prostitution victimless crime essay

Prostitution as a “Victimless” Crime Research Paper

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Community-oriented policing, an organizational philosophy and management approach which has been effective in promoting community, government, and police partnerships, is often considered one of the most valuable ways to minimize both criminal activity and fear of crime in the community through proactive problem solving. However, the implications of the approach in dealing with “victimless” crime need some clarifications.

It has been maintained that the victimless crimes need not essentially be victimless and there are also views suggesting that the role of the law needs to be restricted. One of the major factors relating to the “victimless” crimes has been that they are considered a misnomer. In this investigative paper, the focus has been the identification of why “victimless” crimes may be a misnomer, analyzing the specific “victimless” crime of prostitution.

In an analysis of prostitution as a “victimless” crime, it is primary to maintain that there is an ongoing debate over the classification of the crime into the “victimless” crimes. To avoid an erroneous conclusion on the question of prostitution, it is fundamental to understand a “victimless” crime as a crime committed by an adult, not by a minor, who does not regard themselves as the victims of their behavior. Prostitution and the related offenses form the major part of the crimes observed as “victimless” crimes.

To have a clearer view, prostitution may be understood, as Joel Samaha puts it, as “an ancient business, prospering at all cultures at all times no matter what the condemnation of religion and morals. It’s also a crime nearly everywhere in the United States, persisting no matter how severe the laws or how tough the efforts of police to enforce them.” (p 456, Criminal Law, by Joel Samaha, Published by Thomson Wadsworth, 2004) To evaluate the crime of prostitution in terms of wrongness, it is unquestionable that prostitution is a practice that can permanently harm the good interest of the community and thereby it is a wrong done not the individuals concerned alone but the entire people residing in the community.

There have been multiple perspectives that view the problem of prostitution and public sexual activities differently. Whereas some do not believe the behavior of prostitution as composing a major public safety threat, others view the behavior as a “victimless crime” involving two consenting partners. Yet another group considers the behavior as a chief threat to the community’s “moral decency.” Prostitution and related sexual offenses and behaviors have significantly negative connotations to many people and often moral overtones encompass public discussions about the issue. “Community morals and beliefs about how the law should regulate morality will affect how each community addresses the problem…

Primarily, such activity constitutes nuisance behavior and does not pose a serious threat to community safety. However, there are many reasons why the police should care about it.” (Illicit Sexual Activity in Public Places, by Kelly Dedel Johnson) Some of the reasons for the intervention of the police include facts such as prostitution and public sexual activity can offend inadvertent witnesses, they deter the legitimate use of public spaces, they may cause the spread of sexually transmitted diseases etc. Therefore, the role of the police in the prevention social crimes such as prostitution is often maintained.

In the background of the demands for the intervention of the police to maintain social good against the evils such as prostitution, the usefulness of community-oriented policing comes to question. As Michael Palmiotto suggests, “The key question about community policing is whether it will produce safer communities.” (p 195, Community Policing: A Policing Strategy for the 21st Century, By Michael Palmiotto, Published by Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2000) Although there is no definitive answer to the question as for now, some anecdotal evidences suggest the value of community policing in the maintenance of peace and safety of the people.

Attempts to perceive prostitution as a “victimless” crime calls for the intervention of the services such as community-oriented policing. However, there has been a strong intuition that prostitution and other “victimless” crimes are a misnomer and the laws to check such crimes are ineffective. “Laws to prevent “victimless” crimes generally have nothing to do with right or wrong, and are enacted in order to generate revenue for the government and/or justice system, and primarily, to condition the population into conformity.” (Crime and Punishment).

There have been serious debates on the deliberation of prostitution as one of the “victimless crimes.” People who advocate for strong legal action against prostitution are concerned of personal propriety or religious objection and not sympathy for the people involved. The value of the law against the “victimless crime” of prostitution has been often raised and various factors contribute to make the “victimless crimes” is considered misnomer. “That crimes such as drug use and prostitution have to be labeled “victimless” brings forth one of the most telling arguments: most people likely to be harmed by these acts suffer more under the law than they would under that from which they are supposedly being protected.” (Michael Norwitz – “Victimless-Crime Laws”).

In conclusion, it is important to establish that community-oriented policing has great validity in reducing the criminal activity as well as fear of crime in the community. On the one hand, it is argued that community-oriented policing may be effectively used in the prevention of the “victimless” crimes such as prostitution. On the other, there are serious debates regarding the postulation of prostitution as a “victimless” crime. Prostitution, often regarded as a “victimless” crime, has serious implications in terms of wrongness and the role of the law to deal with this crime is complex.

Bibliography

p 456, Criminal Law, by Joel Samaha, Published by Thomson Wadsworth, 2004.

Illicit Sexual Activity in Public Places, by Kelly Dedel Johnson). Web.

p 195, Community Policing: A Policing Strategy for the 21st Century, By Michael Palmiotto, Published by Jones & Bartlett Publishers, 2000.

Crime and Punishment. Web.

Michael Norwitz – “Victimless-Crime Laws”. Web.

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Is Prostitution a Victimless Crime?

43 Pages Posted: 27 Dec 2013

Ushangi Bakhtadze

Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani University/Sabauni

Date Written: May 26, 2013

Prostitution is often viewed as a crime without a victim, because it is hard to see prostitutes as victims of the activity in which they decided to participate voluntarily. This paper challenges the idea that prostitution is a victimless crime, drawing on analysis of just one type of prostitution – street prostitution. Moreover, it seeks to identify the appropriate response to street sex work and thereby, critically evaluates the different models of intervention, which different countries have adopted in order to regulate this activity. It concludes with a proposal that not only can reduce street prostitution but also help prostitutes to exit the profession.

Keywords: victimless crime, crime without a victim, prostitution, street prostitution, therapeutic jurisprudence, criminalisation, legalisation, decriminalisation

JEL Classification: K14

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Ushangi Bakhtadze (Contact Author)

Sulkhan-saba orbeliani university/sabauni ( email ).

3 K.Kutateladze street www.sabauni.edu.ge Tbilisi, 0186 Georgia +9950322 42 22 42 (Phone)

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Prostitution: A ‘victimless crime’?

For the vast majority of prostituted women, prostitution is the experience of being hunted, assaulted and battered.

When actress Anne Hathaway accepted her Oscar statuette last month for her supporting role in Les Miserables , she ended her speech by saying, “Here’s hoping that someday in the not too distant future, the misfortunes of Fantine will only be found in stories and never more in real life.”  

In Victor Hugo’s novel, Fantine is a young French woman who is abandoned after getting pregnant. As a single mother, she resorts to prostitution, and to selling her hair and teeth in order to support her daughter. Unfortunately, in 21st century America, Fantine’s nightmare lives on. 

The purchase and sale of American women and girls – the buying and selling of these human beings as property – continues all across the country. The key to making Hathaway’s hope a reality – and it’s a hope that any Americans share – is to dispel two myths related to the issue: first, that this is a victimless crime, and second, that it is a “free will” choice.  

Prostitution is often described as a “victimless crime”, or a “consensual crime”, because in theory, no one present at the crime is unwilling. In reality, this is a myth. In reality, prostitution of women is a particularly lethal form of violence against women, and a violation of a woman’s most basic human rights. 

It is rarely the media-approved version of prostitution, a sexy and highly-paid adventure where business is conducted at upscale bars and in hotel rooms; though some sex workers do have that experience, most do not. For the vast majority of prostituted women, prostitution is the experience of being hunted, dominated, harassed, assaulted and battered. 

Sadly, the majority of girls enter prostitution before they have reached the age of consent. In other words, their first commercial sexual interactions are rape. 

Research indicates that most women in prostitution were sexually and physically abused as children. The stories we hear daily at New Friends New Life (NFNL) , a social service agency restoring and empowering trafficked teens and sexually exploited women, corroborate those findings. 

“We’ve all been molested – over and over – and raped,” says one teen girl who completed the sexual abuse recovery therapy offered by NFNL. “We were sexually abused as children. We ran to get away. They didn’t want us in the house anymore. We were thrown out, thrown away.”

Another myth is that most women and girls choose to enter the sex industry. Again, while this is true for a small number of sex workers, the research indicates that for the vast majority of women and girls, it is a highly constrained choice. Ultimately, viewing prostitution as a genuine “choice” for women, such as secretarial work or waitressing, diminishes the possibility of getting women out and improving their lives.

In fact, more than 90 percent of prostituted women in various surveys want out, but lack viable alternatives. They are unable to leave because of their pimps, their addiction, or the need to feed their children. At New Friends New Life , the survivors we work with have described it as “the choice made by those who have no choice”.

The misconception that this is a choice makes outsiders less likely to help women and girls from getting much needed help, and it also shapes the way those women think about themselves. As one survivor said, “I couldn’t understand that I was victimised because I believed I must have chosen to be a prostitute. I initially refused to testify against my traffickers because I believed they were now the only people who accepted me.”

This is the reason why many girls “choose” to return to their traffickers; they feel shunned by society. If prostitution is a degenerate way of life, the public imagines, and if these women have chosen that life, they don’t deserve our help.

Traffickers will tell young women and children that the police won’t believe them, that their family will no longer want them, and that nobody will treat them nicely. And too often, this is true.

I have the same hope as Anne Hathaway. I believe when our culture and society exchanges judgment for compassion, healing can come to thousands of women and girls in America who are real-life like Fantines, whose misfortunes are anything but over.

Katie Pedigo is Executive Director of New Friends New Life , a non-profit that works to transform the lives of trafficked teens and exploited women.

Follow her on Twitter: @katiepedigo

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Women as victims in "victimless crimes:" the case of prostitution, additional details, no download available, availability, related topics.

Is Prostitution a Victimless Crime or Not?

Introduction.

Victimless crimes refers to category of felonies that involve one or more than one person through consensual agreement which results to no direct injury or loss, more importantly these crimes do not interfere with other people’s rights in any way. They are therefore referred as victimless crimes because no party is injured or willing to institute any legal proceedings for redress purposes. For a crime to qualify as a victimless crime it must satisfy three important characteristics; it should be fully consented by the participants, it should not interfere with anyone’s rights at all and finally it should not cause any pain or injury to the participants or third parties (Marlatt, 2004).

