Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960

"Julia Laite is a talented and creative historian and I picked her book because of its broad, contemporary relevance. She’s really interested in tracing legal shifts in state approaches to prostitution in London from 1885 until 1960. Her chronological focus is bookended by the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act and the 1959 Street Offences Act. If you’re not that interested in legislation, don’t worry, as it’s more about the impact of various forms of criminalisation on the business of prostitution in London in this period, as well as its impact upon the working lives of women who engaged in paid sex. Throughout the book, she traces the far-reaching consequences of criminalisation and how, often, the situation on the ground contradicted the stated aims of the legislation. Yes, it’s an important theme in the history of prostitution, and in Laite’s book, the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act is a case in point and a significant moment in British history. The 1885 Act raised the age of consent from 13 to 16, but it also outlawed brothels and made pimping a criminal offence. These legislation changes were introduced with the stated aim of keeping women and children safe because around the turn of the twentieth century there was widespread concern about the ‘white slave trade’. This referred to a moral panic surrounding the kidnap and transportation of young women and girls to foreign brothels where they were believed to be forced to work as prostitutes. Yes, of course, exploitation is ever-present in the history of prostitution for various reasons, but historians generally agree that the panic that surrounded the ‘white slave trade’ was disproportionate to the reality. From research conducted on the subject, it appears that the idea of ‘white slavery’ was much more potent than the reality and that the intent focus on it obscured the other forms of exploitation that were taking place within the commercial sex industry. So, in 1885, the Criminal Amendment Act was passed with the stated aim of keeping women and girls safe. At first glance, it might appear quite honourable to introduce legislation to achieve these ends, but the law also made brothels illegal, which pushed women who were working as prostitutes into more dangerous working conditions. It also increased the dependence of women engaged in prostitution on third parties, like pimps, who were able to charge higher prices for protection from the police. It also made women less likely to report a crime if they had been engaging in prostitution, because doing so would mean admitting to engaging in behaviour that was criminalised. The 1885 Criminal Amendment Act is just one example of legislation that had an honourable stated aim, but a much more complicated reality. That law, in particular, had really far-reaching consequences. It’s interesting that you’ve put it in that context of the liberal, permissive age, because that’s absolutely how many of us would think of this era, particularly as the Wolfenden Committee Report of 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of sex between men. However, one of the other recommendations of this report was a crackdown on street prostitution. Two years after the report’s publication, solicitation became subject to a much higher penalty with the Street Offences Act of 1959. As I’m sure you can imagine, these kinds of policies push women engaging in prostitution into more dangerous situations, encouraging greater reliance on organized crime and third parties to avoid police detection. Importantly, they also don’t actually tackle the key causes of prostitution, such as poverty and gender inequality. As well as decreasing the visibility of prostitution, the goal of criminalisation is to focus attention on punishing individuals (like pimps), rather than tackling the pervasive causes of prostitution for which the state and broader society are responsible. A series of acts were passed in the 2000s to update legislation on prostitution passed in the 1950s. It’s important to note that prostitution itself—the buying and selling of sex—has never been illegal in England, Scotland, and Wales, but soliciting on the street and running a brothel, and pimping for financial gain, are all criminal offences. However, definitions of these crimes are quite flexible. For example, in the UK today, if two sex workers choose to work together in one apartment for safety, the law counts this as keeping a brothel, so both women can face criminal prosecution if they are caught. The legislation introduced at different points throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has cast a really long shadow. The current state of prostitution law in the UK is largely derived from the two pieces of legislation that bookend Laite’s study: the 1885 Criminal Amendment Act and the 1959 Criminal Offences Act."