Prostitution was a serious problem for nineteenth-century Europe: a threat to public health and public order and, at the same time, a prop to morality, allowing society to protect the purity of most women by sacrificing that of only a few. Jill Harsin examines the methods by which the police of Paris resolved the contradictions of this situation--an extralgal adminsitrative system involving the registration, regular medical examination, and periodic administrative detention of all working-class prostitutes. As the author shows, this regulatory system not only deprived prostitutes of civil rights, but increasingly encroached on the rights of all working women who, by the standards and definitions of the police, exhibited suspicious moral character. Drawing on a variety of sources, Professor Harsin presents statistical material on such topics as prostitutes' criminality, providing new evidence for an area hitherto dominated by speculation. Her work challenges previous interpretations by showing a regulatory system well in place during the Restoration. Jill Harsin is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This is a pioneering study that examines the sale of sex in classical Athens from a commercial (rather than from a cultural or moral) perspective. Following the author's earlier book on Athenian banking, this work analyzes erotic business at Athens in the context of the Athenian economy. For the Athenians, the social acceptability and moral standing of human labor was largely determined by the conditions under which work was performed. Pursued in a context characteristic of servile endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of slave labor-was contemptible. Pursued under conditions appropriate to non-servile endeavor, prostitution-like all forms of free labor-was not violative of Athenian work ethics. As a mercantile activity, however, prostitution was not untouched by Athenian antagonism toward commercial and manual pursuits; as the "business of sex," prostitution further evoked negativity from segments of Greek opinion uncomfortable with any form of carnality. Yet ancient sources also adumbrate another view, in which the sale of sex, lawful and indeed pervasive at Athens, is presented alluringly. In a book that will be of interest to all students of sex and gender, to economic, legal and social historians, and to classicists, the author explores the high compensation earned by female sexual entrepreneurs who often controlled prostitutional businesses that were perpetuated from generation to generation on a matrilineal basis, and that benefitted from legislative restrictions on pimping. The author juxtaposes the widespread practice of "prostitution pursuant to written contract" with legislation targeting male prostitutes functioning as governmental leaders, and explores the seemingly contradictory phenomena of extensive sexual exploitation of slave prostitutes (male and female) coexisting with Athenian society's pride in its legislative protection of slaves and minors against sexual outrage.

What is it like to work in a place that is both a thriving and close-knit community and a globally recognised part of the commercial sex industry? London's Soho has always been a place of complexity, contrast and change throughout its colourful history, yet urban branding, local community initiatives and licensing regulations have combined to 'clean up' Soho, arguably to the point of sanitisation, and commercial over-development remains a continuing threat. In spite of all this, Soho retains its edge and remains a unique place to live, work and consume. Based on a ten-year ethnographic study of working in Soho's sex shops, combining archival material, literary sources, photographic materials and interviews with men and women employed there, Tyler draws together insights from history, geography and cultural studies to tell the unseen story of this fascinating work place.

New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1970–1920

Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize of the Society of American Historians and the New York State Historical Association Manuscript Prize

"A wonderful book. The research is overwhelming in breadth, precision, and imagination. City of Eros beautifully portrays an aspect of social and urban, as well as economic history, which we can no longer ignore." —Mary P. Ryan, University of California, Berkeley

"Gilfoyle has tied together into one package the interrelationship between the role and status of women, American ideas about sex, the effects of urbanization and immigration, real estate speculation, vigilantism, and politics. . . . In short, he has effectively brought issues of sexuality into social history. . . . Deserving of the highest praise." — Vern L. Bullough, Historian

"A fascinating study. . . . Gilfoyle does not simply catalogue the omnipresence of the postitutes. He situates their trade in the economic life of the city. . . . City of Eros is social history at its best, beautifully written, with a mosaic of rich detail that informs but does not overwhelm the narrative line." —David Nasaw, New York Times Book Review

