Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960, by Julia Laite.

Abstract

Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885-1960, by Julia Laite. Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ix, maps, 299 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). Buying and selling sex has never actually been illegal in Britain. However, solicitation and other activities that facilitate commercial sex were increasingly prohibited by legal statute and police action since the late nineteenth century. In Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens, Julia Laite explores the complex and contingent experience of prostitutes in relation to the criminal justice system. Laite questions both the motivations and utility of criminalization, arguing that it helped to make prostitution about specific demons in society that could be managed by specific laws, rather than a sign of something very wrong in the fundamental structure of society or the state itself' (p. 216). More often than redressing exploitation and the dangers associated with commercial sex for women, Laite argues, criminalization instead created dynamics which encouraged the involvement of third-parties, organized crime, and women's increased vulnerability to physical harm. Present-day positions and policies on prostitution, Laite concludes, fail to recognize these histories or the harmful consequences of past legal interventions. Laite extends the study of British prostitution through the first half of the twentieth century, from the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act to the 1959 Street Offences Act, a critical period in which prostitution was increasingly the fodder of tabloid sensationalism, public concern and state intervention. During this period prostitution came to be more circumscribed than it had been at any other time in Britain's modern history (p. 2). Critical to understanding commercial sex and its treatment by the criminal justice system is the common prostitute, a term never legally defined, but pervasive in the ongoing criminalization process. Statutes against solicitation were based on an understanding of the public nuisance caused by the common prostitute, an unrespectable urban character distinct from the respectable ordinary citizen. Women entered prostitution for many reasons. Some with dependent children, parents, or partners valued the income and flexible time commitments. Others were coerced or believed they had no other options. Some enjoyed the work. But they all did it, as Laite points out, because there were customers for commercial sex. These included a similarly diverse range of men and motivations. Despite historians' focus on prostitute women, it was men who comprised the majority of individuals participating in commercial sex. Laite's chapter on male clients, and references to male third-parties, pimps, touts, and landlords recognized that on many levels prostitution was inflected by a variety of gender relations. Unlike prostitute women, men were never legally liable for their role in commercial sex and therefore remained largely invisible in the historical record. Still, Laite reminds us that their role cannot be discounted; clients' sexual desires, their spending and earning patterns, their mobility, their leisure patterns and their attitudes were highly determinative of the forms that commercial sex would take (p. 44). Criminalization was, according to Laite, an ongoing process that was both contingent and historically specific. Legal reforms never reduced the incidences of commercial sex, and instead increasing prostitutes' reliance on third-parties, while also undermining women's ability to work safely. …