It is for these reasons that victimless crimes are also referred as consensual crimes or public order crimes because it is often the case that the issues involved in these crimes are issues of morality and public orderly. Because victimless crimes involve two contentious issues of morality and liberty, the legalization of this category of crime is always disputed on many grounds.

As it is, many governments worldwide are halfway committed in enacting or enforcing existing laws and regulations that deter people from engaging in these category of crimes or indeed their prosecution, but still a lot of resources continue being allocated towards addressing victimless crimes. Enforcement of victimless crimes is always contested from two major grounds by many critiques, factors that we shall closely analyze in the next chapters. One is on the basis of the nature of crimes themselves which are considered to be moral issues rather than an illegality per se, and as we all know morality is relative because it is based on personal values that cannot be defined by the State (Marlatt, 2004).

Therefore enforcing victimless crimes will first require States to set national moral standards which will act as benchmarks that would provide the framework of defining which victimless crimes to enforce. But there is a catch, because State in itself has no morals of its own since it is not an individual, rather the individuals entrusted with governance are the ones who usually determine standards of morality. Unfortunately standards of morality tends to differ very much, therefore what is morally right for John cannot be said to be the same for Mary and neither of them should use their moral basis to set the standard for the other.

The other factor from which victimless crimes are always contested has to do with liberty; because the principles of Common Law and natural justice demands that people be free to do what they like as long as they don’t interfere with other peoples liberties, it would be unfair and against natural laws of justice for the State to limit peoples liberties. Throughout this paper these are the core theories that we shall attempt to investigate in order to arrive at a fair assessment that would justify or otherwise refute the need for victimless crimes.

Forms of Victimless Crimes

There are many types of crimes that have no apparent victim or which do not cause injury for that matter; generally there are two forms that victimless crimes can take, one, victimless crimes that involve self only and two, victimless crimes that involve more than two persons (Ward, 2003). Oneself victimless crimes involve felonies that a person commit without involvement of any other party, typical examples include use of recreational drugs, not wearing seatbelt while driving, public nudity, abortions (which can be argued) and failure to wear helmets when riding motorbikes.

Incidentally these are the types of victimless crimes that are less serious and therefore not very much contested, on the other hand, victimless crimes that involve more than one person are the ones which seem to raise more contention despite their harmlessness. Prostitution, gambling and substance abuse are some of the most contentious victimless crimes which involve more than one person that are usually at the centre of victimless crimes debate.

This is probably because of the fact that these crimes occur at a very high rate within the society; for instance victimless crimes in US was responsible for more than 350,000 peoples serving jail time and another 1.5 million being on parole in 2003 according to Parenti (1999).To put into perspective the cost associated with enforcement and prosecution of victimless crimes in United States for instance let us briefly discuss the direct and indirect cost that the government incurs as far as victimless crimes are concerned.

Cost Implications of Enforcing Victimless Crimes

Most government prison systems are clogged by the high proportion of victimless crimes which makes up the majority of the cases, a good example to analyze is the United States prison system. Despite a general reduction in crime rate over the years, the United States prison system has continued to grow to be one of the most massive worldwide with a record of 7.3 million incarcerated persons as of 2008 that keeps on rising everyday 2008 (Parenti, 1999).

This is our first indication that the high number of persons incarcerated in US jails has nothing to do with serious crimes, which would indicate a significant proportion of persons jailed for victimless crimes. Indeed, United States is the leading country in the world with the highest number of persons incarcerated in jails and prisons; and also the leading country with the highest number of prisons, most of which have been built over the last few decades (Parenti, 1999).

In United States, like many other countries worldwide, incarceration is the major method that is used as punishment for convicted persons besides probation. By 2009, the total number of US federal prisons had exceeded the 115 mark, this is without counting the military prison facilities, state prison facilities and county jails among other forms of prisons that are usually outsourced by the governments from private companies (Parenti, 1999).

My hypothesis is that the increased expansion of the prison system in United States was largely driven by the increasing need to prosecute victimless crimes. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that since the start of early 1990, general crime rate in United States dramatically dropped to the lowest ever recorded rates in the country and have since remained relatively low, throughout the 1990 decade all forms of crimes, that ranged from homicides to shoplifting reduced by 40% across all cities in the country in what later come to be known as the “Great American Crime Decline” (Elsner, 2006).

In other cities such as New York which were prone to even high crime rates before this period, the drop in crime rate was even more dramatic and reduced by a whopping 75% (Elsner, 2006). In fact during the year 1990 up to 2006 for instance, the number of incarcerated persons in US prisons has risen to an all time of 2.3 million from just about a million prisoners in 1990 while another approximately 5 million were on probation (ThirdWorldTravellers.com, 2006). It is also during this period, over the last two decades that the United States government rapidly expanded it prisons facility and more than quadrupled its spending on prison system as shown in the chart below (ThirdWorldTravellers.com, 2006).

So the question then becomes why is the rate of incarceration been increasing at a time when all types of crimes have been decreasing to an all time lowest levels? To answer this question let us compare some crime rate statistics. In his book “Ain’t Nobody Business if You Do”, McWilliams states that 4 million persons are arrested in any given year for engaging in victimless crimes (cited in Ward, 2003).

What is more the government incurs cost in excess of $200 billion per year, costs that are associated with enforcement, deterrent and prosecution of victimless crimes. So if the government has committed this vast amount of resources towards controlling victimless crimes, it makes perfect sense that victimless crimes represents the majority of felonies that one is likely to be prosecuted for breaking?

If there is any doubt still left regarding the cost implications of deterring and prosecuting people from engaging in victimless crimes then consider this. United States prison system is one of the most efficient, organized and largest anywhere in the world not because it is the country with highest crime rate or even population but probably because of a phenomenon that was first defined by James Wilson as the “broken window theory” (Elsner, 2006).

In early 2000 the US legal system adopted new policy that required stiff penalties for felonies that were considered lesser crimes; the logic was that meting out harsh penalties for lesser crimes will deter people from committing more serious crimes, which is the essence of broken window theory. Unfortunately most of the “lesser crimes” that the government chose to make example out of were mostly victimless crimes such as drug related crimes, prostitution and gambling.

The result was that by 2006 after just six years of the implementation of this policy, per capita incarceration rate in US stood at 737 persons for every 100,000, far higher than the average rates for most developed countries with the exceptions of Russia and China (Elsner, 2006). In fact the number of convicted persons in US stood at 2.2 million by this period and another 7.3 million people on parole was far much more than in China at 1.5 million prisoners which have a population of 1 billion people (Elsner, 2006). Another way to look at it is that US accounted for 25% of all incarcerated persons anywhere in the world by 2006 while it only has 5% of the world population (Elsner, 2006).

Whichever way you look at it the fact remains that majority of crimes that most people still gets convicted for are basically victimless crimes. Before we consider the reasons that would make any government continue draining resources on an initiative that it should be less concerned with and which it makes no impact at all, let us briefly review the most common types of victimless crimes that many governments are so bent on abolishing.

Prostitution

The old adage that prostitution is the oldest profession on earth certainly has some elements of truth because since the man invented trade sex has always been one form of payment that was offered in exchange of good or with some other form of service. This is perhaps the ancient origin of prostitution business whose concept has essentially remained the same many thousands years later. Today the annual turnover of prostitution industry worldwide is in excess of 100 billion and a flourishing underground business in America (Pen.com, 2002). Prostitution involves consensual engagement or solicitation of sex by adults, it is one of the most common misdemeanors that someone is most likely to be arrested for. Indeed if the current statistics are anything to go by, prostitution is no longer an ancient profession but the largest as well.

In a report compiled by the National Task Force on Prostitution (NTFP) in 2003, 1 million is the modest estimates of women previously or currently engaged actively in the vice (Bayswan.org, 2010). This figure represent 1% of women population who are involved in the illegal business of prostitution not to mention 70% of their male counterparts estimated by the same report to have willingly engaged in prostitution at least once in their lifetime (Bayswan.org, 2010).

Because prostitution is one of the big three victimless crimes that many government allocates vast resources to control, it would be important to undertake a critical review to establish if it should indeed be regulated by considering the cost implications that it has in the society or in fact its benefits to the society. The theory that I wish to advance is that decriminalizing prostitution would be more beneficial from a pure perspective of cost-benefit analysis.

It is a widely held opinion by many policy makers that legalizing prostitution could be the way out of solving various issues such as human trafficking, child pornography and other related crimes that are associated with prostitution, yet except for few States in United States such as Nevada prostitution is still regarded as a felony in many other States and countries worldwide. A report published by Prostitute Education Network (PEN) as early as 1993 indicated that the effects of failing to legalize prostitution had started taking toll on the judiciary system because of the huge case pile up of prostitution related cases that had congested the judiciary as well as the prison system.

70% of all female arrest that were being made for instance at that time involved prostitution charges while male cases accounted for up to 20% (Meir, 2010). Like all victimless crimes there are many reasons why this type of crime should not continue to be enforced; decriminalizing victimless crimes will boost tax revenues and directly save the government a lot of money, decongest judicial and prison system, facilitate enforcement of serious crimes and promote human right through increased liberty.

Perhaps one of the most compelling reasons why prostitution should nolonger be considered as a crime in America are contained in a recent finding that has found a correlation between legalization of prostitution and the prevalence of rapes. In a research study done by Cundiff titled “Prostitution and Sex Crimes” that utilized a regressed model of testing theories the study found that if prostitution was made legal in the United States “the rape rate would decrease by roughly 25% which is a decrease of approximately 25,000 per year” (Cundiff, 2004). The findings of this research study are compatible with various other literatures on the subject which have largely attributed the phenomenon of rape to factors of “lust” and “power thesis” (Cundiff, 2004).

Because men are easily able to access the services of prostitutes at lower rates in jurisdictions that legalize prostitution, there is higher rate of utilization of this purposes that serve to diffuse the elements of lust and power thesis that usually compel men to commit rape (Cundiff, 2004).

