported purpose of the law, it is vehemently defended by the National Rapporteur as an important tool to combat trafficking.

The maximum penalties for trafficking are remarkably high. If you feel the irresistible urge to traffic a woman, it is better to maim her so badly that she will be unable to become a prostitute. Even if she dies due to this violence, your maximum penalty is still lower than the maximum penalty if you had trafficked her. This paragraph is of course very black humor, but the facts are accurate.

Due to twists in interpretation, partially outside of the scope of trafficking laws, consensual sex work obtained from a sex worker under the age of 18 is penalized whether the buyer could conceivably know she was below 18 or not. Even if he has been deceived with the greatest skill, he is still guilty of debauchery with someone under age. Bear in mind that the age of consent in the Netherlands is 16. If he hadn't paid, he could have gotten as kinky as he wanted with her with no repercussions. This is meant to be expanded to cover any prostitute under 21, infantilizing even more women.

There are many more criticisms to be leveled at the trafficking law, but they are dwarfed by these issues. Suffice it to say that the construction of said law is antithetical to a society where prostitution is even marginally accepted. A law should be a clear standard of behavior, penalizing only what is unjust, and be clearly demarcated to avoid spill-over of penalties into situations where it does not right the wrongs it was designed to combat. This law does not meet that standard.

An effect of the excessively corrupted law, erroneously considered a side-effect, is affording very wide-ranging powers to police. The wide scope of behaviors criminalized, combined with the low thresholds to consider any situation a trafficking situation, combined with the broadened powers due to the high penalties, combined with a desire to score on this issue, makes it very easy for vice police to bully, coerce, cajole, or do whatever they want, since they sail very close to the political wind.

Contact with police is a very unpredictable thing. It seems to depend mostly on how the cop perceives you. If you're assertive and feisty, they view you as an immoral harlot and they're much more likely to try to ruin you. If you're submissive or naive, they tend to be more protective and you're let off much more easily. Pride goeth before destruction in these matters. I find it perverse that the strong willed are preferentially chosen as victims in their pantomime.

Problems with police can be divided into two groups: Daily bullying and organized persecution. The former mostly entails vice police coming on endless "inspections" where they intrude as much as they can into your work and personal life. If you work for a licensed operator, this is usually limited, because vice police want to be chummy with the licensee, but if you're in any way vulnerable to their tactics they become a pest.

It mostly involves "inspecting" your toys and condoms, going through your house, wanting to know the ins and outs of your sex life, preaching to you about the horrors of your line of work, exhorting you to make something of yourself, and relishing in the fact that you have no power to get rid of them, whereas they have power over you. The sooner you see how this works the less painful it becomes.

Some girls take this to its logical conclusion and just give the cops what they want. It depends on the cop in question what this is. For some it's misery stories, for others it's the chance to pester a rebellious girl into submission, some want you to fall crying in their arms, sobbing about your awful life, and of course plenty are just looking for a free blow job once a week. If you know how to satisfy just one local vice cop, many problems simply disappear.

As can be gathered from the information about trafficking signals specified above, it is very hard not to be a candidate for an investigation. You want to avoid that, because investigations cause untold trouble. In dealing with police, there is simply no way to get out ahead, and little chance to get out unscathed. The best way of dealing with local vice cops is to never attract their attention. As long as you don't get noticed, you don't get inspected.

The work is fine. I can't repeat that enough. My job is great, and I wouldn't swap with anyone. As long as I can get things done without too much government interference, I can't think of a better way to spend my working days. It is a different story when organized persecution comes ramming down your door. That is treated in the next, and final, part of this series.

Series on the Dutch Model:
Introduction
History
Legal history
Legal developments
Daily reality
War on sex work

Dutch Model - Legal developments

Since legalization was enacted in 2000, there have been calls to "finally" regulate prostitution. Despite not knowing the first thing about our business, politicians drafted a law and regulation that was supposed to improve our lot and protect us from coercion, harm and injustices. This was first called the "kaderwet" or framework law, but later got the title "Wet regulering prostitutie en bestrijding misstanden seksbranche" (law regulating prostitution and combating abuses sex work sector) or WRP.

