The Netherlands holds a long tradition of regulated tolerance toward prostitution. Besides the well-known window prostitution in red-light districts, the Dutch government also regulates other parts of the sex industry.
At the same time, prostitution is known to be related to international trafficking organizations and various other forms of crime. The illegal status of sex work also makes prostitutes more vulnerable to sexual violence and abuse. Despite the ongoing debate about legalization of prostitution, little empirical evidence examines the effects of government regulation.
An important reason for this is a lack of suitable data. In our research, we analyze empirically how the presence of a tippelzone affects aggregate crime in Dutch cities. A tippelzone is a designated legal street prostitution zone, where soliciting and purchasing sex is tolerated between strict opening and closing hours at night. The first tippelzone opened in The Hague in with eight other cities opening zones during the following three decades.
The first objective of tippelzones was to deal with complaints of residents in the areas frequented by street prostitutes. A second objective of the tippelzones was to improve the health and safety conditions of street prostitutes, who are often heroin and crack addicts and sometimes illegal immigrants.
More recently, four tippelzones closed mainly because of the escalation of conflicts between prostitutes. However, the closings were controversial. In our empirical analysis, we take advantage of the opening and closing of tippelzones to obtain empirical evidence for the relation between regulation of prostitution and crime.
