Prostitution had troubled the government and the police in Britain long before John Wolfenden was asked to convene the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution by the Conservative Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe in 1954. Indeed, by the 1950s prostitution had been considered one of the most significant modern social problems for at least three-quarters of a century. While prostitution had always presented problems and questions about the control of public space and sexual morality, it was the Victorians who redefined it as one of their great âsocial questionsâ. In the mid-nineteenth century, concerns about the rampant spread of syphilis during the Crimean War led to the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1865, and 1869. This legislation required women in ports and garrison towns who were suspected of being prostitutes to register with the police, submit to compulsory genital inspection, and suffer incarceration in a âlock hospitalâ if an infection was discovered. By the late 1860s, an enormous protest movement had sprung up demanding the Actsâ repeal, claiming they licensed vice, rode roughshod over the constitutional rights of the women, and codified a âdouble standard of sexual moralityâ that saw women punished for sexual misdeeds while menâs behaviour was accepted and normalized.1
These mounting objections to the regulation and thus supposed legitimation of prostitution and to the mistreatment of women labelled prostitutes led to a wider interest in the question of harm and exploitation in the sex industry. In 1879 a shocking expose of young girls being trafficked from Britain to regulated brothels in Belgium led to the appointment of a Joint Select Committee for the Protection of Girls and Young Women in 1881, the first government committee that investigated sexual exploitation and prostitution. This Committee recommended a new law against what was called âprocurationâ, which would make it illegal for someone to âprocure or attempt to procure a girl or woman to become a common prostitute either within or without the kingâs dominionsâ. A subsequent Criminal Law Amendment Bill dealing with just this issue met with resistance, and it took another major newspaper expose to push the bill through Parliament. William Steadâs 1885 Pall Mall Gazette series, the âMaiden Tribute of Modern Babylonâ, created a panic about children being prostituted in London brothels. With his investigative style of ânew journalismâ, Stead offered scandalous descriptions of rape and abuse within brothels and he wrote that, as part of his investigation, he had been able to purchase a girl, thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong, from her mother for just five pounds.2 As a result, public concern about child prostitution and the age of consent became intertwined with concerns about brothels. When the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, just over a month after the publication of Steadâs expose, it raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, it outlawed procurement, and it made âkeeping a brothelâ a non-indictable, and therefore easily prosecutable, offence. Subsequent case law defined a brothel as a place where âmore than one woman practices prostitutionâ. The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was also the Statute that included the notorious Labouchere Amendment, which was added in its final reading, making âgross acts of indecencyâ between men a crime. It was this Act that Wolfenden would recommend repealing over seventy years later.
Ultimately, however, John Wolfendenâs Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was little concerned with questions of sexual exploitation in prostitution, or even with brothel-keeping; instead it focused on an older, and more persistent, debate concerning the control of prostitution on the streets. Across the country, several laws were directed against women who solicited prostitution in the streets. The 1824 Vagrancy Act, which was applied across England and Wales, stipulated that âany common prostituteâ who was in a public place and âbehaving in a riotous or indecent mannerâ could be fined or imprisoned. This same Act included a clause against âimportuning for an immoral purposeâ which was used against men who were soliciting men. The 1839 Metropolitan Police Act, in force only in London, made it an offence for âany common prostitute to loiter or solicit for the purposes of prostitution to the annoyance of inhabitants or passengersâ.3 Outside of London, the Towns and Police Clauses Act of 1847 enacted similar measures, but stated that the âcommon prostituteâ had to be soliciting âto the obstruction, annoyance or danger of the residents or passengersâ. The legislation in Northern Ireland was broadly comparable: Belfast had the Belfast Improvement Act 1845, which prohibited âcommon prostitutesâ loitering for prostitution or solicitation to the âannoyance of ⊠inhabitants or passengersâ, and the similar Towns Improvement Act (Ireland) 1854 applied to towns in Northern Ireland.4
All of these laws differed little in practice. Direct evidence of annoyance or obstruction was very rarely required, and police forces developed various systems to identify, sometimes caution, and ultimately permanently label certain women âcommon prostitutesâ which greatly facilitated their arrest for soliciting. They would be introduced as a âcommon prostituteâ in court before their trial began and would almost always be found guilty. By the time the Wolfenden Committee sat in the 1950s, the conviction rate for solicitation offences had reached over 99 per cent, the highest conviction rate of any offence in the United Kingdom.5 Yet this approach left the courts and the police open to accusations of prejudice and even corruption. As such, the Wolfenden Committee considered with interest the way prostitution was handled under Scottish law. In Scotland, women who solicited were dealt with under the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act 1892 and various pieces of local legislation, such as the Edinburgh Municipal and Police Act 1879. In addition, the Licensing (Scotland) Act 1903 was used to target pubs and hotels where prostitutes gathered, while the Immoral Traffic (Scotland) Act 1902 dealt with living on the earnings of prostitution and with men who solicited in public places for âimmoral purposesâ. Unlike in England and Wales, there was no requirement under Scottish law to prove annoyance, but prosecutions in Scotland required more evidence than just one uncorroborated witness and prosecutions were initiated by the Prosecutor Fiscal rather than by the police. All of this meant that the Scottish system attracted less scandal in the form of accusations of police bribery and the manufacturing of evidence.6
