To browse Academia. This autoethnography discusses the arrest of a researcher engaged in the study of female street prostitution. The event becomes a way to reflect on the nature of the recently implemented measures for dealing with commercial sex in Italy, and the consolidation process of a new penal ethic based on prevention and new powers for the police forces.
Within this framework, popular journalism and police activism become intertwined, creating a lethal combination that produces authoritarian scenarios in the government of security. What does "abolitionism" mean? Was the legalization of prostitution successful? This essay, which explores the representation of prostitution during Italian Fascism, as represented in Vasco Pratolini's Cronache di poveri amanti, was later developed into a chapter in my Prison Terms: Representing Confinement During and After Italian Fascism, where it is expanded and, among other things, where it updates the bibliography.
By delving into the recent history of sex work in Italy, and the related practices, discourses and policies implemented in the past sixty or so years in the Bel Paese, this essay suggests that commercial sex is at the center of a plurality of forces and phenomena, which are apparently very distant from it, but converge on this Β«hubΒ» and, while transforming it into an observation point able to see the changes in the surrounding society, on occasions use it as a lever to produce transformations.
The instrumental and changing nature of commercial sex makes of this object and the people involved an ambivalent lieu, situated between freedom and repression, change and social conservatism. The article examines the Italian experience in implementing policies and practices on prostitution. If this reality demonstrates the existence of an interactive process that offers to operators and other actors the opportunities of intercepting different segments of persons in prostitution, the same element could represent a critical argument in framing new public policies on this issue.
Keywords: women, trafficking, prostitution, public policies, migration. Usage of any items from the University of Cumbria's institutional repository 'Insight' must conform to the following fair usage guidelines. Any item and its associated metadata held in the University of Cumbria's institutional repository Insight unless stated otherwise on the metadata record may be copied, displayed or performed, and stored in line with the JISC fair dealing guidelines available here for educational and not-for-profit activities provided that.
