To browse Academia. Prostitution has been high on the French political agenda since the late s, but the way in which it has been framed as a policy issue has undergone a radical change since the elections of This article compares competing definitions of prostitution as a political issue under the Jospin and the Raffarin governments.
It examines the abolitionist lobby, which dominated the debates under Jospin, joining forces with women's policy agencies to place prostitution on the policy agenda as a form of violence towards women. It discusses the changes in prostitution policy since , focusing on the criminalisation of soliciting and the construction of prostitutes as part-victim, part-criminal.
It argues that the reframing of prostitution as a law and order issue has harsh consequences for the women in prostitution, but particularly for migrant women, who can be deported for the new offence of passive soliciting. The article analyzes the main approaches to the interpretation of prostitution from the legal, economic, sociological, psychological, sexological and religious points of view. The author formulates its own definition, in which prostitution is considered as a form of entrepreneurial activity for the provision of sexual services on a paid basis, aimed at meeting sexual needs.
The basic preconditions that are necessary for the prostitution to become the signs of entrepreneurial activity are presented: availability of commodity-money relations; religious and social tolerance; sexual freedom; sexual need.
It is offered to allocate three main groups of mutually conditioned motives to engaging in prostitution: psychological-emotional, image and socio-economic.
