M

y sisters. Unite/Get a pole/Wave your bras/['€¦]/Around town/['€¦]/Urging the wiping out of prostitution/Without urging/Marrying ex-prostitutes/Is nonsense.'€ These were the words of the late famed poet WS Rendra in his work Bersatulah Pelacur-Pelacur Jakarta (Whores of Jakarta, Unite).

Despite protests, Surabaya officially closed down Dolly on Wednesday, reportedly the largest red-light district in Southeast Asia. The mayor of the East Java capital and the nation'€™s second-largest city, Tri Rismaharini, known as Risma, had declared the shutdown would happen on June 18, citing a 1999 city ban on the use of buildings for immoral behavior. She had resisted earlier calls to close down the site, saying social preparations were still being made. These included providing job training for sex workers.

The central government has also allocated almost Rp 8 billion (US$676,859) to compensate the thousands who depend on Dolly for their daily bread including food vendors, bartenders, parking attendants and Surabaya'€™s official estimate of some 1,200 sex workers.

Not surprisingly, prostitutes and pimps are protesting. Dolly has been big business since the late 1960s. One economist estimated that Surabaya earned Rp 1.5 trillion annually from Dolly'€™s prostitution, not to mention her side businesses.

We support Mayor Risma in her effort to close Dolly; prostitution is risky, especially for women who lack protection from violence or diseases and who are usually driven to the profession by debts, lack of marketable skills or worse. Human traffickers continue to scout for girls and women to sell into the sex trade.

However, the income disparity between sex work and a '€œnormal'€ job may be large and thus attract women back into prostitution, which if scattered throughout the city could be harder to monitor than Dolly. Sex workers were promised Rp 5 million each in compensation '€” as mentioned in leaflets that protesters urged fellow workers to burn.

In Jakarta, the closing of the Kramat Tunggak red-light district in 1999 by then governor Sutiyoso satisfied clamor to stamp out '€œmoral decadence'€. However, it'€™s unlikely the city has fewer prostitutes today than it did 15 years ago. And advanced technology also renders sexual services just a click away.

That Dolly, Kramat Tunggak and other districts in the largest Muslim-majority country survive for so long is proof that they are reliable sources of income for not only pimps and sex workers but also for authorities assigned to clamp down on them. Therefore, Mayor Risma needs to monitor the aftermath of the closure, which was declared at the Surabaya Islamic Center, satisfying fodder for the moralists.

Yet, authorities must also solve the demand side of the services that Dolly provided. No one is likely to echo the late Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin, who proposed legalizing prostitution. But if moralists say it'€™s best for men to take up to four wives (unless, perhaps, they include the former sex workers, as Rendra suggested), this means little progress in the management of basic instincts that led to the creation of Dolly in the first place.