The table below copied from the same study indicates the data on rape, sex and homicide to depict the relationship that exist between availability of sex and prevalence of rape as well as other homicide crimes. Let us consider data from just two countries; Portugal for instance has the lowest rape rates according to the data, but for good reasons, the frequency of sex per month is seen to occur at a rate of 95.2 times almost 8 times more than is the case for United States which incidentally has a rape rate of 32, this is one of the highest on the list as well as the homicide rate that appears to be correlated with rape rate (Cundiff, 2004).

This figures provides evidence that criminalizing victimless crimes has far reaching implications than is usually thought to be the case given that homicide rates indicated here are indeed a factor of rape which we have seen to be correlated with prostitution.

Drug Related Crimes

Substance Abuse is a term that is used to describe addiction to regular use of drugs that is characterized by a pattern that indicates reliance to particular type of substance which is not regarded as dependent. It is a term that is used to describe all types of drug use by a person which is not conditioned by any medical condition regardless of frequency of their intake (Chamberin, 2010).

Due to the breadth and width of types and nature of drugs use which can be described as substance abuse the World Health Organization allows for different definition of the term “substance abuse” which is generally categorized into four groups: medical definitions, public health definitions, mass communication definitions and criminal justice definitions (Chamberin, 2010). Drug abuse is categorized as a victimless crime because it involve willing user who willingly buys for purposes of consumption, the fact that “addiction” would indicate there is no free will to choose is still unresolved debate.

Currently the United Nations estimates that more than 100 million peoples worldwide regularly abuse the major types of hard drugs such as heroin, amphetamines, cocaine and other synthetic drugs (Sobell and Agrawal, 2009). However there is no estimate of the actual extent of all types of drugs abuse that is regularly used by majority of peoples which also include all forms of drugs that are usually referred as soft drugs such as alcohol, marijuana, barbiturates among others which affect hundreds of millions of peoples. In United States alone for example, approximately 24% of all patients admitted in hospital in year 2004 suffered from Mental Health and Substance Abuse disorders (MHSA) (Busko, 2007).

According to the 2008 report released by National Survey on Drug Use & Health, marijuana is the single most abused illicit substance in United States with 10% of the population regularly or occasionally abusing the drug (Busko, 2007). This is despite the existence of strict laws and regulation that have been developed to curb access and use of illegal drugs in general; decriminalizing this type of victimless crime would therefore lead to unimaginable increase in illicit drug usage.

In any case current studies indicate that drug abuse is probably not a victimless crime; a recent research study provides evidence that shows people who are most prone to abuse drugs have at one point in their life been victimized in one way or another (Celia, Young and Wesley, 2008). Because drug users resort to substance abuse because of what Celia et all refers as “illegitimate coping strategies”, the implication of this findings indicate that drug users are actively involved in completing the cycle of victimization because they are most likely to “victimize” other people when under the influence (Celia et al, 2008).

The effects of drug abuse in a country is a very costly affair; foremost drug use is sort of a past time that keeps people from engaging in constructive work that would contribute to building of economy. For instance, the 5% population in United States that are engaged in drug abuse, half of whom are marijuana users means they are denying government direct income inform of tax that would have been generated otherwise. And it doesn’t even end there, since the government has to allocate finances towards their rehabilitation as well as enforcing drug laws, this makes them unnecessary burden that cause unnecessary spending of money in this areas.

As if this is not enough drug use is directly proportion to the rate of crime in a country since addicts usually resorts to crimes in order to finance their habits; increased crime rate implies more funding to keep people secure in town and cities; if it is true that 40% of all assaults and violent robbery crimes are attributed to drug use; then it is safe to say curbing drug use will consequently reduce these crime rate by the same proportion (Elsner, 2006). There is no doubt therefore that substance abuse is at least one form of victimless crimes that should be highly regulated.

Gambling is a game that involves wagering money in most cases or anything of value for hope of winning perceived amount of money that is way above what someone is putting in. Currently it is estimated that legal gambling establishments are responsible for controlling a total of $335 billion per annum (Purcel, 1997). There is no doubt that gambling is a victimless crime because it is usually undertaken by parties based on various rules which they must fully consent before they can participate. The tendency to gamble has been described by one research study to conform to Extremely Frequent behavior (EFB) theory which is based on compulsion buying (Ricketts and Macaskill, 2003).

Compulsion spending is a behavior found even among general product consumers and is described as “repetitive and seemingly purposeful behaviors that are performed according to certain rules or in a stereotyped fashion” (Ricketts and Macaskill, 2003). The argument that I wish to advance is that compulsion spending when it comes in gambling is no different than what happens when one is actually spending on consumable goods. It would therefore make no sense in trying to limit people freedom in how best they wish to spend their legally earned money.

All forms of gambling or compulsive spending appears to be a symptom of more serious psychological disorders that influence this kind of spending; this is the same for even the most serious form of gambling referred as Pathological Gambling (PG). A research study by Ricketts and Macaskill that sought to theorize the main determinants of gambling in persons found that majority of gamblers are emotionally prone to become addicted (2003). As such gambling becomes a problem because of other factors that are not associated with loosing or winning aspects of the game. Central to these research findings is the fact that gamblers are as a matter of fact drastically hampered by lack of problem solving skills, have fewer choices of coping skills and markedly exhibits low self esteem compared to other people (Ricketts and Macaskill, 2003).

This is evidence enough which indicate that gambling is a function of several related factors that interact to make a person prone to addiction that is associated with gambling. Because gambling is an end product this would mean that criminalizing it is the wrong approach of solving this problem in the society, rather the government should allocate resources towards addressing these underlying problems to the 2% gamblers who are described as PG because they are the only one negatively affected when they engage in gambling.

Legislation Vs Individual Freedom

A central theme that emerges throughout this paper is the issue of liberty which is freedom to express oneself or act as anyone would wish to as long as their actions do not interfere with other people’s rights. The right to liberty and pursuit of happiness are two of the core values that are expressly provided by the United States constitution as captured in the Declaration of Independence and in the fourth amendment. Liberty is also provided in the Universal Human Rights article; when the government therefore implements legislations to limit these rights to act as one would wish as long as no other people’s right are trumped personal liberty is greatly curtailed and denied.

Libertarianism refers to a theory that advocates for individual freedom in terms of thoughts and actions, what will usually be referred as liberty. The ideology of libertarianism is founded on the principle of natural rights that existed before the advance of governments which is the reason that it advocates for personal liberty to come before the rights of the government.

The Self Ownership theory is an argument that libertarians advances to justify and defend the need for increased personal freedom; the self-ownership theory states that “individuals own themselves – their bodies, talents and abilities, labor, and by extension the fruits or products of their exercise of their talents, abilities and labor” (Dammon, 1987). Thus, because people own themselves they should be at liberty to do what they choose without being regulated by any form of authority, of course as long as their actions are not adverse to the welfare of the other members of the society.

An interesting point that is made by the critiques of libertarianism theory is that unrestricted freedom of choice negatively affects other members of the society that would not otherwise be the case if liberty was limited by the government. However I find this not to be a serious objection because failure to choose is actually a choice in itself; in that case, the section of people that argues to be disadvantaged by the choice of others actually appears to have made a conscious choice of not engaging in activities that they consider to be immoral such as prostitution or drug abuse.

If this section of people enjoys the full liberty to make choices out of their freewill why should they be the first to advocate for reduction of freedom of others? In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls derives the First Principle of Justice and the Second Principle of Justice from one of the key theories that he discusses; the difference principle. The First Principle states that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others” (Hikaru, 2009). This principle largely attempted to guarantee the basic human rights of all the persons in a society regardless of their beliefs and values, because these very concepts can never be universal.

History has also taught us that it would be futile for any government to intervene in matters of morality among its people because by and large morality is a term that is relative. For instance during 17 th century for a long time the government used to control the religious beliefs of the people by establishing government churches but which failed and the church was eventually separated from the government. However, legislation alone is not adequate in maintaining order in society and therefore individual freedom is always advocated as a better approach because it primarily allows people to make the right decisions without coercion from the state.

In fact legislation approach of governance indicates that this strategy is very much ineffective; for instance despite a major fear in increased drug abuse that would occur if marijuana use was legalized other research findings indicate otherwise. In some countries where marijuana smoking is legal such as in Denmark and Jamaica the practice is not as rampant as is the case in United States where it is illegal (Parenti, 1999).

Another factor that would support increased liberty is the cost associated with enforcement of most victimless crimes. Unlike legislation, increased liberty would not require any resources to enforce or pass laws because people are given the liberty to make their choices. This difference is substantial to the economy given that in the recently announced 2011 FY budget the Drug Enforcement Agency was awarded a total of $15.5 billion dollars to fight war on marijuana alone (DrugEnforcementAgency.com, 2010).

Because legislation is essentially incompatible with the fundamentals of liberty, personal freedom and the need of reliable laws has always been a balancing act that governments have to undertake in order to create a just and safe environment. It is when this balancing act is not well achieved that a society ends up with more victimless crimes than is necessary. In conclusion I would therefore say that most forms of legislation that decriminalize victimless crimes cannot be justified or defensible in that case because personal liberty is a far more valuable principle that governments are chosen and sworn to uphold and the very fabric that defines democracy in the world today. It is therefore time to uphold the spirit of democracy and human rights across the world by giving people more freedom in choosing the way that they wish to live their life; to achieve this we will have to have more of these victimless crimes.

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Is prostitution a victimless crime?

Published Date: 23 Mar 2015 Last Modified: 12 May 2017

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Prostitution, as described by the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary (1997), is the selling of sexual favors for money or the devoting of oneself or one's talent to an unworthy cause (p. 589). In another frame of reference, prostitution has been called a "victimless crime." What exactly is a "victimless crime"? West's Encyclopedia of American defines it as:

…crime where there is no apparent victim and no apparent pain or injury. This class of crime usually involves only consenting adults in activities such as prostitution, sodomy, and gambling where the acts are not public, no one is harmed, and no one complains of the activities (2008).

