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Julia, a 31-year-old transgender refugee from central America, wishes she didn’t have to rely on sex work right now — especially not illegally without her usual support system.
“It’s a fast way to get money but for me it is not sustainable,” the former student activist said by phone from Eindhoven, a city in the south of The Netherlands.
“It’s been a living hell.”
She is among hundreds of prostitutes – mostly women – in the Netherlands who have been forced to keep working through lockdowns regardless of the risks in order to stay afloat.
Despite the Dutch sex industry being legal, regulated and taxed, sex workers this year have fallen through the gaps even as their work has been officially banned to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
Closed windows and empty streets in Amsterdam's Red Light District in December
Credit: Peter Dejong /AP
Julia says she only started sleeping with men for money two years ago to support herself while her Dutch asylum application was being processed.
Normally, for the sake of her health, she balances it out with part-time hospitality work. But she lost her restaurant job back in March during the first "intelligent" lockdown.
At the same time, sex work was listed among the “contact professions” to shut down until July, the first time that prostitution in the Netherlands had been criminalised in decades.
Life briefly returned to normal over summer, with sex workers welcoming clients back but wearing gloves and avoiding oral sex to contain the virus’ spread.
But with infections rising again, restrictions came back in during recent months. Since December 15, a new strict monthlong lockdown has been introduced, exacerbating an already difficult situation for many.
Julia was among the few sex workers to qualify for some state support, but the €1,050 (£957) a month barely covered her rent, bills and health insurance, let alone daily living costs.
“So I have continued receiving regular clients in my home,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone because I’m afraid of getting caught, so I feel very isolated.”
On top of the risk contracting coronavirus, something she tries to mitigate by asking whether clients have any symptoms before seeing them, she has also had to deal with the mental and physical toll of working in secret.
“Usually I go to Amsterdam regularly for emotional support from other trans organisations, where they also have a doctor and you can get regular tests for STIs such as HIV," she said. "But I can’t access any of that right now.”
Sex workers in brothels, massage parlours and night clubs have been especially hard hit
Credit: PETER DEJONG /AP
Julia works from home, so she is technically among the lucky ones.
Prostitutes working in brothels, clubs or escort agencies fall under an unpopular “opt-in” employment scheme, which sees them pay taxes but does no t entitle them to benefits such as a pension, sick leave or holiday pay.
That means that this year, unlike self-employed people in other sectors, they also did not qualify for the state coronavirus allowance, leaving them struggling to survive.
For Hella Dee, a member of Dutch sex workers union Proud and a sex worker herself, the impact has been catastrophic.
“I have colleagues who cannot feed their children,” she wrote on the website for Dutch Emergency Fund, a fundraising initiative she set up in response. “I have colleagues who continue to work for lack of money. We have to take increasing risks to stay alive.”
When approached for comment, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs said they were aware of the situation: "Since the outbreak of the virus, we are constantly looking for gaps and investigating whether something can be done about it, which also leads to a quick result."
In response, this month the government introduced a new scheme offering temporary support to people who have lost all their income and don’t qualify for other assistance — including opt-in sex workers.
The municipality-assessed scheme should be in place by February 1 and has €130 million earmarked for the first six months of 2021. But for many in hardship now, that will still feel a long way off.
“Most sex workers in the Netherlands encountered financial problems [this year]. Some felt obliged to continue working,” said Roos de Wildt, one of the authors of a report by the Utrecht-based Verwey Jonker Institute on the effect of coronavirus on the industry.
“All sex workers with whom we spoke had to use their savings in order to get through the lockdown and most of them also took on loans and asked for suspension of payment of the mortgage.”
A sex worker waiting for clients in the Red Light District of Amsterdam during normal times
Credit: ANOEK DE GROOT /AFP
Ms Dee’s grassroots Dutch Emergency Fund raised nearly €20,000 earlier this year to provide cash handouts to desperate sex workers. But that’s a drop in the ocean for an industry estimated to normally have an annual turnover of around €500 million.
That’s thought to have declined by a whopping 97 per cent after restrictions were imposed in March, according to a study of the impact of lockdown on prostitution in the Netherlands and Belgium by Flanders-based KU Leuven university.
The problem is not just in the Low Countries, according to the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe.
Its coronavirus-dedicated website, Red Light Covid, said its members were reporting “systemic exclusion from government bailouts and support measures to substitute missing income, and in many contexts… even facing heightened surveillance and policing.”
For Julia and thousands of others like her, it’s an impossible situation.
“The government is telling me you cannot do sex work but you cannot do your other job either,” she said. “If I break the law then I am the criminal, but they are the ones tying my hands. I just don’t know when it will be over.”
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