This book provides a compelling analysis of the conditions in which women are sustained within prostitution in Britain at the end of the millennium. Based on a major empirical study, it is a unique glimpse into how some women, who live lives completely torn apart by poverty, violence and criminalization, are able to understand their lives in prostitution and make sense of the choices they make in their struggle to survive.

Providing a new perspective on migration and sex work in Europe, this book is based on interviews with migrant women in the sex sector. It brings together issues of migration, labour and political subjectivity in order to refocus scholarly and policy agenda away from sex slavery and organized crime, towards agency and citizenship.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. While the debate on regulating prostitution usually focuses on national policy, it is local policy measures that have the most impact on the ground. This book is the first to offer a detailed analysis of the design and implementation of prostitution policy at the local level and carefully situates local policy practices in national policy making and transnational trends in labour migration and exploitation. Based on detailed comparative research in Austria and the Netherlands, and bringing in experiences in countries such as New Zealand and Sweden, it analyses the policy instruments employed by local administrators to control prostitution and sex workers. Bridging the gap between theory and policy, emphasizing the multilevel nature of prostitution policy, while also highlighting more effective policies on prostitution, migration and labour exploitation, this unique book fills a gap in the literature on this contentious and important social issue.

This book provides an international, multi-disciplinary empirical account of pole classes and how they fit into wider discourses about bodies and gender, and age and fitness. In particular, the book explores how women initiate agency and espouse liberation and empowerment through something as seemingly problematic as pole classes.

New Zealand was the first country in the world to decriminalize all sectors of sex work. Previous criminal or civil laws governing sex work and related offenses were revoked in 2003 and sex workers became subject to the same controls and regulations as any other occupational group. This book presents an example of radical legal reform in an area of current policy debate and pushes forward the policy and legal debate for an area undergoing reform in many countries. It provides an in-depth look at New Zealand's experience of decriminalization and provides first hand views on and experience with this policy from the point of view of those involved in the sex industry, as well as people involved in developing, implementing, researching, and reviewing the policies. The book makes valuable comparisons on pre- and post-decriminalization.

In the mid-nineteenth century many parts of England and Wales were still subjected to a system of regulated prostitution which, by identifying and detaining for treatment infected prostitutes, aimed to protect members of the armed forces (94 per cent of whom were forbidden to marry) from venereal diseases. The coercive nature of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the double standard which allowed the continuance of prostitution on the ground that the prostitute 'herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue', aroused the ire of many reformers, not only women's rights campaigners. Paul McHugh analyses the social composition of the different repeal and reform movements - the liberal reformists, the passionate struggle of the charismatic Josephine Butler, the Tory reformers whose achievement was in the improvement of preventative medicine, and finally the Social Purity movement of the 1880s which favoured a coercive approach. This is a fascinating study of ideals and principles in action, of pressure-group strategy, and of individual leaders in the repeal movement's sixteen year progress to victory. The book was originally publised in 1980.

The nineteenth century witnessed a discursive explosion around the subject of sex. Historical evidence indicates that the sexual behaviour which had always been punishable began to be spoken of, regulated, and policed in new ways. Prostitutes were no longer dragged through the town, dunked in lakes, whipped and branded. Medieval forms of punishment shifted from the emphasis on punishing the body to punishing the mind. Building on the work of Foucault, Walkowitz, and Mort, Linda Mahood traces and examines new approached emerging throughout the nineteenth century towards prostitution and looks at the apparatus and institutions created for its regulation and control. In particular, throughout the century, the bourgeoisie contributed regularly to the discourse on the prostitution problem, the debate focusing on the sexual and vocational behaviour of working class women. The thrust of the discourse, however, was not just repression or control but the moral reform - through religious training, moral education, and training in domestic service - of working class women. With her emphasis on Scottish 'magdalene' homes and a case study of the system of police repression used in Glasgow, Linda Mahood has written the first book of its kind dealing with these issues in Scotland. At the same time the book sets nineteenth-century treatment of prostitutes in Scotland into the longer run of British attempts to control 'drabs and harlots', and contributes to the wider discussion of 'dangerous female sexuality' in a male-dominated society.