This classic definition of these types of crime implies there is not any victim of the criminal behavior who experiences harm. From a theoretical perspective, conflict theorists may hold that victimless crimes are established as a type of social control over morality by politically powerful people or groups who find them offensive or undesirable while functional theorists may hold that social needs, not societal power, are the underlying condition of labeling victimless behaviors as criminal (Greek, C.E., 2005).

Why are some consensual acts considered illegal while others are not? McWilliams (1996) asserts consensual activities' prohibitions and restrictions have their basis in religion while O'Donnell (2000) in addressing the price of victimless crime laws, proposes those crime laws are a form of morality control and religious persecution that uphold the opinions of the law-controlling majority with regards to race, ethnicity and political stances.

The issue in victimless crimes is that society has created laws to prohibit certain types of conduct considered to be against the public interest and when supposed victims freely consent to be the victim in one of these crimes; the question is whether the state should make an exception from the law for the situation. For the purpose of this paper, prostitution and the issues of concern in the legalization of this victimless crime is explored.

Upon examining prostitution as a victimless crime, it seems evident there are victims at some level but most of the harm seems to be self-inflicted. Looking at the puzzle of the involved behaviors, having sex and asking for money, each by themselves are perfectly legal. Having sex with someone, even an unknown person is legal, and asking for money is legal but, when the two behaviors are linked into one single instance, a criminal act results. The two separate legal behaviors cannot constitute an illegal behavior for if no person is harmed, or if harm occurs by informed consent of the willing parties, how can it be considered a criminal act? One arguable stance presented is that consensual acts are not without risk and when adults consent to take part in the acts, why should the resulting action be deemed criminal by legal social rules? What kinds of problems can the law solve and what kind of problems does the law create?

Among the many proponents of de-criminalizing victimless crimes the concept of unconstitutionality is consistently cited (Hardaway, 2000; McWilliams, 1998; O'Donnell, 2000; National Platform of the Libertarian Party, 2002). A prominent vocal critic of criminalizing these termed victimless crimes, such as prostitution, is Robert Hardaway.

Hardaway is a professor of Law at the University of Denver's School of Law who has written and co-written numerous texts and articles on legal and community interest matters. Hardaway's 2003 book, No Price Too High: Victimless Crimes and the Ninth Amendment, as cited by Cox in a 2004 review, presents a powerful and strongly-argued perspective which argues the criminalization of victimless crimes violate the Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution (2004). Cox notes the criminalization of these crimes as well as amount of money it takes to enforce the laws are unsound policies according to Hardaway. Although, in the case of drugs, crime against property and person are related to drug use, Hardaway, per Cox (2004), attributes the harm of drug use to the laws rather than the use of drugs themselves. According to Cox, Hardaway uses the example of Prohibition to explain the supply and demand concept of the argument stating: "crime and violence do not emanate from some physiological effect of the drug, but the drug laws themselves" and with the decriminalization of drugs, neighborhood drug dealers would be put out of business effectively breaking the business-end of organized crime (105). Hardaway further posits, according to Cox, "legalizing personal vices is justified by a considered weighing of the costs and consequences of criminalization" (30), (2004).

ProCon.org has a website which addresses the issue of whether or not prostitution should be legalized and many statements were provided on this website of both the pro and con sides of the issue: "No person's human or civil rights should be violated on the basis of their trade, occupation, work, calling, or profession" [Prostitution Education Network, 1996]; "prostitution violates the right to physical and moral integrity…violates the prohibition of torture and of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.." [Hoffman, C., 1997]; "…prostitution laws are…a violation of the right of individual privacy because they impose penal sanctions for the private sexual conduct of consenting adults…" [American Civil Liberties Union, 2007]; "…few activities are as brutal and damaging to people as prostitution…" [U.S. Department of State, 2004] (ProCon, 2009).

Of all opposition members, the most prominent is Melissa Farley, a research and clinical psychologist at the San Francisco non-profit organization, Prostitution Research and Education. Farley has written numerous peer-reviewed articles on the subject (Farley, M., 2006). Farley's numerous research articles provide a well-rounded look at the subject matter of prostitution, the sex industry, exploitation of women, as well as the myriad of troubling issues arising from when men purchase women in prostitution. In the 2006 article, Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not Know in Order to Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly, Farley posits "prostitution is sexual violence that results in massive economic profit for some of its perpetrators" and is a much like slavery in that it is a "lucrative form of oppression" (p. 102). Farley goes further to remark on "prostitution's legal status (legal, illegal, zoned, or decriminalized)" or the location of the activity "(strip club, massage parlor, street, and escort/home/hotel)" the danger to women is still tremendous (p. 103). Farley's discussion on the peer-reviewed literature which documents the violence so prevalent in prostitution and states: "Violence is commonplace in prostitution whether it is legal or illegal" (p. 106). Citing a Canadian commission on prostitution and pornography which reported the "death rate of women in prostitution as forty times higher than that of the general population" and a 2001 Vancouver prostitution research study by Cler-Cunningham and Christensen which reported a "thirty-six percent incident of attempted murder, Farley contends "prostitution can be lethal" (p. 107).

Farley's detailed look at legalized and illegal prostitution can impact the perception of the sex industry as a whole. However, within the United States Constitution's first ten amendments, also known as the Bill of Rights, are provisions which may present a strong argument for abolishing criminalizing prostitution and other victimless crimes.

The First, Fourth, Fifth, and Ninth Amendments are of particular interest in this dialogue of supporting the decriminalization of prostitution. Although victimless crimes such as prostitution are not specifically addressed in the Constitution there seems to be an arguable position that victimless crime laws violate First Amendment restrictions against laws "respecting an establishment of religion" especially since religious and moral values seem to provide the foundation for many of the laws.

The Fourth Amendment's provisions on search and seizure seems to be violated by such devices as warrantless search and seizures which are often utilized to obtain evidence for prosecutorial purposes. The privacy of innocents can be threatened as enforcement of the law requires police and investigators to engage in extensive monitoring, wiretapping, and surveillance of suspects and the public. Some people believe that these warrantless search and seizures and victimless crime laws are a means of political power over selected portions of the population which are unequally enforced against the poor and minorities thereby violating the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment (Kruttscnitt, 1984; McWilliams, 1998; Nussbaum, O'Connell, 2000; 1999; Schur, 1971, 1980, 1983).

The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution has direct bearing on such modern day constitutional issues such as abortion, gay rights, and the right to die. Farber (2007) considers the Ninth Amendment the 'key to understanding' the liberties Americans were to enjoy under the Constitution as envisioned by the Founding Fathers describes the purpose of the Ninth Amendment and the Founders' intent: to protect the rights the Founders' assumed but failed to enumerate or specify in the Bill of Rights. Like the rest of the original Bill of Rights, per Farber, the Ninth Amendment only limits federal power rather than state government powers. The Fourteenth Amendment came along later and addressed the state government and within that Amendment the Privileges or Immunities Clause is paired with the Ninth Amendment (Lash, 2004; Farber, 2007).

America is in first place in the world for the number of incarcerated individuals as highlighted by a Pew Center report that found 1 in every 100 American adults are behind bars with its prison population having tripled in the last 20 years. Spending on prisons has more than quadrupled and the American taxpayers are slowly crushed by this wasteful spending. At an average cost of over $19,000 per prisoner, taxpayers are facing a bill of over $44 billion per year to keep people locked away (Pew, 2004).

Coinciding with this rising prison population is the increase in the number of private prisons which increased from five in 1995 to 100 in 2005. Herivel and Wright ( ) in their book "Prison Profiteers-Who Makes Money From Mass Incarceration" reports private prison industry has seen increased profits and lobbied extensively for more frequent and longer prison sentences and traces the flow of monies designated for the public good and ends up in the "pockets of enterprises dedicated to keeping prison cells filled" (From their book jacket).

History has shown that criminalizing victimless crimes will drive the practice underground where violence, extortion, and coercion are most likely to thrive. This was particularly noticed when the 18th Amendment and later the Volstead Act, 1919, which made it illegal to manufacture or sell "beer, wine, or other intoxicating malt or vinous liquors" it was not illegal to possess it for personal use. The prohibition, originally intended to reduce beer consumption in particular, actually a failure and ended up increasing hard liquor consumption and created a new business, "bootlegging," defined as the unlawful manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcoholic beverages without registration or payment of taxes which became widespread and a staple of organized crime (Prohibition).

Almost every individual has the ability and moral capacity to judge what is helpful or harmful to them and it does not make sense for other people to dictate what choices should be made. When individuals commit acts harmful to themselves, the action should be termed as immoral, not illegal. The criminalization for the act of prostitution should not be determined by social effects of an individual's actions or by the moral or religious views of society. Every person needs freedom to make choices and accept the consequences for without these consequences, growth and experiential development will be hindered.

If an adult man-or an adult woman, wants to engage in sexual relations with another adult man or woman who charges a fee for his or her services, they should be able to do so without the fear of being guilty of a crime. It does not mean that prostitution should not be subjected to certain legal requirements such as health laws. Removing prostitution from criminal statutes and providing a designation as a business entity subjected to business requirements, prostitution can be taxed, sex workers can obtain health and safety rights other employees have, and problems of abuse and graft associated with police jurisdiction of such a business can be dealt with more effectively with better protection from violence and abuse for those individuals who work within the industry. In a 2001 article written for the New Zealand Herald, Sue Bradford, MA, Member of New Zealand's Parliament says it best: "…prostitution has been a career option for some people since history began. Nothing any law has done has changed or will change that…I believe we would all be better off…to accept the job choice that some adults make as valid and worthy of care and compassion for all our sakes" (2001).

Bradford, S. (2001). Dialogue: Sex workers deserve protection of the law. New Zealand Herald. July 30, 2001.

Cox, G.C., (2004). Book review of Hardaway, R. (2003). No price too high: Victimless crimes and the Ninth Amendment. Department of Political Science, University of North Texas.

Farber, D.A. (2007). Retained by the people: The 'silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional rights Americans don't know they have. Perseus Books.

