editorial comment New thinking at last. Not related, but the comparison is obvious. One day!

By Dan Bilefsky, The Wall Street Journal


ANTWERP, Belgium -- As the 9 a.m. shift began at Villa Tinto, which calls itself Europe's most high-tech brothel, prostitute Andrea Maes put on her leather boots, pressed her finger on a biometric scanner and started posing for potential clients in her neon-lit display window.

After matching her fingerprint with the one in its database, the brothel's system clocked her in and flashed her ID number -- A9018 -- to a control room manned by a fellow prostitute. It also switched on the lights in her designer-furnished room -- more boutique hotel than bordello. "At first it felt a bit like Big Brother was watching," said Ms. Maes, 33 years old, as dozens of men cruised the brothel's 51-window gallery. "But we got used to it."

Villa Tinto, House of Pleasure, is a pioneering example of a widening European drive to legalize prostitution, while combating the crime and violence it fosters -- including the explosion in human trafficking in recent years. The brothel opened in January, with the help of the Antwerp city council, the police and the prostitutes themselves as part of a "tolerance zone," begun in 2001. The Belgian government views the three-block area as a test case as it considers national legalization -- a move to wrest prostitution from the control of organized criminals and bring in some lost tax revenue.

"Some say the city of Antwerp is becoming the country's biggest pimp," says Georges Vos, Villa Tinto's manager, who also works as a prostitute there. "But the reality is that things here are much better than they were before."

Germany, the Netherlands and Greece have legalized or expanded regulation of prostitution in the past six years, and others are considering similar moves. By forcing the business out into the open, the governments hope to make it harder for human traffickers to thrive. Nearly 800,000 people are trafficked across borders world-wide each year, according to the U.S. State Department. The victims, promised passage to and work in the West, are typically forced, defrauded or coerced into sexual exploitation, in a modern-day form of slavery. Some Eastern European countries that joined the European Union last year have become major transit points for trafficked women.

Antwerp, a port city of 500,000, offers a case study in the benefits -- and limits -- of legalization. Local police say the tight controls in the tolerance zone have helped reduce prostitution-related crime -- including drug trafficking, assault, rape, murder and vandalism -- by 44 percent overall since 2001. Legalization also has brought in nearly $800,000 in tax revenue to the city.

But even here, human trafficking endures just outside the zone. Police say illegal prostitutes still outnumber legal ones and about a quarter of the total are the victims of human trafficking or work for pimps. In Germany, aid groups say there are three times as many illegal prostitutes as legally registered ones. In the Netherlands, only 5 percent to 10 percent of the nearly 20,000 prostitutes pay taxes, according to the Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam.

Critics say any benefits from legalization don't justify state-sanctioned vice. "Places like Villa Tinto are little more than assembly lines for sex where women are treated like meat for sale," says Nathalie de T'Serclaes, a Belgian senator from Brussels. She wants Belgium to embrace the Swedish model, which criminalizes clients. In the U.S., where prostitution is against the law except in parts of Nevada, the Bush administration argues that legalizing prostitution encourages human trafficking. Last year, Washington warned the Czech government, which has a thriving trade in tourists seeking prostitutes, that legalization risked making the state the chief procurer of prostitutes.

Antwerp's red-light district -- known as the Schipperskwartier, or seamen's quarter -- had flourished since the 1300s, helped by the hundreds of sailors who docked at Antwerp's harbor each week. By the 1990s, the city was overrun with illegal brothels. Violent crime had become ubiquitous, prostitutes worked in cramped, unsafe rooms and 4,000 cars cruised the 17-block area every day, according to police. "A large part of the city was becoming a no-go zone," says Joris Wils, the Antwerp city official coordinating prostitution policy. "We had to do something."

In 2001, the city's socialist government evicted all the brothels on-- of the 17 blocks where the sex trade was active. Then, on the three remaining blocks, it began regulating: It instituted stringent rules governing every aspect of the trade, including the minimum size of brothel rooms -- about 13 by 10. Prostitutes pay the brothel owners about $60 to $125 to rent their display windows for a 12-hour shift, but set their own fees and pocket their own earnings. The brothel owners, in turn, pay the city an annual prostitution tax of about $3,100 for every window they own. In reality, the women, even in the legal trade, can still fall under the control of pimps, who take a big cut of their earnings.

The taxes help pay for a 12-person prostitution police squad, which has a station in Villa Tinto's building. Officers patrol the zone day and night. Under Belgian law, prostitutes must be EU citizens and at least 18 years old. If the squad finds a non-EU citizen, trafficked woman or underage prostitute working in a brothel, the brothel can be put out of business. The city recently built a new health center in the red-light district, and provides prostitutes with free and anonymous medical advice, AIDS screenings and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

The council also banned vehicles from the zone, preventing prostitutes from working in cars and depriving clients of some anonymity in hopes that this would discourage them. The city is even considering putting decorative gates on the zone to mark it as a tourist attraction.

Franky De Coninck, Villa Tinto's 37-year-old owner, took the city's efforts to a new extreme. His family business, based in the sleepy Flemish town of Veltem, had been expanding from construction and recycling into real estate when it acquired a former juice warehouse in Antwerp. He had plans of converting the building to loft apartments, but Antwerp officials said a brothel would be more viable -- given the location in the middle of the prostitution quarter. Worried at first about tarnishing the family name, Mr. De Coninck said he decided that creating a beautifully designed landmark would generate positive attention. He hired Arne Quinze, a well-known Belgian designer who has created furniture for Brad Pitt's Los Angeles mansion, after reading in a Flemish newspaper that Mr. Quinze had always dreamt of designing an upmarket bordello.