Prostitution Scandals in China presents an examination of media coverage of prostitution-related scandals in contemporary China. It demonstrates that the subject of prostitution is not only widely debated, but also that these public discussions have ramifications for some of the key social, legal and political issues affecting citizens of the PRC. Further, this book shows how these public discussions impact on issues as diverse as sexual exploitation, civil rights, government corruption, child and youth protection, policing abuses, and public health. In this book Elaine Jeffreys highlights China's changing sexual behaviours in the context of rapid social and economic change. Her work points to changes in the nature of the PRC's prostitution controls flowing from media exposure of policing and other abuses. It also illustrates the emergence of new and legally based conceptions of rightful citizenship in China today, such as children's rights, the right to privacy, work, sex, and health, and the rights of citizens to claim legal redress for losses and injuries experienced as the result of unlawful acts by state personnel. Prostitution Scandals in China will be of great interest to students and scholars across a range of diverse fields including Chinese culture and society, gender studies and media and communication studies.

The industrialization of prostitution and the sex trade has created a multibillion-dollar global market, involving millions of women, that makes a substantial contribution to national and global economies. The Industrial Vagina examines how prostitution and other aspects of the sex industry have moved from being small-scale, clandestine, and socially despised practices to become very profitable legitimate market sectors that are being legalised and decriminalised by governments. Sheila Jeffreys demonstrates how prostitution has been globalized through an examination of: the growth of pornography and its new global reach the boom in adult shops, strip clubs and escort agencies military prostitution and sexual violence in war marriage and the mail order bride industry the rise in sex tourism and trafficking in women. She argues that through these practices women's subordination has been outsourced and that states that legalise this industry are acting as pimps, enabling male buyers in countries in which women's equality threatens male dominance, to buy access to the bodies of women from poor countries who are paid for their sexual subservience. This major and provocative contribution is essential reading for all with an interest in feminist, gender and critical globalisation issues as well as students and scholars of international political economy.

Empirical and mathematically rigorous, this book provides a study of the economics of prostitution rather than focusing on the sociological and cultural themes. Using economic tools of analysis, internationally based editors have put together a theoretically informed volume that explores the supply and demand of prostitution.

Prostitution is a globalized industry involving millions of workers and it is characterized by a high degree of inequality in working conditions (ranging from slavery to self-managed and legalized unionized employment), by different sub-markets and fully integrated in the productive system.

Taking a provocative approach to prostitution, this book is a must read for students and researchers in the area of gender and economics.

What have different ideas about sex and gender meant for people throughout the history of the Middle East and North Africa? This book traces sex and desire in Muslim cultures through a collection of chapters that span the 9th to 21st centuries. Looking at spaces and periods where sexual norms and the categories underpinning them emerge out of multiple subjectivities, the book shows how people constantly negotiate the formulation of norms, their boundaries and their subversion. It demonstrates that the cultural and political meanings of sexualities in Muslim cultures - as elsewhere - emerge from very specific social and historical contexts. The first part of the book examines how people constructed, discussed and challenged sexual norms from the Abbasid to the Ottoman period. The second part looks at literary and cinematic Arab cultural production as a site for the construction and transgression of gender norms. The third part builds on feminist historiography and social anthropology to question simplistic dichotomies and binaries. Each of the contributions shows how understanding of sexualities and the subjectivities that evolve from them are rooted in the mutually-constitutive relationships between gender and political power. In identifying the plurality of discourses on desires, the book goes beyond the dichotomy of norm and transgression to glimpse what different sexual norms have meant at different times across the Middle East.

As a society we are buying more sex than ever before. Adult sex shops now take their place amongst retailers in the high street and lap dancing clubs compete for an increased share of the leisure economy; hotel chains offer sexually explicit films as part of their standard service, the party selling of adult toys to women in their homes has become a mainstream activity; and at the traditional end of the sexual service economy, prostitution has experienced new growth. Along with this has come new legal measures and attempts to regulate the sexual leisure economy, and far more comprehensive plans than ever before to regulate prostitution, in particular in the form of the new Sex Offences Act. This book seeks to address the range of issues and contemporary debates on the sex industry, including the demand by customers who buy sex, the policing of women who work in the street sex industry, and the violence that pervades prostitution. It shows how these issues have been addressed in policy terms, the problems that have emerged in this, and how a social policy might be formulated to minimize harm and enhance public understanding. Overall the book aims to provide a critical perspective on prostitution policies and the legal chaos and complexities that surround this.

-- Regarded as the seminal collection of studies in the field of sex work, this volume introduces readers to comprehensive and cutting-edge research on commercial sex and sexual economies. - Examines a variety of issues related to sex work, such as prostitution, pornography, sex tourism, escorts, male and female clients through a sociological, political, and legal lens. - The volume offers important scholarship on deviance, as well as on gender, sexuality, crime, and sex work, specifically, making it a highly relevant choice for courses across sociology, criminology & criminal justice, and women's and gender studies disciplines. - The third edition offers new and/or updated writings on "traditional" forms of sexual labour, incl. street prostitution, pornography, and escorting, as well as all new and original contributions on topics of ever-increasing importance in the field: internet facilitation, transgender work, sex workers rights movement, decriminalization and alternative policies, etc. - New chapters offer historical perspectives as well as alternative measures/policies, both of which strengthen the overall context for which the empirically-based chapters are grounded.