Fyffe, C. and Hardaway, R.M. (2003). No price too high: Victimless crimes and the Ninth Amendment. Westport, CN: Praeger.

Greek, C.E., (2005). Criminological theory. Lecture notes. CCJ 5606. http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/

Hayes-Smith, R. and Shekarkhar, Z. (2010). Why is prostitution criminalized? An alternative viewpoint on the construction of sex work. Contemporary Justice Review, March 2010, Volume 13 Issue 1, p. 43-55.

Herivel, T. and Wright, P. (2007). Prison profiteers: Who makes money from mass incarceration? New York: New Press

Kruttschnitt, C. (1984). Labeling women deviant: Gender stigma and social control. Contemporary Sociology. 13 (5), 596.

Lash, K.T. (2004). The lost original meaning of the Ninth Amendment. Texas Law Review, Volume 83, Number 2, December 2004

McWilliams, P. (1998). Ain't nobody's business if you do: The absurdity of consensual crimes in a free society. Los Angeles, CA: Prelude Press. http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/aint/201.htm

Merriam-Webster Dictionary (1997). Springfield, MASS: Merriam-Webster, Inc.

National Platform of the Libertarian Party, 2002. (Adopted at the July 2002 convention in Indianapolis, Indiana)<http:..www.lp.org/issues/platform/victcrim.html

Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Sex & social justice. New York: Oxford University Press

O'Donnell, T. (2000). American holocaust: The price of victimless crime laws. Writer's Digest. Iuniverse.com

ProCon, 2009. Prostitution Education Network, 1996; Hoffman, C., 1997; American Civil Liberties Union, 2007; U.S. Department of State, 2004. http://prostitution.procon.org/view.answers.php?questionID=1315&print=true

Prohibition. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1085.html

Schur, E. (1971). Labeling deviant behavior. New York: Harper and Row.

(1980). The politics of deviance. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

(1983). Labeling women deviant: gender, stigma, and social control. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

West's Encyclopedia of American Law, Edition 2 (2008). The Gale Group, Inc.

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Is Prostitution a Victimless Crime

Prostitution is often viewed as a crime without a victim, because it is hard to see prostitutes as victims of the activity in which they decided to participate voluntarily. This paper challenges the idea that prostitution is a victimless crime, drawing on analysis of just one type of prostitution – street prostitution. Moreover, it seeks to identify the appropriate response to street sex work and thereby, critically evaluates the different models of intervention, which different countries have adopted in order to regulate this activity. It concludes with a proposal that not only can reduce street prostitution but also help prostitutes to exit the profession.

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Caitlin van der Merwe

Julius T Jaesen II

Introduction Prostitution is defined as a form of non-marital sexual activity characterized by financial reward and absence of long-term fidelity between two parties (Tierney, H.1999). Prostitution has been widely debated, condemned for its immoral and degrading nature. On the other hand, there are liberal feminists who have counter argued saying that prostitution is very empowering. The controversy surrounding prostitution has divided feminists worldwide. Radical feminists are of the opinion that prostitution is an institution of male dominance that exploits economically vulnerable and emotionally damaged women for the sake of male pleasure. In this regard, prostitutes become involuntary victims of patriarchy or conscious participants in the degradation of women. This therefore has impacts on all women as a group as prostitution continually affirms and reinforces patriarchal definitions of women as having a primary function to serve men sexually. Conversely, liberal feminists find in prostitution a practice of women‘s resistance to and sexual liberation from norms and traditional moral precepts of sexuality that have long served to control and subordinate women. Others see prostitution as a means of wrestling patriarchal control over women‘s sexuality that women should be at liberty to do (Tamale, S, 2008). Prostitution therefore raises moral and legal questions. The legal question is should the practice be criminalized? In addition, the moral question is, is it wrong to sell or buy sex? These are questions I will endeavor to answer which are informed by the lived realities of women who make their living through prostitution. Prostitution or the selling of sex is, as some would call it, one of the oldest professions in the world as it has been there since time immemorial. What is of interest is the way the law has decided to make it its business who and how people have sex by criminalizing prostitution. As criminal law is meant to regulate social harms, what harm is caused by prostitution? The law seems to be a toothless bulldog in light of the fact that regardless of the criminalization of prostitution many women still engage in the trade and make a living out of it. Criminalizing prostitution seems to be a futile exercise as it is failing to achieve the intended results that of deterring other possible perpetrators; instead. it just frustrates the women who engage in it as they are essentially constantly harassed by the police without any prosecution. Why are there double standards as regards prostitution; why is it that it is only the sellers and not the buyers who are penalized? Is it not a case for patriarchy to further want to domesticate women and ensure that their sexuality is controlled and tamed within marriage? Considering that women in Africa are the least educated and when they are employed it is usually an extension of work done in the domestic arena which is the least paid; is prostitution not one of the better choices from the pool of work that they have to choose from? (Tamale, S, 2008). It is therefore a need to look at prostitution as work and not on the sex as it were so that prostitutes not further driven underground which makes them vulnerable and susceptible to violence. Criminalization creates a culture permitting violence against sex workers and sanctions violence and discrimination against them. Sex workers are also afraid to report crimes against them, knowing that police may arrest them or may not take their claims seriously. If criminalization has failed to reduce prostitution or protect the most vulnerable, what alternative model should take its place? It is this research case that prostitution should be viewed as a legitimate option of work for women that identifies with bodily autonomy, financial independence and the notion of choice (Sanders et al 2009, 23).

Magaly Rodriguez Garcia

Alexis Aronowitz

Ronald Weitzer

Kate Galilee

The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Aimee Wodda

This entry provides a thorough overview of the various types of act that fall under the umbrella term “prostitution”; it describes various forms of solicitation and the individuals engaged in these exchanges; and it offers descriptive statistics. The criminal justice response to prostitution is examined, with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of arguments surrounding criminalization, decriminalization, and legalization. The summary concludes with a review of the global context of sex trafficking.

Journal of Feminist Family Therapy

Karni Kissil

Accounts of the governance of prostitution have typically argued that prostitutes are, in one way or another, stigmatised social outcasts. There is a persistent claim that power has operated to dislocate or banish the prostitute from the community in order to silence, isolate, hide, restrict, or punish. I argue that another position may be tenable; that is, power has operated to locate prostitution within the social. Power does not operate to 'de-socialise' prostitution, but has in recent times operated increasingly to normalise it. Power does not demarcate prostitutes from the social according to some binary mechanics of difference, but works instead according to a principle of differentiation which seeks to connect, include, circulate and enable specific prostitute populations within the social. In this paper I examine how prostitution has been singled out for public attention as a socio-political problem and governed accordingly. The concept of governmentality is used to think through such issues, providing, as it does, a non-totalising and non-reductionist account of rule. It is argued that a combination of self-regulatory and punitive practices developed during modernity to manage socially problematic prostitute populations.

Charmaine Jelbert

This thesis focuses on the British human trafficking prevention policies adopted for the 2012 London Olympics using mixed methods including participation-observation, qualitative interviews, theoretical analysis and policy evaluation. I was invited to observe the Human Trafficking Network and London 2012, the Mayor of London’s official response to the claim that human trafficking would increase at the London Olympics. My presence enabled me to witness first-hand the key policy debates surrounding human trafficking intervention and to conduct a series of in-depth interviews with members of the Human Trafficking Network as well as associated professionals such as the United Kingdom Human Trafficking Centre, MPs, governmental and non-governmental agencies, law enforcement officials, anti-trafficking groups, sex workers, sex workers outreach services and academics. In addition to collecting rich empirical data, I contexualise these policy debates within two relevant theoretical frameworks. First, I draw upon the work of Weitzer (2007) to examine the construction of the four underlying claims that human trafficking increases before and during large sporting events. Significantly, this perspective is built upon an anti-prostitution agenda of the partial criminalisation proponents, which collapses all migration for prostitution together with human trafficking (Weitzer 2005, Kempadoo 2005, Milivojevic and Pickering 2008, Kinnell 2009, Mai 2009, Mai 2012, Weitzer 2014). This same conceptualisation of human trafficking as the nexus of prostitution, migration and crime is replicated within the global anti-trafficking framework (Milivojevic and Pickering 2013), resulting in two approaches to human trafficking prevention policies — Security Governance and Human Rights — which together resulted in preventions measures that target prostitution and control migration. Finally, I draw upon my empirical evidence to critically examine the effects of the claim that human trafficking increases over the Olympics and, moreover, situate the response by the Mayor of London within the global anti-trafficking framework. This framework highlights the contradictions and, in some instances, failures between the approaches to human trafficking and the stated purpose of the Human Trafficking Network. The thesis concludes with two innovative policy recommendations for human trafficking prevention programmes.

