Amsterdam’s mayor is planning to issue sex worker permits for locations outside the city’s historic centre in an attempt to encourage women working from behind windows in the De Wallen red-light district to move out of the area. Femke Halsema, the Dutch capital’s first female mayor, will launch a fresh push to change the face of the streets around the city’s docks next year, after the failure of a series of attempts to clean up the red-light district and make life tolerable for the women working there.

Women working in the area are increasingly unable to make a living, and are instead subjected to gawping and abuse from tourists, according to councillors from the GroenLinks, D66 and Socialist party, three of the parties in the city’s governing coalition. The fourth governing party, the Dutch Labour party, has said it would prefer to continue a policy devised in 2014 to buy out the windows over a period of time, but has not ruled out giving its support.

Alexander Hammelburg, a councillor for the liberal D66 party, told the Het Parool newspaper that women would be able to “work in anonymity, freed from tourists who constantly take pictures” in the proposed locations. “The De Wallen is simply no longer the ideal place,” Hammelburg said. The GroenLinks council member Femke Roosma said: “Think of a kind of hotel with rooms, equipped with an alarm button, a safe for the money and cameras outside.”(theguardian)…[+]