This book is about the surprisingly neglected area of the regulation of sex. It describes and discusses the ways in which various sexual activities are controlled, regulated and made illegal and/or deviant and illicit. Its primary focus is upon the multiple and complex social controls (laws, statutory regulations, professional/occupational codes, normative frameworks) constructing, constituting and shaping how we 'do' sex, and deals with sex that is both illicit (deviant, illegal) and illegal (criminal, offending). The book challenges the idea that early twenty-first century Britain is increasingly sexually 'liberated' by suggesting that this very 'openness' provides the conditions in which all sexual activities have become increasingly subject to regulation and control. By examining the policies and laws about various sexually activities, and the social conditions underpinning them, alongside existing research and theoretical literature the authors have provided an accessible text on the sociology of sex.

"Dancers/Hostesses required for top cabaret nightclubs both here and overseas. No experience necessary. Mega bucks to be earned. Telephone. . . "Would you answer an ad like this? Thousands of women do and fall victim to the illegal trafficking in women by organized crime syndicates.Driven by the desire to start a career or escape poverty, women migrate in search of work and a better life for themselves and for their families. For some, this search is the beginning of a nightmare experience. From "hotel receptionist" to nightclub "dancer" to "domestic worker," Stolen Lives: Trading Women Into Sex and Slavery exposes how women are hired in their country of origin, transported, left without money, passports, or permits, and become trapped into prostitution or domestic slavery. Branded as illegal aliens and marooned in a culture they don't understand, they have nowhere to go and no one to help them.With personal testimony from women caught in the trafficking web, Stolen Lives reveals the violent inner workings of international crime networks, the routes and methods involved, and how trafficking gangs are able to circumvent the law.The trade in women is one of the most shameful abuses of human rights, yet it continues to be ignored by national governments. Stolen Lives confronts the hidden scandal of global trafficking which exploits women as they attempt to emancipate themselves.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources - the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

This study of prostitution addresses issues of female agency and experience, as well as contemporary fears about sexual coercion and the forced movement of girls/women, and police surveillance. Rather than treating prostitutes solely as victims or problems to be solved, as so often has been the case in much of the literature, Nancy M. Wingfield seeks to find the historical subjects behind fin-de-siecle constructions of prostitutes, to restore agency to the women who participated in commercial sex, illuminate their quotidian experiences, and to place these women, some of whom made a rational economic decision to sell their bodies, in the larger social context of late imperial Austria. Wingfield investigates the interactions of both registered and clandestine prostitutes with the vice police and other supervisory agents, including physicians and court officials, as well as with the inhabitants of these women's world, including brothel clients and madams, and pimps, rather than focusing top-down on the state-constructed apparatus of surveillance. Close reading of a broad range of primary and secondary sources shows that some prostitutes in late imperial Austria took control over their own fates, at least as much as other working-class women, in the last decades before the end of the Monarchy. And after 1918, bureaucratic transition did not necessarily parallel political transition. Thus, there was no dramatic change in the regulation of prostitution in the successor states. Legislation, which changed regulation only piecemeal after the war, often continued to incorporate forms of control, reflecting continuity in attitudes about women's sexuality.

Monica waits in the Anti-Venereal Medical Service of the Zona Galactica, the legal, state-run brothel where she works in Tuxtla Gutierrez, Mexico. Surrounded by other sex workers, she clutches the Sanitary Control Cards that deem her registered with the city, disease-free, and able to work. On the other side of the world, Min stands singing karaoke with one of her regular clients, warily eyeing the door lest a raid by the anti-trafficking Public Security Bureau disrupt their evening by placing one or both of them in jail. Whether in Mexico or China, sex work-related public policy varies considerably from one community to the next. A range of policies dictate what is permissible, many of them intending to keep sex workers themselves healthy and free from harm. Yet often, policies with particular goals end up having completely different consequences. Policing Pleasure examines cross-cultural public policies related to sex work, bringing together ethnographic studies from around the world-from South Africa to India-to offer a nuanced critique of national and municipal approaches to regulating sex work. Contributors offer new theoretical and methodological perspectives that move beyond already well-established debates between "abolitionists" and "sex workers' rights advocates" to document both the intention of public policies on sex work and their actual impact upon those who sell sex, those who buy sex, and public health more generally.

