Such attitudes, however, were still usually influenced by moral assumptions about sex
work. Sympathy was often framed around notions of ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. In Settle’s study,
she notes that officers generally distinguished between young women who had ‘fallen’ into
sex work due to economic hardship or abusive coercion (the naive female victim of
circumstance) or the ‘old pros’ (sexually deviant and criminal women who needed
punishment). 39 Similar approaches can be seen in America at the start of the twentieth
century. Institutions, established circa 1915, aimed to reform women arrested for
prostitution. However, support was disproportionately provided to white women, who were
deemed ‘worthy’, while women of alternative ethnicities, especially Black women, were
viewed as ‘unworthy’ due to racial beliefs about inherent sexual deviance. 40 Terry Lilley et al
argue that reformist policing approaches to sex work are paternalistic and create tension in
attitudes between sex workers who are viewed as victims and those who actively choose
prostitution as a form of labour. 41 They also tend to fail to safeguard male or trans sex
workers, as the imagery of the ‘victimised prostitute’ is inherently female. 42 Whether policing
methods were regulationist or reformist, they were still fundamentally concerned with the
control of the sex worker’s body in a way that promoted contemporary ideals of
‘respectable’ femininity.
Modern society, at least in the Western contexts predominantly explored in this
essay, was one that anxiously conflated sex work with broader concerns about disease and
urbanisation. From the eighteenth century, attitudes to gender and sexuality changed,
39 Settle, pp. 29-30 40 Terry G. Lilley, Chrysanthi S. Leon, Anne E. Bowler, ‘The Same Old Arguments: Tropes of Race and Class in the History of Prostitution from the Progressive Era to the Present’, Social Justice , 46. 4 (2019), 31-52 (pp. 33-36) 41 Lilley, Leon, and Bowler, pp. 36-40 42 Tracey Sagar, Debbie Jones, “Not in our name’: Findings from Wales Supporting the Decriminalisation of Sex Work’, in Policing the Sex Industry: Protection, Paternalism and Politics , Ed. Teela Sanders, Mary Laing (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 89-106 (p. 90)
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