When the CEDAW Committee examined the Netherlands this year for its seventh periodic review, many of us hoped its findings would finally confront the reality that so‑called ‘regulated prostitution’ has not delivered safety or equality for women and girls. And the advance unedited concluding observations from the report do recognise serious harms in the Dutch prostitution model. Yet when it comes to what should be done, the Committee pivots to recommendations that normalise and expand the very system of exploitation it has just described.
This is not just an unfortunate turn of phrase. The Netherlands review is a small but telling example of a larger problem: institutional drift away from sex‑based protections and rights for women and girls. Across the UN system, bodies created to protect our human rights are starting to speak in the language of, and for, the very industries that harm us.
For a body charged with monitoring the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, this is more than a drafting quirk. It reveals a deeper shift in how parts of the UN human‑rights system are now thinking and speaking about prostitution, and about the sexual exploitation of women and girls. AAWAA has written to the committee to express our concerns; see our letter, below.
What the CEDAW Committee gets right on the Netherlands
The observations do not shy away from acknowledging that trafficking and exploitation remain entrenched in the Netherlands, despite decades of legalisation and regulation. The Committee notes the “persistent prevalence of trafficking in women and girls” for sexual and labour exploitation, inadequate victim identification, particularly among asylum‑seeking, refugee and undocumented women and unaccompanied children, and low prosecution and conviction rates with lenient sentences.
It is particularly critical of how the Dutch system ties ‘protection’ to migration control and criminal proceedings. Anti‑trafficking functions are entrusted to immigration police, which understandably deters undocumented women from reporting exploitation. Access to shelters, psychosocial support and temporary residence permits beyond the reflection period is too often conditional on cooperation with prosecutions, even though lengthy procedures and lenient sentencing make that cooperation costly and re‑traumatising for many women.
The Committee also records the damaging effects of local attempts to “clean up” prostitution zones. It notes that repressive local policies have reduced licensed workplaces, banned home‑based prostitution, increased dependence on brothel operators, and pushed independent women into the illegal sector with reduced access to protection, health care and social services. In Curaçao it highlights a discriminatory permit system under which only foreign women are allowed to engage in regulated prostitution on temporary permits, leaving them highly vulnerable to trafficking and abuse.
These findings confirm what abolitionist women’s groups and survivors have been saying for years: legalisation has not removed exploitation. Instead, it has reorganised and obscured it.
Where the recommendations go wrong: ‘safe and legal workplaces’ and ‘minor sex workers’
Despite this evidence, the Committee’s main prescription is not to push for the abolition of the prostitution system itself but to improve and expand it. In its recommendations on “Trafficking in women and girls and exploitation of prostitution”, it calls on the Netherlands to “reverse repressive local policies, ensure access to safe and legal workplaces, including home-based sex work, prevent abandonment to unsafe conditions, and amend the draft [Sex Work] Regulation Law … to ensure it does not criminalize sex workers or increases their vulnerability”.
The intent to reduce harm is clear. But the effect is to affirm the sex trade as a legitimate labour market that needs better zoning and more “safe and legal workplaces”, including in private homes, rather than as a system of sexual exploitation and discrimination that States must prevent and reduce. In practice, this framing pressures the Netherlands to liberalise its prostitution regime further, to reopen and expand legal venues, and to step back from any measures that would reduce the visible footprint of the sex trade.
The language used around children — girls — is just as troubling. UN communications on the review have referred to “minor sex workers”, terminology that has rightly alarmed survivor‑led groups and the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. Under international standards, there is no such thing as a “minor sex worker”. The Convention on the Rights of the Child speaks of “the exploitative use of children in prostitution”, and its Optional Protocol defines “child prostitution” as the use of a child in sexual activities for remuneration or any other form of consideration. The Palermo Protocol refers to “the exploitation of the prostitution of others” and treats any involvement of a child in prostitution within a trafficking situation as trafficking, with consent legally irrelevant. The 1949 Convention requires States to punish those who exploit the prostitution of others and affirms that both trafficking and exploitation of prostitution are incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person.
