Definitely not most of the time. In Amsterdam, window prostitutes need to be registered with the municipality, chamber of commerce, tax authorities, and with the window operator they operate at. Minimum age is 21. This operator needs a license, which requires a municipality approved plan of operation.

National police authorities do extensive research concerning prostitution because it touches key issues of organised crime, in particular illegal prostitution, human trafficking, violence, money laundering etc. The amount of problems they find with window prostitution are relatively small, because they're licensed and under supervision of various authorities. The amount of human trafficking, taking away of passports etc you describe, doesn't happen much at all in the red light district.

It does happen, but not in window prostitution (which has fixed, licensed addresses, which are supervised). Rather it happens in the shadow, i.e. various somewhat secret and temporary networks which offer prostitution services at constantly changing addresses, with front men running the operations. Almost all cases where police finds out about human trafficking, violence, money laundering, underage prostitution etc, is from this underground sector.

I'm not saying the red light district is paradise or that I'd want me or my friends to work there. But it's not really where most of the problems are. When people speak about issues in the Netherlands with respect to prostitution, it's either NIMBYism in the red light district, or the issues with illegal underground prostitution outside of the red light district. People seem to conflate the two in this thread.

You’re correct. I did some searching and most of the articles were about Dutch teens being trafficked to other places in Europe as opposed to the opposite happening.

The places that keep getting caught with actual human trafficking are hotels, usually not cheap ones, in central locations (so they can cater to "visiting" businesspeople) and they tend to not even change (meaning they catch someone imprisoning and prostituting an underage girl in Hotel X, and then 3 months later they catch another one in exactly the same spot). To me this implies that there's significant police cooperation with the abuse, otherwise why wouldn't they just go by every evening until it stops? And of course, it's the same people in the same space, so definitely the Hotel owners know and cooperate.

So in a way this supports the idea of the red light district: make it legal in a well-defined, licensed space to protect the workers. Because you can't eliminate it and the ways they get exploited in the shadows are pretty bad.