The women who still walk the streets of Victorian Britain

8th January 2007
By Julia Laite

Free Access

This article is provided free-to-view for all visitors to thepolitician.org.

When prostitution is in the limelight because of scandals, controversies, or tragic incidents such as the Ipswich murders, it tends to inspire knee-jerk reactions, especially from the media. In the face of these reactions, it is very important for policy makers to take a well-considered approach to the question. And no perspective offers more measured insight than the historical one.

The first lesson that history might teach us is that neither the laws which control prostitution nor the serial murder of prostitutes are new. The law against street solicitation used today has been altered by only eight words since 1839. Laws outlawing brothels, pimping and trafficking have been in place since the late nineteenth century. Though all these laws have been reiterated in more recent Acts, it is fair to say that almost no fundamental changes have been made to the way in which the government deals with prostitution since the late nineteenth century, over one hundred and twenty years ago.

In the high moral climate of the late nineteenth century, a child-prostitution scandal in 1885 sparked a movement which looked to the criminal law to protect women and promote morality. It was in this context that laws against brothels were passed, as well as those which addressed third party exploitation. However, it was not long before demands for protection turned to demands for repression. Despite the fact that the public was most concerned with the role of exploitative third parties, these new laws fell most heavily on prostitutes themselves. Police prosecuted small brothels, leaving many women homeless, and the laws which protected women from exploitation were put into use with a mere fraction of the frequency with which laws that punished street prostitutes were applied.

A very curious paradox emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Socially and culturally, the prostitute was coming to be seen more than ever before as a victim and people were less inclined to blame the woman herself for her initial entry into prostitution. Instead, they were coming to understand prostitutes as women forced to become involved in commercial sex because of economic need, limited choices, abuse, or coercion. Legally, however, the prostitute woman was still seen as a criminal, and was being punished as one more than ever before. Over the first half of the twentieth century, as it is today, this punishment was largely executed through solicitation law.

Since 1885, the UK government has often found itself treading a very delicate line. On the one hand, like the government of today, previous parliaments and state offices have been petitioned by powerful citizens’ organisations demanding that they clear the streets of prostitutes and repress all manifestations of vice. On the other hand, governments have also been compelled to uphold the rights of individuals before the law, rights which meant that even prostitutes could not be subjected to unjust procedures in the name of the public peace. Advocates for the repeal of the solicitation laws in the 1920s opposed them on libertarian grounds, arguing that they were unequal and unconstitutional, in that they singled out vulnerable women for an offence that no man, and no ‘innocent’ woman, could commit. A woman, once labelled a ‘common prostitute’, could be easily arrested and convicted for solicitation any time she was on the street. An important safeguard, which required that the woman had to be annoying ‘inhabitants or passengers’ before she could be arrested, was removed in 1959.

Most importantly of all, argued solicitation law opponents, the law did not work. It did not ‘eradicate’ prostitution, nor did it improve the lives of prostitute women. Far from it: not three years after the wave of repression began in 1885, ‘Jack the Ripper’ started his gruesome murder spree in London’s East End. This prostitute killer has lent his name to all too many subsequent serial killers, including the most recent one. In the face of the Ipswich murders, where police officers begged for information from women and potential victims who were busy hiding from arrest warrants, the words of one advocate for the repeal of solicitation law in the 1920s still ring true: ‘Perhaps no class of people has been so much abused, persecuted, hated, or, alternatively, sentimentalized over as prostitutes have been,’ she wrote, ‘but one thing they have never had yet, and that is simple legal justice. Ought we not to secure legal justice for the ‘common prostitute’ before we set out to reform her?’

It is still fundamentally important that, in formulating new laws and policies on prostitution, the government does not lose sight of this need for ‘legal justice’, and that it recognises the civil rights of the people it hopes to punish, control, or help. For defending the civil rights of prostitutes does not only uphold an ancient British ideal of equal citizenship: a lack of fair treatment under the law has led many prostitute women, as we have seen during the Ipswich murders, to be immensely distrustful of the state. Sadly, these state organizations, especially police forces, are the very ones which should be the front line of help for vulnerable women. But until these women have a guarantee of fair treatment before the law, it will be immensely difficult to address their needs. This problem is rendered even more serious by the severe under-funding of programmes and shelters to which women might turn in lieu of the street, the courtroom, and the gaol cell.

Many solutions have been proposed throughout history. In the mid-nineteenth century, Britain experimented with a regulated system of prostitution. The system collapsed quite quickly in the 1880s and, if other countries which practise regulation today are any indication, any present attempt to instate it would be fraught with problems. Not only do legalized brothels require many unwilling women to register themselves as prostitutes, they offer no protection to street prostitutes and underage prostitutes who fall outside the system. Toleration zones can isolate women, and push the problem of prostitution — and the welfare of prostitute women — out of the sight of the public.

Britain has also considered implementing a system of complete repression, where the buying as well as the selling of sex is illegal. This system has been common in the United States for almost a century. Britain took a small step toward it in the 1980s, when it passed laws against ‘kerb crawling’, but this system has historically enjoyed very limited success. Women are still far more frequently arrested than men, and most prostitutes claim that kerb crawling laws simply afford them less time to evaluate the threat of potential clients.

We still operate within the paradox of prostitution control which existed in the late nineteenth century, one which construes the prostitute as a victim while all the while punishing her as a criminal. Despite the fact that our society has come to see prostitutes as women who suffer from economic inequality, dislocation, bad home environments, addiction and familial and institutional abuse, the law we still apply most frequently in the control of prostitution is that which attacks street solicitation. Most paradoxically of all, in punishing these women we may cut them off from the very institutional relationships they need to help them exit prostitution and escape the poverty, addiction, and abuse which contributed to their prostitution in the first place.

The most recent government proposals advocate using the solicitation laws and the kerb crawling laws to ‘crackdown’ on street prostitution, while allowing small brothels to operate. But as over a century of ‘crackdowns’ demonstrate, these policies neither work in terms of eliminating prostitution nor in terms of helping prostitute women. For the historian, most ‘new’ strategies for prostitution control do not seem particularly new. One possible strategy, however, is shockingly novel: a real financial commitment to programmes which prevent women from entering prostitution, and which help them exit it once involved. Over the course of the past 120 years, many organisations have recognised the need for such resources, and have tried all manner of methods to ‘rescue’ and ‘reform’ prostitutes. Never has this common recognition translated into coherent and well-funded government programmes. Government sponsored organizations like the Poppy Project, for instance, are short of money and resources and still depend heavily on private donations to supplement government funding, and to help those women who are ineligible for public funds. History shows us just how immensely difficult prostitution is for governments to cope with. But if our goal is to truly help prostitute women and to drastically reduce the amount of prostitution that goes on in our society, perhaps such radical policies, after one hundred and twenty years of ones which do not seem to work, are just what is needed.

Julia Laite is a historian and Commonwealth scholar at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge.

Filed Under: Legislation, Prostitution, Social Policy
Back to Top^