This book focuses on human trafficking in Europe for labour and sexual exploitation. It includes empirical work on trafficking throughout Europe, identifying underlying causes in globalisation, migration policies and gender inequality. It questions whether European responses-from policy makers or civil society are adequate to meet the challenge.

Amsterdam was, after London and Paris, the third largest city in early modern Europe, and was renowned throughout Europe for its widespread and visible prostitution. Delving deep into a wide range of sources, but making particular use of the transcripts of thousands of trials, The Burgher andthe Whore reconstructs Amsterdam's whoredom in detail. The colourful and fascinating descriptions of the prostitutes, their bawds, their clients, and the police shed new light on the cultural, social, and economic conditions of the lives of poor women in a seafaring society.
Lotte van de Pol explores how the vice trade was embedded in Amsterdam's society, economy, and judicial system, and how legislation and policing were shaped by misogynist attitudes towards women and fear of God's wrath and venereal diseases towards sex. The story concentrates on the people living at the margins of a rich metropolis, in which there was a large surplus of women, many of them poor immigrants with little prospect of marriage. Many changes are visible in the 150 years under scrutiny, including the view of prostitution from immorality to trade, and of prostitutes from whores and criminals to paupers. The result is a book that can be read as the history of the Dutch Golden Age from below.

Slavery and sexuality in the ancient world are well researched on their own, yet rarely have they been examined together. This volume is the first to explore the range of roles that sex played in the lives of enslaved people in antiquity beyond prostitution, bringing together scholars of both Greece and Rome to consider important and complex issues. Chapters address a wealth of art, literature, and drama to analyze a wide range of issues, including gendered power dynamics, sexual violence in slave revolts, same-sex relations between free and enslaved people, and the agency of assault victims. Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity reveals the often hidden and contradictory attitudes concerning the sexual identities and expression of enslaved people. These individuals were typically objectified by both social convention and legal description but were also recognized as human subjects, with subjectivity and sexual desires of their own. The contributors provoke valuable and fascinating questions that not only recognize the trauma and struggles of enslaved people but also point to the apparent inconsistencies in the mindsets of the enslavers. The resulting volume expands our understanding of both sexuality and slavery in ancient Greece and Rome, as separate subjects and as they impacted each other.

Recent years have seen a 'quiet revolution' in the way that the sex industry is regulated and governed. The consensus around what the problems of prostitution are has broken down and in its place a plethora of contradictory themes has emerged. "Regulating sex for sale" examines the total package of reforms and proposals that have been introduced in this area since May 2000. Bringing together some of the most well-known writers, researchers and practitioners in the field, it provides a detailed analysis and critical reflection on the processes, assumptions and contradictions shaping the UK's emerging prostitution policy. What are the unintended consequences of recent policies and how do they impact on the populations that they regulate? Do they contain any possibility for radical intervention and/or new ways of governing prostitution? The book describes the impact these policies have on indoor sex workers, street-based sex workers, young people, men or those with drug misuse issues. It also looks at the assumptions made by policy makers about the various constituencies affected, including the communities in which sex work takes place. This is the first book to address the contradictions in current policy on prostitution in England and Wales and will be of interest to academics, postgraduate students and policy makers in criminal justice, as well as in other areas, including children and young people, community safety and urban studies.

Masculine Identities and Male Sex Work Between East Java and Bali introduces the reader to the stories of young male sex workers in South Bali. These are accounts of gang warfare, bodies, and violence which speak to the dreams, aspirations, and failures of a generation of young men in contemporary Indonesia.

Prostitution in the ancient Greek world was widespread, legal, and acceptable as a fact of life and an unavoidable necessity. The state regulated the industry and treated prostitution as any other trade. Almost every prominent man in the ancient world has been truly or falsely associated with some famous hetaira. These women, who sold their affections to the richest and most influential men of their time, have become legends in their own right. They pushed the boundaries of female empowerment in their quest for self-promotion and notoriety, and continue to fascinate us. Prostitution remains a complex phenomenon linked to issues of gender, culture, law, civic ideology, education, social control, and economic forces. This is why its study is of paramount importance for our understanding of the culture, outlook and institutions of the ancient world, and in turn it can shed new light and introduce new perspectives to the challenging debate of our times on prostitution and contemporary sexual morality. The main purpose of this book is to provide the primary historical study of the topic with emphasis upon the separation of facts from the mythology surrounding the countless references to prostitution in Greek literary sources.