"Remarkable. . . . [A] clear and fascinating narrative . . . [that] opens up plenty of new lines of inquiry. . . . A major contribution to the history of gender, popular culture, and the life of New York City." —Elliott J. Gorn, Journal of American History

"The first careful analysis of the politics, geography, and business of prostitution in the nation's metropolis. With grace and style, Timothy Gilfoyle has moved the subject from the shadows to the light." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Columbia University

Every year, hundreds of thousands of women and children are abducted, deceived, seduced, or sold into forced prostitution, coerced to service hundreds if not thousands of men before being discarded. These trafficked sex slaves form the backbone of one of the world's most profitable illicit enterprises and generate huge profits for their exploiters, for unlike narcotics, which must be grown, harvested, refined, and packaged, sex slaves require no such "processing," and can be repeatedly "consumed."

Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, in the first journey of its kind, he traveled across four continents to investigate these crimes and take stock of their devastating human toll. Kara made several trips to India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Albania, Moldova, Mexico, and the United States. He witnessed firsthand the sale of human beings into slavery, interviewed over four hundred slaves, and confronted some of those who trafficked and exploited them.

In this book, Kara provides a riveting account of his journey into this unconscionable industry, sharing the moving stories of its victims and revealing the shocking conditions of their exploitation. He draws on his background in finance, economics, and law to provide the first ever business analysis of contemporary slavery worldwide, focusing on its most profitable and barbaric form: sex trafficking. Kara describes the local factors and global economic forces that gave rise to this and other forms of modern slavery over the past two decades and quantifies, for the first time, the size, growth, and profitability of each industry. Finally, he identifies the sectors of the sex trafficking industry that would be hardest hit by specifically designed interventions and recommends the specific legal, tactical, and policy measures that would target these vulnerable sectors and help to abolish this form of slavery, once and for all.

The author will donate a portion of the proceeds of this book to the anti-slavery organization, Free the Slaves.

An adaptation of the documentary film, Operation Toussaint reveals how an Ex-Special Agent and Operation Underground Railroad are saving children from sex trafficking around the world through Operation Toussaint, a covert mission to Haiti. Tim Ballard left his post as a special agent for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to found Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.). Through this organization, Tim and his team plan undercover operations to rescue child sex trafficking victims around the world. To date, they have saved hundreds of children from horrific conditions, which Tim wasn't able to do when bound by government restrictions. Take an inside look at O.U.R., and their mission to end modern day slavery, as you join Tim and his Special Forces team on a covert mission to Haiti where they bring a ring of sex traffickers who bribed their way out of jail to justice in Operation Toussaint.

Popular representations of third-world sex workers as sex slaves and vectors of HIV have spawned abolitionist legal reforms that are harmful and ineffective, and public health initiatives that provide only marginal protection of sex workers' rights. In this book, Prabha Kotiswaran asks how we might understand sex workers' demands that they be treated as workers. She contemplates questions of redistribution through law within the sex industry by examining the political economies and legal ethnographies of two archetypical urban sex markets in India.

Kotiswaran conducted in-depth fieldwork among sex workers in Sonagachi, Kolkata's largest red-light area, and Tirupati, a temple town in southern India. Providing new insights into the lives of these women--many of whom are demanding the respect and legal protection that other workers get--Kotiswaran builds a persuasive theoretical case for recognizing these women's sexual labor. Moving beyond standard feminist discourse on prostitution, she draws on a critical genealogy of materialist feminism for its sophisticated vocabulary of female reproductive and sexual labor, and uses a legal realist approach to show why criminalization cannot succeed amid the informal social networks and economic structures of sex markets. Based on this, Kotiswaran assesses the law's redistributive potential by analyzing the possible economic consequences of partial decriminalization, complete decriminalization, and legalization. She concludes with a theory of sex work from a postcolonial materialist feminist perspective.