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Term Paper On Is Prostitution A Victimless Crime

Type of paper: Term Paper

Topic: Business , Social Issues , Women , Health , Trade , Commerce , Crime , Prostitution

Published: 01/29/2020

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When a crime is committed without inflicting direct harm on another individual, this crime is often called a victimless crime. This is the type of crime that leaves no obvious victims behind although the act itself may be considered illegal or against established laws. It may also not result to damage to property or threaten the rights of anyone; and, may be committed by the perpetrator alone or in connivance with two or more persons without causing injury to other persons. In such cases, the offense is considered a consensual crime. One such example is prostitution, which renders the one offering sex as an offender and a victim as well. Prostitution has been regarded as a definitive example of a victimless crime, considering that the act is a consensual contract between consenting individuals. The individual selling sex is often viewed as the person to be charged of the crime. However, in instances when this individual is female, she may be considered a victim of the crime as well. While some people will regard prostitution as a victimless crime, I think that it is not a victimless crime because not all who engage in the flesh trade do it on purpose. Some are forced to do it out of need or desperation. In most cases, it is a cry of help because prostitution could be the only choice they have at the time. It could have been borne out of abuse, fear, low self-esteem, or lack of other options in life. In addition, prostitution is a form of sexual harassment and exploitation especially when a prostitute is obligated to perform acts that are against her wishes, but is still forced to do in order to earn a living. As a result, prostitutes end up being emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually scarred. With many prostitutes becoming victims of physical assault or assaults with weapons, it is not a surprise then that many of them resort to suicide or experience post-traumatic disorders. Aside from the prostitutes, other victims of this consensual crime are the wives who are often left unaware of the husband's indiscretions until she (the wife) is infected with communicable diseases brought about by the husband's sexual relations with prostitutes. In most parts of the United States, prostitution is considered illegal because it is widely believed to cause more harm to women. For instance, women engaged in this trade open themselves up to possibilities of rape and various forms of physical and verbal abuses. It also makes them more susceptible to diseases, thus, may become health threats to society. In addition, it exploits women's rights and demeans the womanhood of sex workers. For moralists, they may say that prostitutes deserve whatever negative effects their actions bring; and, because it is immoral, therefore, prostitution must be treated as a crime. However, sex trade workers are still people and no one has the right to put down another individual. Currently, courtrooms deal with prostitution cases where prostitutes and customers pay fines when caught, but return to the same flesh peddling and buying after settling the misdemeanor. Instead of managing the trade, the system only temporarily prohibits individuals from doing the act. In this light, what then is the role of the government in regulating prostitution? For me, the government has a huge responsibility in ensuring the safety of its citizens, regardless of their occupation and financial status. Even if the government bans or criminalizes the prostitution, it will not go away since it has always been there and will continue to happen with or without laws governing prostitution. Thus, I think the best way to approach this problem is for the government to be involved and think of ways on how to assist women engaged in prostitution rather than acting passively towards it. The government may also present ways on how to disengage from the trade, which is extremely beneficial to those who want to leave the trade. What then are the pros and cons of legalizing prostitution? There are some people who are against the legalization of prostitution due to its moral and social impact in society. People say that it could increase rates of teenage pregnancy and divorce rates due to the health impact of legalizing the sex trade. Even if the sex worker is constantly monitored for sexually transmitted diseases, there is no assurance that the "buyer" is free from any diseases. In addition, it gives the impression that the female body is a commodity that men can buy anytime they want. However, legalizing prostitution prohibits pimps from forcing women to abide by rules that further degrade themselves. It means that violence brought about by prostitution will be lessened, including reduction in cases of under-aged prostitution. It also means the health safety of prostitutes will be monitored considering that they will be subjected to constant tests to prevent the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, sex workers will be required to register with the police to obtain licenses to work as prostitutes, thus making it easier to supervise who are legally engaged in the trade. For these reasons, I believe that legalizing prostitution is the best method to control the trade.

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Prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia

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Introduction

In the years immediately following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, migrant prostitution from the former Soviet areas became one of the most visible manifestations of the political and economic uncertainty pervading the region. In contemporary Turkey, sex workers from the former Soviet Union are considered so ubiquitous that the nickname “Natasha” is often used to refer to prostitutes in general. 1 The association of prostitution from and in Russia with recent geopolitical shifts has, however, served to occlude wider discussions of sex work as a historical phenomenon in the region. Furthermore, the fact that prostitution was considered a politically unacceptable topic of discussion in the postwar Soviet Union meant that no historical work on commercial sex was produced in Russia itself before the late twentieth century. In the last twenty years scholars writing in English and Russian have made up for lost time, publishing innovative studies of prostitution regulation in nineteenth-century Russia, philanthropic and scientific activism surrounding commercial sex before and after the revolution, and social historical analyses of women who sold sex in the early Soviet period. 2

This chapter examines the history of prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg from 1600 to the present. It is based on both primary and secondary sources, although it is important to note that historiography on Russian prostitution is sparse except for the period between 1843 and the mid-1920s. As a result, my coverage of earlier periods, and the mid-Soviet period (in which prostitution was supposedly non-existent) is correspondingly much less dense.

The study also draws on the considerable statistical material available on prostitution from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, when the imperial Russian police regulated prostitution. Even mildly reliable statistics for the social backgrounds and experiences of prostitutes are not available for Moscow or St. Petersburg until the birth of the regulation of prostitution in 1843, when the state’s own interest in the surveillance of prostitutes necessitated the collection of information about them. Even then, the high point of statistical research into prostitution came between 1885 and 1917, and in the Soviet period the ideological necessity of claiming that prostitution was a problem that was disappearing under socialism (and by 1945, was deemed to have been eradicated) militated against the systematic collection of information about it. As a result, by far the richest data comes from the 1885–1917 period. Government-collected data on legally registered prostitutes, mediated as it was through a series of legal and social constructs denoting what sex work or prostitution was at that particular time, can only give us a small snapshot of prostitution as a legal identity, social category, and daily practice in Moscow and St. Petersburg in this period. Nonetheless it does give us a sense of how certain important social phenomena (such as urbanization, industrialization, war, revolution, and mass migration) may have impacted commercial sex as a practice as it was understood by the late imperial state.

Finally, a minor point on chronology: while Moscow existed in the seventeenth century, St. Petersburg was not founded until 1703, at which point Peter the Great made it the new imperial capital. Thus, all reference to information about the pre-1703 period pertains to Moscow only, and after 1703 the text will note which city is being referred to at any given time.

Definitions

The legal, cultural, social, and philosophical definitions of prostitution in Russia, and therefore in its two capitals, St. Petersburg and Moscow, have changed greatly since 1600. To give a very rough outline of the contours of the many and overlapping definitions of prostitution (explained in more detail below), it is worth noting that in the early seventeenth century, the state did not consider prostitution to be a crime separate from that of adultery, as “ecclesiastical literature did not distinguish between a prostitute and a woman who slept with a man other than her husband voluntarily, without financial gain.” 3 The Old Church Slavonic word for both was bludnitsa , and whether money changed hands was irrelevant to the ecclesiastical authorities’ harsh judgement of extramarital sex. 4 It was not until the landmark Law Code of 1649 that secular law took a stance on offences relating to prostitution, in this case outlawing the procurement of women for fornication and assigning the death penalty for women who live by “fornication and vileness” and destroy any resultant offspring. 5

On his ascension to power, Peter the Great, ever careful about the health and strength of his military, proved much more ready to legislate against prostitution as a crime against the secular order, as opposed to a moral crime to be treated by the Church. In 1716, his “Military Statutes” ordered that “no whores [ bludnitsy ] will be permitted near the regiments.” 6 His successors Empress Anna Ioannovna (1730–1740) and Catherine the Great (1762–1796) placed further restrictions on the movement and activities of women “of debauched behaviour”, underlining the crime of commercial sex as a threat to public order. 7 It was in the nineteenth century that the exigencies of public health became the overwhelming justification for restrictions on the activities of prostitutes, and rather than prohibit commercial sex altogether state authorities sought to legalize it in restricted circumstances and thus control the activities of “public women”. 8 Just as in France, the Russian state enacted regulations in 1843 that allowed for tolerated prostitution in cities as long as prostitutes were registered with the police and submitted to weekly medical examinations. 9

This position, and the accompanying legal entity of the “public woman”, remained until 1917, when the Provisional government overthrew the system of regulated prostitution. This paved the way for the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution, who perceived prostitution as a prime example of the structural inequality of men and women, and its eradication as an important step on the path to gender equality. Thus, rather than reintroduce criminal measures against commercial sex or the medical supervision of women engaged in it, Bolshevik officials developed a system whereby they sought to rehabilitate and educate former prostitutes so they no longer needed to sell sex. However, the system of labour colonies they enacted for these purposes proved useful vehicles for a punitive shift against women who sold sex in the Stalin period, during which time such women came to be deemed “social parasites” and “socially harmful elements”. 10 Many were shot during the terror of the late 1930s. 11 In a discursive development that highlights the deep ambiguity of Soviet approaches to sex work, the language of prostitutes as “social parasites” in police reports and even some official proclamations of the Soviet government appeared alongside the continued existence of the idea that the “ideal prostitute” was an economic victim. By the late 1920s and early ‘30s, however, the state’s declaration that socialism had been achieved “in one country” and that there was accordingly full employment for all women meant that such an ideal type (the woman driven to commercial sex because of unemployment and destitution) was supposed to have disappeared. 12 Indeed, her very presence could serve to undermine the notion that socialism had been achieved at all. Accordingly, police and policy makers spoke more frequently of “professional prostitutes” who supposedly chose prostitution because of their criminal deviance, rather than because of economic need. 13 The entrenchment of the category of professional prostitute enabled the Soviet authorities to demonize women who sold sex as social parasites while continuing to insist that the primary cause of prostitution was economic want. Police repression of prostitution continued from the late 1920s throughout the Soviet period. Despite this, selling sex was not actually prohibited again until 1987, when it became an administrative offence during the moral regeneration campaigns that accompanied glasnost . 14 In contemporary Russia, prostitution is an administrative but not a criminal offence, and thus operates in a liminal space between censure and sanction. 15 Throughout the 1990s in particular it came to be seen as an especially visible sign of the sexual anarchy and social breakdown that accompanied the transition to capitalism. 16

From this sketch, we can see that the legal and social definitions of prostitution shifted over time from those constructing it as a moral crime or crime against God (pre-1649 Muscovy), to that of a crime of against secular public and military order (under Peter the Great in particular), and to that of a threat to public health (under the system of regulation, 1843–1917). In the Soviet period it became a vestige of the inequality of the past and a sign of “social parasitism”, and finally a somewhat tolerated “perversion” that symbolized the confusion of the post-Soviet period. These categorizations were not, of course, clear-cut, particularly in the overlapping of moral and religious disapproval and the need for public order. The vestiges of pre-1649 ecclesiastical censure can be seen, for example, in the 1736 declaration against secret brothels by the governing senate, which stated that “many debauched women and girls can be found in charitable homes, which is indeed against pious Christian law.” 17 Furthermore, the legal definition of a “prostitute” was often unclear, with vague references to fornication (1649 Law Code), whoring (1716 Military Statutes), public women (nineteenth century regulations) and social parasites (Soviet declarations). Throughout all of this, however, context demonstrates that there were some features that these categories had in common. With the exception of the pre-1649 ecclesiastical laws, all legal and administrative mention of prostitution made reference to commercial sex or the exchange of money, and the law recognized such actions as a separate crime from adultery more broadly (albeit many social commentators did not differentiate so starkly between women who sold sex and any women who had sex outside marriage). The nineteenth-century statute defined prostitutes through the language of “trade”, referring to them as “women who traded in vice” and who “made debauchery into a trade.” 18 Prostitutes could be women of any age, but under the nineteenth-century regulations, one could only be a “public woman” registered with the police if above the age of 16 (18 after 1903). 19