Indeed, the complexities and inconsistencies of the system in England and Wales increasingly gave rise to media storms and scandals. The first of these happened in 1887, when PC Endacott arrested a woman named Elizabeth Cass as a âcommon prostituteâ, only to be challenged in court by her respectable employer. The incident saw Endacott on trial for perjury, new orders issues by the Commissioner Charles Warren, and a dramatic drop in arrests for more than three years afterward.7 Then, in 1906, a series of allegations of wrongful arrest, police corruption, and police brutality saw the establishment of the first Royal Commission on the Duties of the Metropolitan Police which, despite its generic name, was heavily focused on prostitution and the policing of other kinds of street offences and vice. Nevertheless, with the arrival of the First World War in 1914 came growing concerns about the spread of immorality in Britain. Promiscuity and prostitution were framed not just as threats to respectability but to the very war effort. The term âamateur prostituteâ was applied to young, sexually liberal women who engaged in sexual activity with men in exchange for gifts or payment in kind, while soldiersâ camps opened up new markets for prostitution.8 In the late stages of the war, the government introduced Regulation 40D in order to tackle venereal disease within the armed forces. It meant that women who gave venereal disease to servicemen could be imprisoned. Repealed before the end of the war, Regulation 40D was a controversial measure which treated women, and prostitutes in particular, as sources of infection.9
Double standards in the way women and men were regulated continued to plague policy, policing, and prostitution after the First World War. The interwar years saw the Metropolitan Police hit with new waves of scandals concerning their application of England and Walesâ solicitation laws, their corruption, and their mistreatment of prostitutes. In 1922 Sir Almeric Fitzroy, Clerk of the Privy Council, was charged with âwillfully interfering with and annoying persons in Hyde Parkâ after police officers saw him approach a number of women in a single evening. Fitzroy had his conviction overturned when one of the women annoyed, Mrs Turner, was said to be a prostitute.10 Turnerâs profession was used to discredit her testimony and the injustice of this shone a light on discrepancies in the way police and courts were handling evidence of annoyance. With the solicitation laws leaving police open to accusations of unfairness and impropriety, the government established the Street Offences Committee in October 1927.11 In many ways a precursor to the Wolfenden Committee, the Street Offences Committee was asked to review the âlaw and practice ⊠in connection with prostitution and solicitation for immoral purposes in streetsâ. While the Committee conducted its investigation there was further public scandal. In April 1928, Irene Savidge and Sir Leo Chiozza Money were arrested and charged with public indecency after Money was seen kissing Savidge in Londonâs Hyde Park. As in the Fitzroy case, Money was a man of high social status. Though he and Savidge were both acquitted, the policeâs treatment of Money and Savidge differed significantly. Savidge faced extensive re-questioning by the police after her acquittal but Money did not.12
As a result of these high-profile scandals, confidence in the Metropolitan Policeâs handling of solicitation and indecency was shaken. In August 1928 the Royal Commission on Police Powers was set up, but there was little actual change.13 When the Street Offences Committee published its final report in November 1928 it recommended the removal of the term âcommon prostituteâ from law and the creation of a gender-neutral law against solicitation. However, these proposals were not enacted. Differences of opinion among Committee members undermined the strength of the report and there was continued debate about the evidentiary threshold that should be applied to the matter of annoyance.14 As such, the interwar years did not see the emergence of any consensus or even clarity about how to manage prostitution on the streets.
As had happened during the First World War, the arrival of the Second World War stoked fears about increased opportunities for prostitution and promiscuity. Prostitution was blamed for wartime rises in rates of venereal disease as young women engaged in transactional sex with soldiers. Moreover, there was an explosion, more generally, in the organized and professional commercial sex market at the same time as police numbers were significantly reduced by the war. Once again, problematic wartime regulations were introduced to try to limit the spread of venereal disease. Regulation 33B, introduced in 1942, meant that anyone who was identified by two other people as having passed on venereal disease could be arrested and made to undergo treatment. Though Regulation 33B was not gender specific, it was used until 1947 and it was based on an assumption that promiscuous women were the cause of venereal disease.15
When Britain emerged from the war, it needed to take stock of the immense destruction to housing and infrastructure caused by bombing campaigns, the high numbers of deaths and causalities, and continuing food shortages. As Britain began the process of negotiating a peopleâs peace, ushering a new era of welfare capitalism, its hold on its imperial possessions grew increasin...