by NMN
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Belgium’s New Prostitution Legislation: Separating Fact from Fiction

Casting an eye over recent headlines such as ‘Belgium’s sex workers get maternity leave and pensions under world-first law’, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Belgium is embarking on an unprecedented and positive breakthrough for women. But the reality is somewhat different.

Similar legislation has been in place in Germany and New Zealand for years but trying to shoehorn a fundamentally exploitative and dangerous practice into an employment law framework does not transform it into something healthy and respectful along the lines of waitressing or healthcare. To believe that it would is a symptom of the kind of magical thinking that would be endearing in a toddler but is wildly irresponsible in an adult.

But, but, you might be thinking, the BBC said it’s going to make women safe and let them refuse “clients” and give them benefits and pensions. Surely the BBC – the BBC! – can’t have got this so wrong? But the truth is there is a long history of the mainstream media falling for the lines put out by vested interests. Just think how long the tobacco and asbestos barons pulled the wool over so many people’s eyes. And it’s not like the BBC has a record of balance on this issue.

Fortunes are made in the sexploitation industry. Not by the women who are its raw material, but by third parties – pimps, traffickers, brothel keepers, and the big websites that flood the airwaves with violent, misogynistic, racist porn and huge catalogues of women that men can rent to use and abuse sexually.

Just like the tobacco and asbestos barons, the pimps have captured institutions, governments, and even UN agencies. They have also managed to capture almost all of the large bodies that provide funding for women’s organisations here and in the global south. Funding bodies, like the Open Society Foundation and its subsidiaries, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mama Cash, the Ford Foundation, and many of the UN agencies, often require support for “decriminalisation of sex work” as a condition of receiving funding.

As a result, women’s organisations that do not support this are starved of funding and those in the global South in particular often do not have the resources for a website and are therefore more or less unknown internationally. So lobbyists for the sex industry can claim, with a straight face, that “all sex worker led organisations” support “decriminalising sex work”. But of course they don’t explain that by this they mean decriminalising the entire industry, including pimps and brothel keepers (now redefined as ‘managers’), advertising, and punters. They might say loudly that of course sex trafficking would be illegal, but not that they have redefined it so that most sex traffickers would slip through the net unscathed.

In spite of all these advantages – a supine mass media, capture of major institutions, generous funding for the foot soldiers and so on – in the last couple of years, the pimps have faced some serious setbacks.

In September 2023, the EU Parliament voted to support a resolution that defines prostitution as a form of violence and both a cause and a consequence of the persisting inequality between women and men, and encourages member states to adopt a Nordic Model approach.

This year, Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on VAWG, presented a ground-breaking report to the United Nations that also defined prostitution as a form of violence and advocated for the Nordic Model. She followed this with an excellent position paper on women’s struggles to exit prostitution and the support that they so desperately need.

Also this year, the European of Court of Human Rights ruled that the French Nordic Model law does not violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

This has obviously been quite a blow to the pimps and their cheerleaders, who are used to dominating the discourse. But their problems go back even further. There was a time, about 15 years ago, when they would hold up Germany as the model every country should be following.

But then Germany with its clean, efficient mega-brothels and around a million men paying for sex acts every day was exposed as not so very clean after all. It turned out that those mega-brothels were filled with migrant women, most trafficked from the poorest parts of Eastern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, suffering unimaginable horrors, and there is a rampant underground largely controlled by organised crime syndicates and biker gangs. The problems for both the individual women and society were just too hard to ignore, so the pimps changed their tune.

Germany has legalisation, they said, which means, as sex industry cheerleader, Franki Mirren, explained, “sex work is controlled by the government and is legal only under certain state-specified conditions.” What is really best for “sex workers”, the pimps then insisted is decriminalisation, which according to Mirren involves, “the removal of all prostitution-specific laws”, as implemented in New Zealand in 2003. This was convenient for the pimp lobby because New Zealand’s tiny population and geographical isolation make it difficult for the much less well funded lobby for the abolition of prostitution to challenge the hyperbolic claims of its success.

But challenge the claims we did and a growing number of New Zealand women who have lived experience of the system there have courageously started speaking out about its reality (see the links at the end of this article for examples). So, slowly, awareness of the fact that New Zealand’s system was also far from perfect began to spread.