The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia ( gse ) provides a good source for thinking about shifts in the semi-official definition of prostitution in the twentieth century. The first entry on prostitution, from 1940, declares that prostitution constituted “the offering of one’s body in exchange for money, in order to satisfy sexual desires.” 20 The longest entry on prostitution of any edition of the gse , the 1940 text unsurprisingly links prostitution to poverty (referencing Engels’ The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State ) as well as vagrancy, before stating that neither of these exists in the Soviet Union. The 1955 edition of the gse ties the definition of prostitution even more tightly to conditions of material need, defining it as “the sale of one’s body, usually by a woman, in order to make a living.” 21 It is interesting to note the inclusion of the qualifier “usually by a woman”, one of the very few acknowledgments in imperial or Soviet discourse that men could theoretically also be prostitutes. This post-World War ii entry also claimed that by eliminating the social conditions that led to prostitution, the Soviet Union and all “socialist democracies” had liquidated prostitution. Finally, the 1975 edition of the gse provided the shortest and most perfunctory definition of prostitution of all, describing it as “a type of socially-deviant behaviour.” 22 The entry repeated the assertion that prostitution did not exist in the Soviet Union, despite considerable evidence to the contrary (discussed below).

The Labour Market for Prostitution

The first reliable data we have on the labour market for prostitution comes from the mid-nineteenth century, when both the increasing reliance of professionals on statistical measures and the interest of the state in controlling prostitution in part through knowledge of it sparked a number of investigations of the brothel system in both St. Petersburg and Moscow. Under the nineteenth-century regulation of prostitution, brothels were legal if registered, although only women could run them (thus technically excluding men from the possibility of making money from the sexual labour of women). Other than brothel prostitution, women who wished to sell sex could also be registered as “street” prostitutes, which meant that they lived individually and solicited for clients in public rather than through a brothel.

According to an extensive 1889 census of registered prostitution across the empire, the division of labour between brothel prostitutes and “street” prostitutes was strikingly different between St. Petersburg and Moscow. In the former city, of 2,232 registered prostitutes, 584 (26 per cent) were brothel prostitutes, while 1,649 (74 per cent) were street prostitutes. 23 In Moscow, conversely, of 1,068 registered prostitutes in 1889 (less than half the number in St. Petersburg), 924 (86.5 per cent) were brothel prostitutes and only 144 (13.5 per cent) were street prostitutes. 24 This suggests that, at least in the waning decades of the nineteenth century, the brothel system was considerably more developed in Moscow than in St. Petersburg, whereas the geography of legal commercial sex in the latter unfolded far more publicly (in the streets, taverns, and courtyards frequented by street prostitutes) than in the former. Furthermore, the registered prostitute population of Moscow was less than 50 per cent of that in St. Petersburg. While St. Petersburg was indeed a larger city than Moscow in this period, the difference was not immense; in 1897 the capital had a population of 1,132,677 while Moscow had a population of 988,614. 25

These figures are open, of course, to various interpretations. One is that the market for commercial sex was greater in the imperial capital, potentially because of a higher number of single men moving to the centre of power for employment. However, when we look at the gender breakdown of the cities, we find that in fact it was Moscow that had the higher ratio of male to female population (56.7 per cent male compared to 46.3 per cent female) in this period, as opposed St. Petersburg (which was 54.5 per cent male to 45.5 per cent female). 26 Perhaps a more plausible explanation comes from the structure of regulation in St. Petersburg. The urban regulation of prostitution in the Russian empire was mandated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but the structure of regulation itself was left up to local authorities to determine. In some cases, regulation was managed by a particular Medical-Police Committee, which was a combined force of police and civilian medical practitioners (this was the case in St. Petersburg). In others, it was managed under the aegis of the local Sanitary Commission or similar organization charged with the general upkeep of hygiene and sanitation methods in the city, which acted independently of the police. 27 In still other cities, regulation was subsumed under the general work of the police in carrying out surveillance of the population. 28 As this typology shows, the goals and means of the various bodies managing prostitution in urban centres across the Empire could vary greatly. This in turn could influence the availability for brothel work in particular cities, for example in St. Petersburg where we see it was rare for a registered prostitute to work at a brothel.

At the brothels in both Moscow and St. Petersburg there was considerable stratification, which influenced the availability and types of sexual labour performed by women. For Moscow, Dubrovskii’s 1889 census reports that the cost for a visit at the highest category of brothels (which employed 110 prostitutes in all) was 5 rubles, while a whole night was 10. In the middle tier of brothels, which employed 304 prostitutes, he recorded a price of 1–2 rubles per visit and 2–6 rubles for a night, while in the lowest tier, employing 537 prostitutes, a visit was 20–50 kopecks (a ruble was 100 kopecks) and a night was 50 kopecks to 2 rubles. 29 Thus we can see that by far the majority of women worked in the “lowest” type of brothel, suggesting that the majority of clients had little money to spend and probably came from the working class of the city. In St. Petersburg, which, as I have noted above, had a far smaller proportion of brothel prostitutes than Moscow, the highest tier of houses charged 3–5 rubles a visit and 5–15 rubles a night, employing eighty-two women. The medium tier charged 1–2 rubles a visit and 2–5 rubles a night, with 262 prostitutes, and the lowest tier charged 30–50 kopecks a visit and 1–2 rubles a night, with 435 prostitutes. 30 Once again, we can see that the lowest tier of houses held the largest number of registered prostitutes. We also see that the percentage of brothel prostitutes in the “lowest” houses is fairly constant between Moscow and St. Petersburg; in both cities it is between 55.8 and 56.5 per cent of all registered brothel prostitutes.

In analysing the above data, it is worth repeating the caveat that, even by imperial statisticians’ own admission, only a small number of women selling sex registered with the police as legal prostitutes ( prostitutki ). Furthermore, the statistics are open to the critiques of underreporting and inaccuracies that plague all attempts to collect data, particularly in the context of quasi-legality and clandestinity that pervaded sex work in the imperial period. Nonetheless, they are able to hint at least to the state’s perception of the labour market for prostitution at this time; furthermore, the fact that they were collected at all highlights the increasing scrutiny with which social scientists and bureaucrats viewed prostitution in this era.

Prostitutes’ Social Profiles

Once again, there is very little information on prostitutes’ social profiles in Moscow and St. Petersburg before the late nineteenth century. The information for that period, however, is quite extensive (this is particularly true for St. Petersburg). The imperial Russian state generally categorized its subjects by “estate” ( soslovie ) and confession. In 1888, Aleksandr Fedorov, a doctor and member of the Medical-Police Committee, surveyed 2,915 registered prostitutes in St. Petersburg. Of these, 49 per cent belonged to the peasant estate, 35 per cent were born townspeople ( meshchanki ), and 12 per cent were soldier’s wives, or soldatki . 31 Although the smallest number by proportion, soldatki were perceived as particularly susceptible to prostitution, representing as they did the wives of absent conscripts. As Beatrice Farnsworth has noted, the soldatka was “stereotyped as abused, neglected, and without resources, [and] seen as a loose woman who drank and the bearer of illegitimate children.” 32 As such, she represented the paradigmatic prostitute for many contemporary observers, despite being outnumbered by her peasant and urban dwelling sisters. This reputation was apparent even before the advent of nineteenth-century attempts to quantify it; Barbara Alpern Engel states that in the eighteenth century, “enough women turned to prostitution as a temporary or a permanent expedient that soldier’s wives obtained an unsavoury reputation.” 33

The state regulation of prostitution facilitated information collection on prostitutes’ social profiles; once it was deregulated in 1917 and declared “liquidated” in the early 1930s, there was once again very little information collected on the backgrounds of people who sold sex. Historians who have considered Soviet prostitution have suggested that, in the early years of the new regime, urban women and many “former” elite women (that is, women from the former aristocratic and middle classes now deprived of most rights and privileges) turned to casual prostitution in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1920s. 34 High unemployment in the period also fed into a perceived growth in urban prostitution. 35 From the mid-1930s, prostitution was officially declared eradicated in the Soviet Union, and historians have not yet thoroughly investigated the newly-available archival records of the police units and administrative courts to potentially correct this view. Prostitutes do occasionally appear in the historical record in the period between the 1930s and the opening up of the Soviet Union under perestroika. One example is in memoirs of the Gulags, where women sometimes turned to prostitution in an attempt to leverage better conditions or food. Further, as prostitution had itself become a forbidden activity (through claims of its impossibility), some women were purportedly sent to camps as punishment for commercial sex, a practice many continued in the Gulag. 36

In the late 1980s, in the resurgence of interest in prostitution that came with perestroika, newspapers in Moscow began printing descriptions of the social makeup of “women of loose morals” who had been identified by the police. Although these were by no means scientific statistical studies, they do provide a picture of the evolving ways in which Russians were reconsidering the possibility of commercial sex in their midst. The women purportedly fell into two distinct groups: those with existing connections to the criminal underworld whose activities were part of a general conglomeration of “anti-Soviet” activities, and homeless women or bomzhi , many of whom lived in railway stations and sold sex in return for food or clothing. 37 This picture contrasted with that which developed around prostitution in the port cities, especially St. Petersburg. There, prostitution was very much associated with women who went to bars and restaurants known to be frequented by foreigners, and who very explicitly sold sex for hard international currency. 38 The press described the world of foreign-currency prostitutes in terms of glamour, high fashion, and the promise of international travel, a theme that was the subject of one of the most successful (and controversial) Soviet films of the 1980s, Interdevochka (Inter-Girl). Interdevochka tells the story of Tatiana, a beautiful, kind and plucky nurse who by night sells sex to foreign men in fancy hotels. At the beginning of the film, Tatiana is planning to leave St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) with a client-turned-lover, to marry him in Sweden. However, before she is able to leave, friends and family find out about her work, and after she goes to Sweden her mother commits suicide out of shame. Interdevochka highlights the paradox of the perestroika approach to sex work. On the one hand, in an era in which foreign currency was everything, it could be a woman’s path out of a crumbling state; on the other, its fundamental moral ambivalence ensured that no good could come of it, even for the most well-meaning such as Tatiana.