This book presents an analysis of the social organization of escort agencies in Poland. Izabela Slezak focuses on the actions of female sex workers, who are seen as active participants co-creating their working conditions. She analyzes the interactions between sex workers and their clients. Furthermore, she discusses the relationships between employees of the premises, namely the women providing sex services, the managers of the agencies, and security workers. The conclusions of the publication are the result of long-standing ethnographic research carried out in escort agencies, as well as unstructured interviews with their employees and clients. The book is addressed to people who are interested in qualitative sociology, interpretative sociology, and those who would like to understand contemporary escort agencies which operate in Poland. It will be also important for employees of organizations that work with people who provide sex services.

The creation of Lima's red light district in 1928 marked the culminating achievement of the promoters of regulation who sought to control the spread of venereal disease by medically policing female prostitutes. Its closure in 1956 was arguably the high point of abolitionism, a transnational movement originating in the 1860s that advocated that regulation was not only ineffective from a public health perspective, but also morally wrong. The Sexual Question charts this cyclic process of regulation and abolition in Peru, uncovering the ideas, policies, and actors shaping the debates on prostitution in Lima and beyond. The history of prostitution, Paulo Drinot shows, sheds light on the interplay of gender and sexuality, medicine and public health, and nation-building and state formation in Peru. With its compelling historical lens, this landmark study offers readers an engaging narrative, and new perspectives on Latin American studies, social policy, and Peruvian history.

In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women--mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army--endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative.
Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women--a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors-- from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women's human rights movement--that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

Bringing together conceptual, practice, and advocacy knowledge, Ending Human Trafficking and Modern-Day Slavery: Freedom's Journey explores the complexities of human trafficking and modern-day slavery through a global perspective. This comprehensive, multidisciplinary text includes a discussion of the root causes and structural issues that continue to plague society, as well as real-life case studies and vignettes, the words of human trafficking survivors, and insights from first responders and anti-trafficking advocates. Each chapter includes a "call to action" to inspire readers to implement a range of strategies designed to disrupt, eradicate, or mitigate human trafficking and modern-day slavery.

'Holy hell, this book was intense...it kept me on edge the whole time. I absolutely LOVED this book.' Reader Review 'Ben, I need you. Help me.' 'PLEASE HELP ME!' 'It was an accident...but there's so much blood...' In a frantic late-night phone call, Ben learns his wife, Mia, has killed a man. And she needs his help. When Ben arrives at Mia's hotel room, the scene is horrific - but over the course of the night it will get much worse. All their secrets will be uncovered, and they will discover how far they'll go to protect themselves and each other... will they kill for love? Or will they die for it? One phone call. Twelve hours to save their marriage. And their lives. Told in real-time half-hour chapters, this is a read-in-one-sitting thriller that fans of T.M. Logan and Harlan Coben will devour. Sit down and strap yourself in for the rollercoaster read of 2022. Readers are hooked on answering The Call: 'It grabs you on the first page and the tension doesn't let up. Atmospheric, twisted and utterly compelling - I couldn't put it down.' Debbie Howells, author of The Secret 'Incredibly fast-paced and well plotted, a cracking read.' Araminta Hall, author of Perfect Strangers 'An excellent book - I flew through it...A dark, chilling, twisted delight that had me hooked from the start' Susi Holliday, author of Substitute and The Last Resort 'I loved it! A very fast-paced, action-packed story with lots of craziness and suspense to keep you reading straight to the very end!' Reader Review 'Go with the flow and enjoy the rollercoaster ride...A gripping thriller that surprises, at times, by being laugh-out-loud funny.' Reader Review 'Don't start it unless you have a spare few hours...you won't want to put it down.' Reader Review 'So gripping that I couldn't have put it down even if I had wanted to...full of suspense and mystery, I loved it.' Reader Review 'This one is certainly worth a read. A fun ride through a very dark night. Recommended.' Reader Review 'A fun, high-energy read...this thriller offers you a rollercoaster of a ride.' Reader Review 'Wow... It's intense, gory and gripping, and I really enjoyed it!' Reader Review 'I really enjoyed this book, it grabbed me from the very first page.' Reader Review 'From the very first page this book draws you in. The suspense starts straight away... it kept me hooked throughout' Reader Review 'A twisty and scary read that I couldn't put down!' Reader Review 'A psych thriller, domestic suspense mash-up that is filled to the brim with lies and secrets' Reader Review 'I read The Call in one sitting. It was fast-paced and twisty and kept me intrigued right to the end.' Reader Review

