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Zusatztext This is the latest in the rapidly expanding specialist series of Willan books on themes relating to sex and society. It addresses a real gap in terms of current texts and understandings in relation to the problem of prostitution and specifically the legalization of commercial sex work. The author sets her stall out right from the start asserting that recent Government reforms to control prostitution are counter-productive in not only failing to meet their desired objectives, but in creating a number of unanticipated ancillary social problems. She has also been fortunate to draw on the expertise and help of a number of leading criminologistsand practitioners in the field,including Betsy Stanko, Keith Soothill, Helen Self, Lorraine Gelsthorpe and the Metropolitan Police Vice and Clubs Unit. This gives the book not only considerable academic integrity, but embeds the discussion in a practical and real life context as well. The first chapter provides a brief historiography of societal responses to commercial sex as both an actual and perceived problem, from initial public acceptance in Roman times to an increasingly less tolerant and more repressive regime. Reference is made to moral repression, the role of the church, the hypocrisy of the Victorians and associated vice and vigilance campaigns, through to the Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act 1956. From then the increasing use of more punitive strategies aimed at ‘eradicating’ the ‘problem,’ primarily the kerb-crawling provisions of 1985 are covered, culminating in the Sexual Offences Act 2003. In the second chapter Brooks-Gordon analyses the integrity of the Government’s investigation into the current problem of prostitution; analysing its Consultation Document Paying the Price 2004 and subsequent Co-ordination Strategy on Prostitution January 2006. The consultation report maintains the premise that prostitution must be controlled despite the fact that it is not illegal. The author challenges the Government’s approach on the basis of its failure to even ask the question whether sex-work should be legitimate and its automatic assumption that it is and should be a crime. The consultation exercise is subjected to considerable criticism, particularly the lack of any historical perspective post-Wolfenden in the literature review and the subsequent failure to consider the wider contextual and socio-cultural changes of the past 50 years. The failure to address the psyche of male sex clients and the reasons why they choose to engage in commercial sex is identified as another shortcoming.Existing research on these themes is also underutilised and remarkably the Home Office is alleged to have misrepresented its own previously commissioned research.Further condemnation emanates from the Government’s failure to fully consider policy initiatives introduced elsewhere, particularly Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and where reference has been made the author claims it has been misinterpreted or misread.Finally, in relation to domestic ‘re-education schemes’ and ‘conditional cautioning’ the claimed successes of the Home Office are not, she argues, supported by its own research and statistics. Thus not only is it claimed that there appears to be a considerable amount of spin but also that the Government’s approach lacks integrity in its failure to analyse the problem of prostitution in light of the not inconsiderable debates that have been taking place in sociological discourse. Brooks-Gordon questions the failure to utilise any legal discourse (i.e. legitimacy andlegal theory),feminist discourse (traditional moral discourse, sexual domination discourse, sex work discourse) or social policy discourse (public nuisance discourse, moral order discourse, market discourse) which given the subject matter displays either extreme ignorance or extreme arrogance and the author is right to point this out. Instead she asserts that th...
