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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.
This article makes a small contribution to Families, Relationships and Societies’ knowledge production. It addresses racialised and ethnicised inequalities experienced in the everyday lives of a family constituted through serial migration, where the adult interviewed (‘Lizzie’) reflected on her childhood experience of leaving the Caribbean to join parents she did not remember and siblings she had never met. It reuses material from a larger study of the retrospective narratives of adults who had been childhood serial migrants. A major finding is that Lizzie’s experience of serial migration was intersectional, linked to her social positioning and her experiences of racism at school and felt outsiderness at home in contrast to feelings of belonging and being valued at the Black-led church she attended. The article argues that, while such family experiences are frequently unrecognised, they pattern children’s experiences, their adult relationships and identities and contribute to, and arise from, historical and sociostructural constructions of society.
This chapter argues for a psychosocial perspective where the psychic and the sociostructural are understood as inextricably linked. It documents a move from a traditionally psychological focus as the result of engagement with sociological issues to a psychosocial one, encompassing sociological and psychological perspectives. The chapter makes three suggestions that new sociologists might like to consider. The first is that it is important to recognise that no one discipline can provide all the tools, insights, and methodologies necessary to studying sociological questions. The second is that it is as important to attend to methodological issues as the topic being studied since these are interlinked. The third is that it continues to be crucial to try to understand how agency and structure (or individual and society to put it another way) are always at play in social life and research.
This chapter provides a discourse analysis of the emergence of child sexual exploitation (CSE) as a social problem in order to uncover the unchallenged modes of thought that dominate our practices and assumptions about what CSE is and how to deal with it. It first describes discourse analysis and suggests the sort of questions that such an approach raises. The chapter next describes the discursive field out of which emerged the discourse of CSE as a particular type of social problem. Afterward, the chapter turns to the discourse of CSE and the subjects of regulation that it creates. To conclude, this chapter reflects on the discursive erasures within the discourse and why it is important to still talk about prostitution.
This chapter places the use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) in policing prostitution into the broader context of the regulation of prostitution in the United Kingdom. It argues that ASBOs are not at odds with recent reforms to the regulation of prostitution — despite first impressions — and are not particularly innovative or new measures used by criminal justice agencies in the policing and regulation of prostitution. It also contends that ASBOs represent a broader shift in the way prostitution is regulated towards harsher, deeper, targeted state-sponsored, coercive and punitive regulation of some of the most excluded, marginalised and impoverished individuals in prostitution — street sex workers. First, the chapter places ASBOs in the context of the regulatory system as put in place by the Wolfenden Report and which has been in operation for the last sixty years. It then considers the recommendations set out in the Coordinated Strategy. The Wolfenden Committee recommended the decriminalisation of male homosexuality and the partial criminalisation of prostitution.
This chapter addresses a number of questions on prostitution policy and its reform generally. It provides answers to the problem of how to critique or engage with policy in a field where the key signifier (that is, prostitution) is one which is both highly contested and, as argued in the Introduction, capable of signifying almost any type of social anxiety about sex, danger, violence, and community destruction. The chapter discusses the second dominant theme that arises from this volume, which is ‘evidence’. It notes that this issue is not unique to prostitution-policy reform and has been a theme in critical engagement with New Labour’s policy making for a number of years – especially in relation to criminal-justice policy. The chapter explores the final theme to arise from this book, which is the relationship between ‘policy’ or ‘regulation’ and ‘the problem’ of prostitution.
This chapter opens with a description of the empirical realities that shape and have shaped many women’s choice to sell sex – realities which have remained constant for some time now. It provides two frameworks for understanding, first, the shifting discourses that currently constitute prostitution, and second, prostitution policies. The chapter also provides a narrative framework in which recent policy changes can be placed.
Available Open Access under CC-BY licence.
How do environmental policies link to dynamic and relational family practices for children and parents? This Policy Press Short presents innovative cross-national research into how ‘environment’ is understood and negotiated within families, and how this plays out in everyday lives.
Based on an ESRC study that involved creative, qualitative work with families in India and the UK who live in different contexts, this book illuminates how environmental practices are negotiated within families, and how they relate to values, identities and society. In doing so, it contributes to understanding of the ways in which families and childhood are constructed as sites for intervention in climate change debates.
In an area that is increasingly of concern to governments, NGOs and the general public, this timely research is crucial for developing effective responses to climate change.
This chapter introduces an intersectional theoretical perspective as a means both to analyse educational systems and to compare the utility of different methods for analysing the intersectional complexity of educational systems. We first present the intersectionality approach, which emphasises both the social context of action and the multidimensional axes of inequality. The paper then elaborates on intersecting inequalities, and contextualises them within educational systems. In the third section we illustrate how to apply the intersectionality approach to educational systems and educational inequalities by highlighting some qualitative and quantitative research strategies. We end by considering qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), which is a method that might be viewed as a third approach midway between qualitative and quantitative approaches and that has recently been argued to fit well with intersectional approaches. We conclude by comparing the strengths and shortcomings of the three methodological perspectives (qualitative, quantitative and QCA) for applying an intersectionality approach.
This introductory chapter elaborates on the concept of climate change. It considers how families and the children within them think and feel about their local environments and how these ‘small’ environmental issues fit with ‘big’ environmental concerns about climate change in one country in the Majority world (India), and one in the Minority world (the UK). There is a great deal of evidence that, while most scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is a pressing issue and most people believe that climate change needs to be addressed, relatively few in countries that produce the most carbon emissions are prepared to make sacrifices to deal with it.
