Policing Prostitution examines the complex world of commercial sex in the late Russian Empire. From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated across the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. Medical police were in charge of compiling information about registered prostitutes and ensuring that they followed the strict rules prescribed by the imperial state governing their visibility and behaviour. The vast majority of women who sold sex hailed from the lower classes, as did their managers and clients. This study examines how regulation was implemented, experienced, and resisted amid rapid urbanization, industrialization, and modernization around the turn of the twentieth century. Each chapter examines the lives and challenges of different groups who engaged with the world of prostitution, including women who sold sex, the men who paid for it, mediators, the police, and wider urban communities. Drawing on archival material from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, Policing Prostitution illustrates how prostitution was an acknowledged, contested, and ever-present component of lower-class urban society in the late imperial period. In principle, the tsarist state regulated prostitution in the name of public order and public health; in practice, that regulation was both modulated by provincial police forces who had different local priorities, resources, and strategies, and contested by registered prostitutes, brothel madams, and others who interacted with the world of commercial sex.

Focusing on the ports, dockyards and garrison towns of Kent, this study examines the social and economic factors that could cause a woman to turn to prostitution, and how such women were policed.

Law Enforcement, Policing, & Security

Focusing upon the 1950s, and especially the 1957 Wolfenden Report, Helen Self's study thoroughly exposes the sexual double standard and general misogynist assumptions underlying British legislation relating to prostitution.

This collection focuses attention on an important but academically neglected area of contemporary operational policing: the regulation of consensual sexual practices. Despite the high-level public visibility of, and debate about, policing in relation to violent and abusive sexual crimes (from child sexual abuse to adult rape) very little public or scholarly attention is paid to the policing of consensual sexual practices in contemporary societies. Whilst ‘sexual life’ is commonly understood to be a matter of ‘private life’ that is beyond formal social control, this book shows that policing is implicated in the regulation of a wide range of consensual sexual practices. This book brings together a well known and respected group of academics, from a range of disciplines, to explore the role of the police in shaping the boundaries of that aspect of our lives that we imagine to be most intimate and most our own. The volume presents a ‘snap shot’ of policing in respect of a number of diverse areas – such as public sex, pornography, and sex work – and considers how sexual orientation structures police responses to them. The authors critically examine how policing is implicated in the social, moral and political landscape of sex and, contrary to the established rhetoric of politicians and criminal justice practitioners, continues to intervene in the private lives of citizens. It is essential supplementary reading for courses in criminology, law, policing, sociology of deviance, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies.

This collection brings together opinion, commentary, research evidence, professional guidance, debate and critique in order to understand the phenomenon of anti-social behaviour.

The exponential growth of sexual commerce, migration and movement of people into the sex industry, as well as localised concerns about transactional sex, are key areas of interest across the urban west. Given the complex regulatory frameworks under-which the sex industry manifests, the role of the police is significant. Policing the Sex Industry draws on the research and expertise of academics and practitioners, presenting advanced scholarship across a range of countries and spaces. Unpicking the relationship between police practice and commercial sex whilst speaking to the current policy agendas, Policing the Sex Industry explores key issues including: trafficking, decriminalisation, localised impacts of punitive policing approaches, uneven policing approaches, hate-crime approaches and the impact of policing on trans sex workers. A dynamic and incisive contribution to existing research, Policing the Sex Industry will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as researchers at all levels, interested in fields including Criminology, Sociology, Gender Politics and Women’s Studies

There is great interest internationally in the development of prostitution policies in the Nordic countries after Sweden, Norway and Iceland have introduced general bans against buying sex whilst selling sex remains legal. In addition, there is a partial ban against buying sex in Finland. This is a different approach from that of several other European countries, where we have seen a decriminalisation of third-party involvement in prostitution as well as to that of the USA which criminalises both the buying and selling of sexual services. Thus the Nordic countries are often treated as representatives of a 'Nordic model' of prostitution policies. In this book - the first on the subject - Skilbrei and Holmström argue that these models of policies or policy regimes tend to ignore the trajectories, contexts and consequences of the full range of approaches to prostitution, thus they are too simplistic and static. Prostitution policies in the Nordic countries are multifaceted and dynamic, and cannot be represented as following a straight path and detached from empirical contexts. Their analysis treats Nordic prostitution policies both as a product of history, of current national and Nordic debates, and of international obligations and changes in the international and national prostitution markets. Furthermore they argue that a broad understanding of the relevant context is necessary so as to place Nordic prostitution policies within broader policy concerns related to gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality, social welfare, immigration and organised crime, as well as to neoliberal forms of governance.

This book places prostitution at the very centre of European history in the twentieth century. With its wide geographical focus from Italy to the USSR via Sweden, Germany, occupied Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, as well as the international stage of the United Nations, this book encourages comparative perspectives, which have the potential to question, deconstruct and re-adjust distinctions between western, eastern, northern and southern European historical experiences. This book moves beyond exploring state-regulated prostitution, which was the dominant approach to managing commercial sex across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. State regulation combined police surveillance, the registration of women selling sex (or suspected of doing so), and compulsory medical examinations for registered women, as well as various restrictions on personal movement and freedom. The nine chapters shift focus onto the decades after the abolition of state-regulated prostitution well into the second half of the twentieth century to examine the ruptures and continuities in state, administrative and policing practices following the end of widespread legal toleration. The varied chronology extends the parameters of existing historiography and explores how states grappled to understand, or impose control over, the commercial sex industry following the far-reaching social, economic and political upheaval of the Second World War. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of European Review of History.

Policing Women examines for the first time the changing historical landscape of women’s experiences of their contact with the official state police between 1800 and 1950 in the Western world. Drawing on and going beyond existing knowledge about policing practices, the volume discusses how women encountered the official police, how they experienced that contact, and the outcomes of that contact in the modern Western world. In so doing, it is an original and much needed addition to the literature around changes in policing, women’s experiences of the criminal justice system, and women’s experiences of control and regulation. The chapters uncover such experiences in a range of countries across Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia. Importantly, the collection focuses upon a crucial epoch in the history of policing – a 150-year period when policing was rapidly changing and being increasingly placed on a formal level. Bringing together scholarly work from expert contributors, this unique volume draws to the fore women’s experiences of policing. It will be of great use to both scholars and students on undergraduate and postgraduate criminology and history courses, working on the history of crime, historical criminology, the history of criminal justice, and women’s history.