Neither CEDAW nor these treaties uses or defines the term ‘sex work’. Describing prostituted girls as “minor sex workers” in this context is therefore not just a poor choice of words. It reframes sexual exploitation as labour, and invites States to treat children in prostitution as participants in a market rather than as sexually exploited children and, in trafficking contexts, child trafficking victims.
A deeper problem: when ‘sex work’ becomes CEDAW’s default frame
These choices are not isolated. General Recommendation No. 38 recognises that prostitution and trafficking are rooted in sex inequality, male sexual entitlement and economic coercion, and treats them as manifestations of violence and exploitation, not as ordinary employment. CEDAW itself, in article 6, speaks of “trafficking in women and exploitation of the prostitution of women”, not of ‘sex work’.
Yet in the Netherlands observations, the Committee repeatedly adopts ‘sex work’ language and evaluates policy through the lens of making “workplaces” safer and more legal, rather than through the lens of reducing male demand and preventing women and girls from being prostituted in the first place. This is a significant shift in how the Committee understands the problem it is meant to eliminate. It risks encouraging States to believe that their CEDAW obligations are met if they optimise the conditions of a commercial sex industry, even as that industry continues to generate violence, trauma and discrimination.
The Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls has warned against exactly this move. Her report to the General Assembly describes prostitution as a “system of violence, exploitation and abuse” and calls for abolitionist legal frameworks that decriminalise women in prostitution, criminalise buyers and profiteers, and provide real exit pathways. When CEDAW embraces ‘sex work’ language and calls for more “safe and legal workplaces, including home-based sex work”, it is not only out of step with its own General Recommendation. It is also out of step with this broader UN human‑rights analysis.
This is what we mean by mandate drift. A treaty body charged with monitoring States’ progress in eliminating discrimination against women is now, in practice, helping to entrench a commercial system in which men buy access to women’s bodies, and in which the harms are treated as occupational hazards to be managed rather than as violations to be prevented.
What a CEDAW‑consistent, abolitionist approach to the Netherlands could look like
None of this means the Committee must ignore the immediate dangers faced by prostituted women and girls in the Netherlands. On the contrary, CEDAW’s own findings can support a much stronger, abolitionist, rights‑centred response.
A CEDAW‑consistent approach would start from three basic commitments. First, it would recognise prostitution as a form of sexual exploitation and a manifestation of discrimination against women and girls, in line with General Recommendation No. 38 and the work of the Special Rapporteur. Second, it would insist that women in prostitution should not be criminalised for their own exploitation. Third, it would affirm that persons under 18 in prostitution are sexually exploited children and, in trafficking contexts, child trafficking victims, never “minor sex workers”.
On that basis, the Committee could have urged the Netherlands to move towards an end‑demand or abolitionist model: decriminalising women in prostitution; criminalising purchase and third‑party profiteering; guaranteeing statutory, long‑term exit supports, including housing, income, health care and legal assistance; and removing migration‑control conditionalities from access to protection and residence permits. It could have called for the closure of discriminatory permit systems such as those in Curaçao, and for robust action against the employers, intermediaries and buyers who profit from women’s poverty, migration status and vulnerability.
Crucially, it could have done this while still insisting that, in the immediate term, no woman should be made less safe by State action. There is no contradiction between abolishing prostitution as a system and protecting women in prostitution as rights‑holders in the here and now. The problem arises when the system itself is re‑imagined as a legitimate labour market under the banner of ‘sex work’.
Where next
The observations on the Netherlands are labelled “advance unedited version”. There is still time for the Committee to reflect on its language and recommendations before the text is finalised. We hope it will do so, and that it will take seriously the concerns raised by survivor‑led organisations, by the Special Rapporteur, and by abolitionist feminist groups around the world.
For our part, we will continue to argue that no human rights body can fulfil its mandate to protect women and girls while promoting the normalisation and expansion of prostitution. CEDAW was not created to make the sex trade safer for buyers and profiteers. It was created to help secure the conditions in which our sex‑based protections and rights are realised, including the right not to be bought.
