A new law in Belgium has set a new standard for protecting a class of people long abused and exploited by the masses: Pimps.

Yes, you read that correctly: The purveyors of the sex trade enjoy new rights under legislation just passed in the country that serves as the seat of the European Union. Their biggest legal protection? If one of their prostitutes refuses to have sex with a “customer” more than 10 times in a six-month period, the pimp can appeal to the government to serve as a mediator to resolve the “dispute.”

What do prostitutes get out of this arrangement you might ask? Well, the legislation affords them a right to health insurance, a pension, and maternity leave, just as employees at a regular upstanding business would get. Notably, the union representing prostitutes was among the law’s advocates.

Yet as much as the red-light industry would like to claim otherwise, no number of “sex work is real work” chants will ever change the fact that prostitution is an inherently exploitative and sordid line of work. And Belgium’s new law, for all its employment benefit mandates, only underscores this dark and twisted reality.

The unspoken truth of the new law’s provision allowing pimps to appeal to the government is that women who enter the prostitution industry effectively have no power over their bodies and their lives and must serve at the pleasure of their pimp masters. If you don’t want to have sex with a gross parade of individuals, too bad, the government is going to help make sure that you do, and it is going to tax your earnings in the process.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Prostitution and all other forms of “sex work” are inherently exploitative. The industry is rife with human trafficking, and even the women who voluntarily enter it effectively become slaves to the pimps who manage them. The answer to this exploitative industry is not to give prostitutes employment benefits — it is to prohibit the industry entirely.

In enacting this new law, Belgium has taken a major step backward in protecting women from exploitation. Because of this law, more women will be trapped and enslaved by greedy, perfidious pimps who are eager to profit off of the backs of vulnerable women but care nothing for their well-being.