The opportunity to impose rules on prostitution was enthusiastically embraced, but the drafting process took several years. This was mainly due to differences of opinion between parties about which purposes the regulations should serve. The American imposition of new trafficking rules in 2004 upset the process, drawing it out longer. When the original version of this draft was published, the year 2008 had rolled around.

It was very clear from the contents of the draft that this proposal of law had been designed by a Christian minister. It entailed no rights for sex workers, only tools for municipal government to eradicate prostitution and a registration system to avoid whores escaping from government scrutiny. Clientele of unlicensed prostitutes would be penalized as well as sex workers operating without license.

Part of the plan was that sex workers would get an identity pass from municipal government at registration, which would have to be checked by each client before each transaction. This was met with much resistance from prostitution and human rights organizations, and the identity pass was removed from the draft. The remainder of the law was left criticized but relatively unscathed and was accepted by parliament.

The Senate proved a bigger obstacle, and, in contrast with the ministry and parliament, was susceptible to arguments from the people who were going to be subjected to the new law. They scrutinized the proposal, and found many unanswered questions about efficacy and necessity, as well as infringements on civil and human rights. There were multiple consultations with the responsible minister, who wasn't the one who drafted the proposal, on these issues.

Every consultation was farcical. The minister did not have any answers and made a complete clown of himself. He was stymied when confronted with obvious questions about whether the level of disruption his law would cause was justified in the absence of clear goals and purposes. It was only after a government reform, with associated tightening of party reins, that treatment of the proposal was allowed to continue, now without heavy criticism from coalition parties.

Despite this political maneuver, there was still no answer to any of the pressing questions that needed to be answered to declare the proposal juridically sound. In a surprise capitulation, the minister suddenly dropped two large sections of the law that had been the focus of most criticism. The parts concerning licensing were kept, but the central registration of all prostitutes in one register, and the duty of the client to make sure his whore was licensed were deleted.

As I write this article, the revised proposal of law is under scrutiny by parliament, but since they were not critical about the original, I don't expect them to be critical about the pared down version. More worryingly, the indefensible parts of the proposal he dropped on the state level are now promoted to municipalities, which are prompted to implement these regulations themselves on the municipal level.

The current proposal entails a compulsory licensing system for "commercial sex enterprises." It contains rules describing circumstances where it is compulsory to withhold or withdraw licenses, and tools to arbitrarily withhold or withdraw licenses. It contains penalization of prostitutes if they are not licensed, if they are licensed but not in the correct way, and we're even penalized if our operator doesn't obey the law, whether we know it or not.

One major justification of the law is that it is meant to bring uniformity to municipal regulations, thus obviating the flight of coerced prostitution to less regulated municipalities. This is instantly belied by the fact that there are explicit allowances for stricter additional regulations. There are no stipulations to guarantee a workable licensing situation for sex workers, only stipulated restrictions.

Despite the age of consent at 16, the age of majority at 18, and the age where paid labor is allowed at 12, a prostitute will be penalized if she works under 21 years of age. She is then treated as a minor. This is professed to be protection of vulnerable young girls. The method is to fine the woman. The minister, when questioned, stated that this fine was a "light penalty" to "emphasize the girls own responsibility." Bear in mind that the rationale behind the rule was that younger women would not be able to freely choose due to immaturity. It is odd to think that this does not preclude fining them.

Originally, the penalization of working under 21 was motivated as a tool to "extract women from prostitution, voluntarily or involuntarily." The "reasoning" behind this part of the proposal was that pimps alledgedly wait until a girl is not a minor anymore to push her into sex work. In support, a rousing publication by the Netherlands' largest rescue industry sect is quoted.

Apparently a belief existed that pimps ignore the draconian trafficking laws, but would be stumped should the girl get fined for working at "too young" an age. Apparently women can be considered competent at 18 in any line of work, except when it involves them husbanding their own sexuality. Apparently a throw-away lie on this prohibition making it easier to force purportedly coerced women out of their jobs is sufficient to apply laws that ignore the right to sexual self-determination.