Mr. Quinze quickly set up a consultation committee of prostitutes. They asked him to install red and black neon lights that would illuminate the women inside the display windows but also hide blemishes. They also requested discreet tilted mirrors on the floors of their display windows so they could vet clients as they approach and decide whether to open their windows for business.

Police and city officials warned Mr. De Coninck that his plans for a 51-room brothel, Antwerp's biggest, could make the villa vulnerable to pimps and illegal prostitutes, since it would be hard to monitor so many windows at the same time.

He began to research security technology used by scientific laboratories and military facilities and came up with the idea of incorporating biometric technology into the brothel's design. Mr. De Coninck also added another safeguard: To prevent an approved prostitute from handing over her room to an illegal one, the prostitute must press her finger on her room's sensor every hour, or the electricity and heating automatically shut down. He also agreed to help foot the bill for the police station on the brothel's premises, its walls also partly painted a lurid red. Mr. De Coninck declined to say how much he invested in the building or to quantify his profits, but he is considering opening a string of brothels in other European cities.

Ms. Maes and other prostitutes say they appreciate the high-tech security. In case of trouble from clients, she can press a panic button next to her bed, which calls police and triggers a red flashing light in the brothel's control room. "In the old days I worked in a place where you were lucky if the electricity worked and I feared for my life," says Ms. Maes, a mother of two, who says she turned to prostitution from waitressing because it is lucrative and offers flexible hours. "If something should happen to me and I turn up dead tomorrow -- the technology here means that police will know exactly who I am." Before she could rent a room, Ms. Maes agreed to three rounds of biometric fingerprinting and handed over her passport to police.

Legal prostitutes typically charge more than the illegal ones -- one reason the illegal ones remain in business. Ms. Maes says that she typically charges about $125 for a half-hour session with a client -- more than double the rate of many illegal prostitutes. On a busy day, she says she can earn more than $600, sometimes as much as $1,200. Illegal prostitutes often must see twice as many clients to earn enough to pay their pimps, some of whom demand payments of up to about $600 a day, according to police.

Some of the dozens of clients cruising the red light district say they prefer going to regulated brothels like Villa Tinto because it is safer and more hygienic, but others prefer to avoid the sanitized atmosphere. Prostitution has lost its taboo to such an extent in the tolerance zone that police say clients routinely telephone the police station to complain that they were not happy with a city-approved prostitute and want their money back. "We explain that this is not in our job description," says Capt. Jan Piedfort, head of the prostitution squad.

A recent Friday-night patrol by the squad illustrates some of the gains and the frustration of the city's battle with the traffickers. The patrol began at the Villa Tinto station, where officers picked up a batch of prostitutes' passports to confirm that the prostitutes are EU citizens and of legal age.

Capt. Stefan Gijsens, 36, an 11-year veteran of the force, surveyed the quarter's neon-lit windows, asking for identification from any prostitute who didn't look familiar. Under a special bylaw passed by the mayor, the squad can randomly search and question anyone in the zone. "Rather than being an enemy, the girls know we are here to help them and that helps us to gain their trust so we can prevent crime," Mr. Gijsens says.

The previous night a young Hungarian prostitute working in the tolerance zone was brought in for questioning after being badly beaten by her pimp. But 12 hours later, she already was back behind her window. The squad dropped by to try to persuade her to file a complaint against her pimp, but she said she was too scared. Police said the pimp keeps her locked up in a tiny room, not far from her display window. Since she refuses to file a complaint, there is little they can do.

It is a different world outside the tolerance zone. The squad walked by 'T Keteltje, a bar whose name means the Little Kettle, without stopping. Inside, 15 young women in tight T-shirts sat on a line of stools at the front of the bar. These are the new recruits, who have the biggest debts to pay their pimps and are given the first crack at customers, outreach workers at the bar and police say. Dozens more circulated in the back room. By midnight there were more than 60 women gathered in the bar and dozens of men of all ages.

Police and outreach workers specializing in human trafficking say that most of the women at 'T Keteltje are Nigerians employed by older female pimps, who typically pay recruiters in Nigeria nearly $19,000 per woman to smuggle them in. Each woman usually works two years at the bar to pay the more than $30,000 required to cancel her debt and earn her freedom. If the debt isn't paid, the recruiters threaten the woman's family back in Nigeria. The owner of 'T Keteltje declined to comment on whether prostitution goes on in the bar.

There are 16 cameras built into the dimly lit bar's ceiling, which police say are used to film clients to ensure they don't snitch to authorities. Bar workers say they are there for safety and to prevent girls from stealing from customers.

Capt. Piedfort says that even with his expanded powers he can't shut down the place -- though the squad has raided it -- because the sex takes place off the premises.

Frank Cool, an outreach worker, who distributes free condoms at the bar, says many of the women tell him they would rather not work as prostitutes, but that the $125 they can earn from a single client is more than what they would earn over several months in Nigeria. "Most of the girls who come here do know what they are getting into," he says. "Some have university diplomas, but they still see this as a way of getting out of poverty."

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