German abolitionists compiled data on the number of homicides by pimps and punters, of women involved in prostitution under various regimes. We have charted some of that data and it clearly shows that the number of these homicides is much higher in New Zealand with its decriminalised system and in Germany and the Netherlands with their legalised systems than in Sweden, Norway and France that have the Nordic Model.

It would be tempting to suggest on this basis that the Nordic Model is safer for women. But the truth is that prostitution is the most dangerous occupation in the world and nothing can make it safe. What the Nordic Model does do when well implemented though, is to reduce the size of the industry and the number of women involved and the number of men buying sex – and this, thankfully, leads to fewer murders.

So, TLDR, the pimps had a serious PR problem on their hands.

Their solution? Belgium!

Belgium decriminalised prostitution in 2022 to much fanfare: The first European country to decriminalise prostitution! The start of an enlightened European revolution! And so on.

But just over a year later, Belgium passed additional “sex work” legislation – the legislation that has just come into force to those triumphant articles by the BBC and others. But hang on a minute – isn’t the key feature of full decriminalisation that there should be no prostitution-specific laws? So doesn’t that mean Belgium no longer has decriminalisation and now has legalisation? Well exactly. But what’s an awkward fact between pimps and their supporters? If they say it’s decriminalisation, then it is decriminalisation, OK?

Espace P, a Belgian organisation that provides support to “sex workers” has helpfully published the text of the new legislation in English. It makes provisions for legal employment contracts, which grant access to regular employee social security benefits, plus some special protections. This implies that the Belgian government now recognises prostitution as a normal job, albeit one that requires some additional safeguards.

Key among the safeguards is the stipulation that “employers” cannot force “sex workers” to “have relations” with any specific “client” or to perform any specific practice, and such refusal cannot be considered a “breach of the employment contract” and must not lead to any negative employment-related consequences for the “sex worker”. However, if she does exercise this right of refusal more than ten times in six months, the law provides for mediation services to aid resolution.

It remains to be seen how this will work in practice. Esther, prostitution survivor and NMN policy expert, was sceptical. It ignores market forces and coercion caused by demands from buyers, and how that will trickle down to what brothel owners consider normal services. Women who refuse certain practices (such as anal or fisting) are likely to find they don’t get many buyers once these have come to be seen as normal services. How will brothel owners respond to that? Will they even be able to keep afloat if women turn down dangerous sex acts popularised by online porn?

It’s similar to how women on OnlyFans are coerced into doing increasingly extreme things by the competition and their need to make money. Traffickers will undercut brothels by coercing the women they control, who won’t have employment contracts. This will either lead to a two-tier system (one of the key things the pimps and their cheerleaders complain happens under ‘legalisation’) or brothel owners will use their powers of persuasion to ensure the women they employ never refuse a practice, like they do in New Zealand, as Chelsea Geddes has testified.

Esther summed it up:

“Will any woman who is alone with a buyer be able to refuse a sex act on these grounds? The people who draft these laws have no understanding of how coercion or this industry actually work.”

Another worry is that under Belgium’s social security system, you are not entitled to unemployment benefits if you quit a job voluntarily or refuse to take one that is offered. What are the implications of this now that prostitution is officially accepted as a normal job? Will unemployed women be coerced into taking a job in a brothel? And will women who walk out of one be refused unemployment benefits and so be coerced to stay in prostitution against her will? What would the “right” to refuse specific sex acts mean in those circumstances? I assume it doesn’t mean she can refuse to “have relations” with any client and still be paid.

In this article, I’ve covered just a few of the contradictions inherent in any regularised prostitution system, which the pimps and their cheerleaders would prefer we didn’t articulate. Esther has written extensively about many others and how prostitution can never conform to modern health and safety norms, employment regulations and equality law. Pretending that it can, is likely to have negative consequences for other workers and lead to a watering down of standards, especially for women. If a “sex worker” gives blow jobs as part of her employment contract, what’s to stop the boss of any other business tacking on giving blow jobs to important clients and managers as part of your job description?

All in all, this new development is a very far cry from the supposed liberation proclaimed so loudly. In reality, it enshrines in law men’s right to sexual access to women and positions women as subordinate to men. This is not compatible with the aspirations of a modern egalitarian democratic society. That’s why we call for the Nordic Model.

New Zealand women’s testimony

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