When grilled on this issue by the Senate, the minister changed tack. The current justification of the infantilization of young prostitutes is "to protect the bodily integrity of young adults." This is presented as "an instrument to counteract prostitution under the age of 21." At least one step of failed logic has been removed from the official justification, but still a reason based in sanity and reality is missing.

In the Netherlands, you're allowed to fuck every guy on a rave when you're 16, you can join the army to get blown up in Afghanistan at 17, at 18 you're fully competent for marriage, breeding kids, drinking, gambling, to stand trial and to work yourself to an early grave - but not to decide that getting paid is reason enough to deliver sexual services. Then government will punish you.

The least objectionable part of the proposed law is to require prostitution businesses to submit a paper detailing how they plan to fight human trafficking. This has been done before on the municipal level, and was a nice earner for people who could write such papers for you. It didn't help one bit, of course, since it was and is meant to be an legalistic obstacle to get a license if you don't have someone helping you out. However, it is one of the less perfidious rules.

Not so with the rule that anywhere where "commercial prostitution" may be suspected to occur, municipal civil servants are allowed to enter without consent from the owner or occupant of the house or building. This is already standard practice for many licensed prostitutes, but with the new law anybody can get a sudden surprise raid by municipal non-police busybodies who say you're prostituting because nobody needs that many condoms.

There have been many soothing words from the minister that he only targets "bedrijfsmatige" (commercial, litt: as a business) prostitution. The wording in the definition in the proposal of law, however, is crafted to include everyone who performs sexual services for any kind of compensation. When quizzed on this, the minister said that the ministry doesn't mean to target independent home workers, but doesn't want to exclude them from the law because they don't want to hinder municipalities that do.

Inclusion of every single sex worker as a target for the law is a point pursued by the Association of Dutch Municipalities, the most powerful lobby group of the Netherlands, who have been sending pressing letters to the minister imploring him to give tools in this law that will encompass all sex workers and allow municipalities to completely forbid any kind of sex work in their territories. The minister has been very accomodating to them, but claims this is not a goal of the law. Of course, both demands are met in the proposal.

Since the 90's, a policy of slow extermination of prostitution areas has been pursued by many municipalities. There was a misunderstanding among sex workers that with legalization, this would come to an end. The legalization was, however, only a tool to expedite this policy. The pace was now no longer set by resistance from the law, but by financial concerns and the lingering public opinion that prostitution should have a place in Dutch society.

When combating prostitution, municipalities always claim shutting down businesses is necessary to combat human trafficking, even though it is usually quite obvious that the actual purpose is gentrification. The Hague is known to have commissioned a feasibility report on the option to shut down the Doubletstraat window area in a bid to upgrade the nearby Bierkade area, but was informed that "unfortunately" insufficient crime existed to make that workable.

Amsterdam has been using money from building societies to buy up window brothels, claiming that the "low economic value" of the brothels, coffee-shops (cannabis cafés), and peep shows should give way to high-end couture, art, and restaurants. When this costly and failing project is criticized, the municipality invariably retorts that this project is necessary to combat human trafficking.

Utrecht was very proud of its severely overregulated window brothels, touting them as the showcase of what could be achieved by strict government interference, until the nearby sewage treatment plant would be modernized and shrunk, raising development opportunities. Then suddenly, within months, every single operator lost his license due to trafficking accusations in a secret report.

The Utrecht municipality claims to want window prostitution to return, but whenever the requirements for a license are met by anyone, the municipality changes the requirements. They use discretionary powers, meant to disrupt money laundering by organized crime, to delay and disrupt any attempt to set up any prostitution business. Local people are approached by the municipality and told step-by-step how to file complaints that will delay licensing even further.

The municipalities are, unfortunately, less sensitive to embarassment. Where the national government backs off from items of policy that are obvious failures or iniquities, the municipalities don't care. Partly this is because the national government is much better scrutinized by press, and can count on opposition parties blowing the whistle on failed policy, whereas the municipalities are much less open and much less under the watchful eye of the press.

A nice example is the case of Patricia Perquin. In 2011, a national newspaper announced a series of articles written by a prostitute from the Amsterdam red light district. Usually hookers' opinions are kept out of official channels, so this drew quite some attention, both from us whores and the general public. We were happy that the voice of at least one prostitute would be heard as something more than soundbites in somebody else's show.

