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Saving Fallen Women Now? Critical Perspectives on Engagement and Support Orders and their Policy of Forced Welfarism
- Anna Carline, Jane Scoular
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- Journal:
- Social Policy and Society / Volume 14 / Issue 1 / January 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 27 August 2014, pp. 103-112
- Print publication:
- January 2015
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- Article
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The UK seems set to follow the increasingly abolitionist trend that is taking hold in Europe in response to the issue of prostitution. While some argue that an abolitionist approach signals a serious attempt to tackle the injustices and gendered aspects of commercial sex, we are less optimistic. Drawing upon the findings of the first study to evaluate Engagement and Support Orders, we argue that any focus on women's needs is distorted by the continued zero tolerance approach to street sex work and the criminal justice setting it takes place in. New revolving doors have been created for those involved in the most visible sectors of the industry and support agencies have been made to take on an increased policing role. This narrow focus individualises the causes of poverty and prostitution, elides the wider structural factors that shape sex work and does little to address the real needs of this vulnerable group. In conclusion, we argue that future policy should engage more productively with the rich cultural study of sex work. This will enable the development of ground-up responses and allow for a more effective role for the criminal law.
two - What’s anti-social about sex work? Governance through the changing representation of prostitution’s incivility
- Edited by Jo Phoenix
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- Book:
- Regulating Sex for Sale
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 July 2022
- Print publication:
- 23 September 2009, pp 29-46
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Summary
Introduction
Recent reforms of prostitution policy in the UK have been abolitionist in tone, with concerns about community safety and violence against women encouraging zero-tolerance strategies. In relation to street sex work, such strategies include a range of interventions – from voluntary referrals to compulsory intervention orders and Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) designed to extricate women apparently ‘trapped’ in street prostitution. Despite being heralded as a new approach, we argue that recent constructions of street sex work as a form of anti-social behaviour must be viewed as merely the latest attempt to construct the street sex worker as a social ‘other’. In this chapter we utilise both critical and empirical forms of enquiry to uncover the relationship between dominant constructions of the ‘problem of prostitution’ and the associated norms that operate across various historical epochs, focusing in particular on the recent association between street sex work and anti-social behaviour. By situating this within a critical historical analysis of prostitution policy, we are able to contextualise contemporary policy within the wider history of control and governance in order to show that the alleged antithesis of sex work to community safety owes as much to the ideological operation of law as to any inherent feature of commercial sex. In the main part of the chapter we consider the practical implications of recent reforms, which continue to follow this ideology. By reflecting on our recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation-funded study, which examined the experiences of those living and working in areas of street sex work, we outline some of the dangers of policy frameworks and techniques of control that continue to situate sex work as antithetical to the cultivation of community safety.
Recent reforms
Recent reviews and reforms of prostitution law in the UK (Home Office, 2004; 2006; Scottish Executive, 2004; 2006; 2007 Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill; 2007 Prostitution (Public Places) (Scotland) Act) have been widely acclaimed as marking an important sea-change in sex work policy, with new anxieties about community safety and exploitation joining more long-standing concerns about morality and decency. The Home Office strategy (2006) which informs current law reform proposals prioritises the promotion of community safety and the elimination of street sex work as a form of commercial exploitation in its key objectives.
twelve - Prostitution, gentrification, and the limits of neighbourhood space
- Edited by Rowland Atkinson, University of Sheffield, Gesa Helms, University of Glasgow
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- Book:
- Securing an Urban Renaissance
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 11 July 2007, pp 203-218
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Summary
Conceived as a series of policies intended to bring people back into cities, urban renaissance offers a new vision of environmentally sustainable, socially balanced, and aesthetically inspired urban regeneration. While clearly informed by New Labour's specific concerns about active citizenship, social inclusion, and community participation, urban renaissance has nonetheless been identified as following a well-tested and global model of urban regeneration reliant on the rolling out of the ‘gentrification frontier’ (Lees, 2003b; Atkinson, 2004; Atkinson & Bridge, 2005). In essence, the suggestion here is that the Urban Task Force and subsequent urban White Paper promote a model of regeneration that idealises middle-class lifestyles, and hence encourages the middle classes to move ‘back to the city’. In practical terms, however, the cash-starved state seems unprepared to intervene significantly in central city property markets, meaning this model of middle-class led regeneration is reliant on investment by private developers keen to exploit the gap between current and potential ground rent.
Local authorities lacking the financial means (or imagination) to revitalise areas of urban blight and disinvestment thus aim to serve up the central city as an unmissable investment opportunity for developers, believing an injection of capital is necessary to prevent a net outflow of consumers, businesses, and residents from city centres bedevilled by images of anti-social behaviour, drunken yobbery, second-class shopping, and unemployment (Baeten, 2002). Often, this requires local authorities to take steps to tame urban ‘disorder’, pioneering new techniques and technologies of ‘policing’ designed to promote consumer-led revitalisation. In some instances, this has involved the extension of private property rights to public space, with new agents of social control (for example, city centre guardians) seeking to maintain the civility of the streets through innovative forms of policing (Belina & Helms, 2003; Raco, 2003). Simultaneously, demands for reassurance policing has encouraged many communities to be more active in seeking partnership solutions to crime and disorder issues, with community watch and neighbourhood warden schemes now widespread (Crawford, 1998; Sagar, 2004).
Imposing a particular form of order on the streets is thus often depicted as the precursor of a benign form of civic renaissance. However, critical voices have stressed this is often about the imposition of middle-class consumerist values, and is actually about the displacement of those ‘Others’ who threaten consumer-led regeneration.