Cabinet plans to raise minimum age for sex workers to 21

The government is planning to raise the minimum age for sex workers to 21 to prevent vulnerable youngsters being forced into the trade.

Successive Dutch governments have tried since 2009 to increase the legal age from 18. Amsterdam city council already enforces a limit of 21 under a local by-law.

Justice minister David van Weel said he wanted to raise the minimum age nationwide, along with other measures such as making it a criminal offence to earn money from illegal sex work.

“We agreed in the coalition agreement that vulnerable sex workers need to be better protected, which is why I want to raise the age limit as soon as possible,” Van Weel said.

“I also want to see if we can introduce a pimping ban to tackle bad actors who take advantage of vulnerable sex workers who are often working illegally in the Netherlands.”

In 2019 the government tried to introduce a compulsory registration scheme for sex workers which would require them to prove they were over 21, but the plan was criticised by sex workers’ representatives on privacy grounds. The bill was eventually voted down in the Senate.

A decade earlier Fleur Agema, an MP for the right-wing populist PVV party, proposed raising the minimum age to protect young girls from so-called “loverboys” who lured them into prostitution after their 18th birthday.

The idea was taken up by caretaker justice minister Hirsch Ballin in the last days of Jan Peter Balkenende’s administration, but it failed to reach the statute books.