From the initial article on, we knew something wasn't right. She didn't write like a whore, and her experiences were more reminiscent of misery porn TV shows than of anything any of us had ever seen in the Amsterdam red light. As the series progressed, her portrayal of prostitution became more absurd, and she took venomous potshots at well-known Amsterdam prostitute advocates who had been in conflict with the municipality.

Six months later, in 2012, she came out with a book, which was even more absurd. It was promoted as a true story, but it read like a dimestore novel. The mass media promoted the booklet, its authenticity was confirmed by people within the rescue industry who claimed to know her, her credibility had been established by her vetting by the newspaper, and it became a bestseller, as well as the talk of the town.

It was remarkable how seriously she was treated. Many news outlets featured stories about this "brave woman" who told her "true story." Meanwhile, most actual whores were not that convinced that she ever had been a hooker, but we were all sure her story was a complete fabrication. It was jarring to see how this fraud was getting attention with a low freak show content when compared to real hookers who had made the news.

She was, by far, not the first prostitute to come forward with her story. There had been many who tried to show the world what their experience had been like. These other whores had never been remotely as successful, even with better reading books, and were ostracised by mass media instead of hailed as heroes. Their story was publicly made out to be "too romantic" and not horrific enough. Not so for the misery porn by Perquin.

Three months after publication of her first book, Patricia Perquin was hired to be the official advisor on prostitution policy by the municipality of Amsterdam. Not only were her inane ideas hailed as the way forward, she was used as the official voice of prostitutes, not just to justify policy, but also to silence opposition from actual whores and advocacy groups.

Several weeks before the news of this new position came out, prostitution advocacy foundation De Rode Draad (Red Thread) had published a poignant review of Patricias book and articles, reaching the conclusion that she was a fraud. The municipality of Amsterdam responded by blackmailing them, and when they didn't submit, bankrupting the foundation. Despite the foundations national fame and notoriety, and even official inclusion as a government partner in laws, this conflict was reason enough for the municipality to destroy them.

It took about a year before the inevitable happened, and Patricia Perquin was revealed to be a well-known hoaxer and con artist, who had been fired as a journalist multiple times for making up stories, and who had been running a publishing company she used for conning authors out of money during the time she claimed to have been a full-time prostitute on the Wallen. Now that her face was known, it became very clear very quickly that she had never worked there.

The remarkable thing, if one is not already grizzled and cynical from seeing it happen over and over again, is that the municipality didn't drop her as advisor. She kept her position, despite the denouement, and the responsible alderman (who is currently deputy prime minister) claimed that "We realize like no other that the Red Light is surrounded by question marks and obscurities. That now questions are raised about the resumé of this woman does not mean that nothing is wrong in the Red Light. Her stories don't differ from the experiences of other prostitutes." There was, according to him, proof, secret proof, that she had been truthful, and her advice was still great.

Amsterdam doesn't use her name as a passe-partout anymore, but she is still, although rarely, used to show that Amsterdam listens to prostitutes when it comes to prostitution policy. There was a short flurry of press attention when her real background was revealed, but it has since died down, and it hasn't damaged Amsterdams credibility when it comes to prostitution policy one iota. The books are still in the shops under non-fiction, and people still take the municipality of Amsterdam seriously when they say they listen to whores.

When it was still shocking news, I had some hope it might change peoples minds, or at least make the media more cautious to believe the horror stories. She wasn't the first fake victim to be exploded, and she won't be the last. But now it's old news, people are irritated when you bring her up, and the newspaper and journalists are more often chided for "damaging the Cause" of combating trafficking than lauded for their incisive reporting.

I think it is obvious why we're worried what will happen when the new prostitution law gives the municipalities many new powers to persecute us. It lowers the threshold for taking action against us, and that's the only thing still protecting us from the frenzied anti-prostitution policies. They will be able to do openly what they do under pretense now, and they will be able to go much further at much lower cost. But more about that in the next article.

Series on the Dutch Model:
Introduction
History
Legal history
Legal developments
Daily reality
War on sex work