One of the most fascinating phenomena of 1960s film culture is the emergence of American sexploitation films-salacious indies made on the margins of Hollywood. Hundreds of such films were produced and shown on both urban and small-town screens over the course of the decade. Yet despite their vital importance to the film scene, and though they are now understood as a gateway to the emergence of publicly exhibited hardcore pornography in the early 1970s, these films have been largely overlooked by scholars. Defined by low budgets, quick production times, unknown actors, strategic uses of nudity, and a sensationalist obsession with unbridled female sexuality, sexploitation films provide a unique window into a tumultuous period in American culture and sexual politics. In Lewd Looks, Elena Gorfinkel examines the social and legal developments that made sexploitation films possible: their aesthetics, their regulation, and their audiences. Gorfinkel explores the ways sexploitation films changed how spectators encountered and made sense of the sexualized body and set the stage for the adult film industry of today. Lewd Looks recovers a lost chapter in the history of independent cinema and American culture-a subject that will engross readers interested in media, sexuality, gender, and the 1960s. Gorfinkel investigates the films and their contexts with scholarly depth and vivid storytelling, producing a new account of the obscene image, screen sex, and adult film and media.

This book traces the social history of early modern Japan's sex trade, from its beginnings in seventeenth-century cities to its apotheosis in the nineteenth-century countryside. Drawing on legal codes, diaries, town registers, petitions, and criminal records, it describes how the work of "selling women" transformed communities across the archipelago. By focusing on the social implications of prostitutes' economic behavior, this study offers a new understanding of how and why women who work in the sex trade are marginalized. It also demonstrates how the patriarchal order of the early modern state was undermined by the emergence of the market economy, which changed the places of women in their households and the realm at large.

Somaly Mam was abandoned as a baby and looked after by her grandmother until she disappeared. She was then taken into the care of a man she called 'grandfather', but was treated no better than an unpaid servant. sold. Raped at twelve, Somaly was forced to marry at fifteen and then sold to a brothel. She endured years of abuse before managing to escape. The Road of Lost Innocence is a moving account of a traumatic childhood and also the inspirational story of a determined and courageous woman devoted to helping other girls caught up in the illegal sex trade and violent underworld in Cambodia. In 1997 Somaly Mam co-founded AFESIP to combat trafficking in women and children for sexual slavery.

"Common women" in medieval England were prostitutes, whose distinguishing feature was not that they took money for sex but that they belonged to all men in common. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England tells the stories of these women's lives: their entrance into the trade because of poor job and marriage prospects or because of seduction or rape; their experiences as street-walkers, brothel workers or the medieval equivalent of call girls; their customers, from poor apprentices to priests to wealthy foreign merchants; and their relations with those among whom they lived. Through a sensitive use of a wide variety of imaginative and didactic texts, Ruth Karras shows that while prostitutes as individuals were marginalized within medieval culture, prostitution as an institution was central to the medieval understanding of what it meant to be a woman. This important work will be of interest to scholars and students of history, women's studies, and the history of sexuality.

Our world enables the sexual abuse of children. Children of all ages are abused in every country in the world, by members of every society, culture, religion, and socio-economic class. About 120 million children under twenty, or one child in ten, report sexual abuse. We often blame children for their own abuse instead of holding the perpetrators responsible for their crimes. When perpetrators are prosecuted, punishments are rarely severe. Remarkably, we sometimes justify child sex abuse, or even facilitate it, allowing it to continue, not only in hidden places, but even in the open. This book exposes the stunning extent of child sex abuse in today's world.