Researchers examining prostitution in contemporary Moscow have found that the social stratification that seemed to emerge among prostitutes in the 1980s has largely carried over into the post-Soviet period. The most prestigious sex work is still done in hotels, serving a largely foreign (or very wealthy Russian) clientele. A study in 2003 found that hotel prostitutes were charging between us $50 and us $200 per client in the city. 39 Falling just under this were brothel, massage parlour, and sauna sex workers ( us $26– us $150 per client), then street sex workers ($50–$100 per client), and truck stop sex workers ( us $4– us $6 per client). As in the late Soviet period, the “lowest” rung on the sex worker hierarchy was that of the bomzhi , or the railway station sex workers, who charged anything from a crust of bread to us $6 per client. 40 It is clear that there is a precipitous drop between even street sex workers, many of whom solicit by the highways in the city and on the way out to the airport, and the sex workers who operate at the train stations and roadside houses of the region.

Religious, Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds

The religious, racial and ethnic backgrounds of Russian prostitutes differed significantly between St. Petersburg, located on the far-western edge of the empire, and Moscow, considered to be in the Russian heartland. Regarding the pre-nineteenth century situation, historian Alexander Kamenskii states that foreigners ( inostrantsy ) made up the majority of prostitutes in St. Petersburg in the eighteenth century, although he does not provide an archival source to back this up. 41 Whether or not this was the case, by the mid- and late-nineteenth century the picture was very different. Fedorov’s 1888 study of registered prostitutes in St. Petersburg found that of the 2,915 women studied, 87 per cent were of Russian ethnicity, 9 per cent were Russian subjects but of a different nationality or ethnicity (such as Poles, Finns, Latvians and Jews), and 4 per cent were foreign subjects. 42 It is important to note that the fact that these statistics only pertained to registered prostitutes is particularly pertinent in the case of ethnicity, as foreigners and even Russian subjects without permission to live in the city may have been particularly likely to avoid the police scrutiny that came with registering with the police and worked instead as clandestine prostitutes.

Dubrovskii’s 1889 census of prostitutes in the Russian empire gave figures for the ethnic and religious background of prostitutes surveyed, but it did this by province ( guberniia ) rather than city. However, in both Moscow province and St. Petersburg province, the titular cities had by far the largest number of registered prostitutes in the region, which means we can draw some conclusions, albeit imperfect ones, from the data. In Moscow province, 97 per cent of brothel prostitutes resided in the city of Moscow. 87 per cent (1,009) of these women were classified as being of Russian “ethnicity” by the imperial state, while 6 per cent (71) were German, 5.5 per cent (65) were Polish, 0.5 per cent (5) were Jewish, and 0.4 per cent (4) were Latvian. Also there was one Swede, one Estonian, and one black woman ( negritianka ) registered as prostitutes. 43 In St. Petersburg province, a slightly lower proportion of registered prostitutes in the region resided in the city itself; most of the remainder resided in Kronstadt, a small town just nineteen miles west of St. Petersburg that was historically the home of the Russian admiralty and the base of the Baltic Fleet. In St. Petersburg province, the prostitute population was slightly more ethnically diverse, with 84 per cent (2,186) of surveyed prostitutes categorized as ethnically Russian, 4.6 per cent (121) German, 3.4 per cent (89) Finnish, 2.5 per cent (66) Estonian, 2 per cent (56) Polish, 0.6 per cent (17) Jewish, 0.5 per cent (13) Swedish, and small numbers of women of Hungarian (3), Greek (5), Romanian (1), Czech (3) French (6) and Lithuanian (1) nationality. 44 In both cities, women who were neither Russian nor one of the main minorities (Polish or German) were considerably more likely to be “street” prostitutes working on their own, rather than brothel prostitutes. 45

In terms of religion, the vast majority of registered prostitutes in both St. Petersburg and Moscow in the nineteenth century were Russian Orthodox, with Protestant and Roman Catholic distantly behind in terms of numbers. According to Dubrovskii, of the total number of brothel prostitutes in Moscow province, 87 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 9 per cent were Roman Catholic, 3.5 per cent were Protestant, and just one was Jewish. 46 Of the total number of street prostitutes in Moscow province, 87 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 3 per cent were Roman Catholic, 9 per cent were Protestant, one was Jewish, one was Muslim and one was an Old Believer (a member of a schismatic branch of Orthodoxy that adhered to pre-1666 liturgical practices). 47

Of the brothel prostitutes in the St. Petersburg province, 83.5 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 13 per cent were Protestant, and 3.5 per cent were Roman Catholic. 48 As for street prostitutes, 86 per cent were Russian Orthodox, 10 per cent were Protestant, 3 per cent were Roman Catholic, 0.5 per cent were Jewish, and one was an Old Believer. 49 Thus, comparing the two regions, the primary substantive difference was the higher number of Protestant prostitutes in St. Petersburg, unsurprising given the proximity of the region to the predominantly Lutheran Baltic provinces and Finland. The proportion of Russian Orthodox prostitutes stayed relatively constant across the two regions (around 83–87 per cent). St. Petersburg had the highest proportion of Jewish prostitutes, but at 0.5 per cent this was still an infinitesimal number compared to other confessions (it is important to remember that in this period most Jewish subjects of the Tsar were confined to residence in the Pale of Settlement, the region covering roughly what is today Belarus, Eastern Poland and Central Ukraine).

Once again, for the Soviet period, the dearth of statistical information makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the ethnic and religious makeup of prostitutes. One important thing to note is that if, as stated above, we take the conclusion that in the 1920s many urban and “former” (disenfranchised) women turned to prostitution, this would suggest that the percentage of prostitutes in the two cities of Russian ethnicity would have increased if it changed at all. The Soviet state, officially a (militantly) atheist one, no longer collected information on the religious backgrounds of its citizens, which were supposedly non-existent.

In contemporary Moscow, the ethnic stratification of prostitution appears to map closely onto the hierarchy within sex work itself. According to ethnographic research from the 1990s and early 2000s, the highest-class (hotel) prostitutes tend to be ethnically Russian (the most privileged ethnic group generally) while the lowest rung, the bomzhi in the rail stations and truck stops, are usually non-Muscovites and often non-Russian migrants from former Soviet states. 50

Employment Prior or Parallel to Prostitution

The most common path to prostitution in the nineteenth century was by way of domestic service. According to Dubrovskii’s 1889 census of prostitutes, 46 per cent of women surveyed stated that they were in domestic service prior to prostitution. 51 Citing the domestic servant’s lack of protection in late imperial society, the historian David Ransel has said that “the female domestic often lived in a kind of personal bondage” in the period, and “frequently her position was far from secure and subject to great abuse.” 52 The precariousness and often misery of a domestic servant’s employment conditions would thus help to explain the frequency with which women often left domestic service and entered prostitution. Writing in 1927, the doctor V.M. Bronner and jurist A.I. Elistratov claimed on the basis of the 1897 All-Russian census that, in that year, 6 per cent of domestic servants became prostitutes (compared with 4.6 per cent of needle workers and 1 per cent of factory workers). 53

The second most common employment background for women working as prostitutes was the needle trades, which despite requiring considerable skill and years of experience, paid barely subsistence wages (women made 64 per cent of what men did in these trades). 54 Further undermining women’s ability to make a living in this line of work was its seasonal nature; usually, it involved four to five months of work a year, and was not able to support women who had moved permanently from their village to the city. 55 Finally, the third largest group of prostitutes were former factory workers, comprising 6.4 per cent of prostitutes according to Dubrovskii. As Barbara Alpern Engel has noted, this group was the only one in which their proportion among prostitutes was smaller than their proportion in the female workforce as a whole (around 20 per cent in 1890). 56 Arguably, this suggests that even as factory work involved long hours and often poor pay (particularly when compared to men) the work was stable enough to keep most female employees out of sex work. However, there was always a large oversupply of female migrants to the city looking for factory employment relative to the number of jobs available. The ranks of St. Petersburg and Moscow prostitutes likely contained a large number of women who were aspiring, but had never been actual, factory workers.

Family Situation

Nineteenth-century studies suggested that many registered prostitutes were full or half orphans; according to Dubrovskii’s 1889 study, fewer than 4 per cent of prostitutes reported that both their parents were still living. 57 Historian Laurie Bernstein reports that disrupted family backgrounds were the most distinguishing characteristic of prostitutes in nineteenth-century Russia, with many telling social workers and journalists about parents who beat them or relatives who drove them out of the home. 58 This model of family crisis as a driver of prostitution was also reflected in the rise of concerns about child prostitution, particularly after 1905. Concern about sex work among vagrant and homeless juveniles contributed to the notion that many who ended up prostitutes came from broken homes and financially unstable backgrounds. 59

Dubrovskii also gives us figures on the percentage of prostitutes who were married, widowed or divorced at the time of the 1889 survey. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vast majority of prostitutes were unmarried. In Moscow province, 91 per cent of brothel prostitutes were unmarried, 7 per cent were married, 2 per cent were widowed and 0.3 per cent were divorced. 60 In terms of street prostitutes in Moscow, 77 per cent were unmarried, 13 per cent were married, 7 per cent were widowed and 3 per cent were divorced. 61 In St. Petersburg province, 95 per cent of brothel prostitutes were unmarried, 3 per cent were married, 1.5 per cent were widowed and 0.4 per cent were divorced. 62 Among street prostitutes, 90 per cent were unmarried, 6 per cent were married, 3.4 per cent were widows, and 0.7 per cent were divorced (see Table 6.1). 63