Red-Light Districts and Toleration Zones: Geographies of Female Street Prostitution in

England and Wales

Author(s): Phil Hubbard
Source: Area, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Jun., 1997), pp. 129-140
Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003779
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Area (1997) 29.2, 129-140

Red-light districts and Toleration Zones:

geographies of female street prostitution
in England and Wales
Phil Hubbard, Lecturer in Human Geography, Geography Subject Group,
School of Natural and Environmental Science, Coventry University, Priory Street,
Coventry CV1 5FB

Summary Although female street prostitution is widely acknowledged to occur in specific spaces,
characteristically referred to as 'red-light ' districts, geographers have been remarkably reticent in
examining the nature and location of these spaces. Against a backdrop of mounting debate
surrounding the legal status ofprostitution in England and Wales, this paper considers the importance
of such areas in the regulation and containment of street prostitution, and speculates as to how
changing social and legal attitudes might result in very different geographies of prostitution.

Introduction
As the ' oldest profession ', female prostitution has long been recognised as a
persistent feature of urban life, albeit one which has manifested itself in a variety of
forms across different societies. In contemporary Western society, a hierarchical
distinction is often made between ' higher-class ' prostitutes who work off-street (as
masseurs, call girls or escort workers) and ' lower-class ' prostitutes who solicit for
clients in public spaces (Roberts 1992). It is this latter type of sex work, where female
street prostitution is a major activity in (mainly) residential areas, that forms the most
visible and contentious manifestation of prostitution in most British cities. Although
there has been a recent rise in the visibility of male (predominantly homosexual)
street prostitutes in British cities (see Matthew 1988), it is the continued presence of
female street prostitution in a number of notorious ' red-light ' districts that has
engendered the most fervent arguments as to the ' place ' of prostitution in British
society. Recent events in a number of inner city vice districts have increased the
intensity of such debates, with community activists in Balsall Heath in Birmingham
and Manningham in Bradford involved in lengthy pickets against street prostitutes.
In essence, these residents have sought to take the law into their own hands, arguing
that the current legal and social regulation of prostitution is failing to protect them
from the ' public nuisance ' caused by street prostitutes and kerb-crawlers
(The Guardian 6 May 1995; The Independent 29 July 1995).
Such community actions have succeeded in drawing attention to the fact that
prostitution laws in Britain are fundamentally flawed, outdated and inoperable, yet
little concern has been voiced within such debates for the working conditions of
street prostitutes themselves, who, at the lowest end of a stigmatised and marginal
ised profession, accept physical, sexual and psychological violence as occupational
hazards (O'Neill 1996). It has often been argued that the criminalisation of street
prostitutes, which does much to reinforce and reproduce the status of prostitute
women as ' deserving victims', plays a major role in actually contributing to such
violence (see, for example, the arguments of Lopez-Jones 1990; Roberts 1992;
Kinnell 1993). The failure of current prostitution laws to provide adequate

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 130 Hubbard

protection for street prostitutes has been most recently voiced in a highly-publicised
report, The Game's Up (Children's Society 1995), which highlighted the ways in
which the criminalisation of Britain's estimated 3,000-5,000 juvenile prostitutes
frequently encourages them to seek the ' protection ' of potentially exploitative
pimps, hindering the work of health and social services.1
It is against the backdrop of the arguments for the reform of the prostitution laws
that this paper seeks to examine the changing regulation of street prostitution,
acknowledging that the policing of prostitution frequently operates in an explicitly
spatial manner which reflects and reinforces the marginal status of female prostitutes
(whom, it should be noted, are regulated in a very different manner to male sex
workers, who exhibit their own characteristic geographies). Throughout, the paper
draws on the reactions which have accompanied recent debates concerning the past,
present and future of prostitution in British cities, together with field observations
from Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where the recent community protests have
offered a particularly appropriate opportunity to examine the way in which the
spatial and social marginalisation of prostitutes intersect. The aims of this paper are
thus threefold; firstly to investigate the current distribution of street prostitution in
England and Wales; secondly to consider the extent to which this distribution is a
reflection of contemporary regulatory regimes (both social and legal); and thirdly, to
speculate as to how changing the prostitution laws might affect this distribution. In
doing so, the intention is to explore a number of themes of wider relevance in social
and cultural geography, particularly those of control and transgression, for, as Laws
(1994, 11) argues, considering how geographies of oppression are revealed in the
deployment of space can help us think about the way in which social relations are
mediated in and by space.

The distribution and policing of street prostitution

Ashworth et al (1988) have suggested that there exists a general silence on
geographies of prostitution in the urban West, despite the fact that the broad
delimitation of certain districts as ' vice areas ', typically in inner city areas, has been
a common feature of many descriptions of urban form and structure since the work
of the Chicago school (see, for example, Reckless 1926). Despite the realisation that
prostitution characteristically occurs in particular spaces, and the fact that the female
prostitute has frequently featured as a central figure in debates about the gendered
and sexualised nature of public space (Wilson 1995), little attempt has been made by
geographers to examine the nature of these spaces or how they contribute to the
social construction of prostitutes' identities (though see Symanski 1981; Hart 1995).
Nonetheless, with respect to street prostitution, even the most cursory mapping
reveals a distinctive and highly uneven spatial distribution. Figures 1 and 2, for
example, give an indication of the distribution of street prostitution in England and
Wales by police force areas, based on 1994 Home Office figures for prosecutions
relating to soliciting and kerb-crawling. Although it is difficult to identify a clear
urban/rural distinction at this level of spatial disaggregation (for example, prosecu
tions for Norfolk consist almost entirely of offences in Norwich), it is possible to
discern that there is a significant over-representation of prosecutions relating to street
prostitution in the most heavily urbanised police force areas. For example, while
there were 3622 arrests for soliciting in London, 1497 in the West Midlands and 659
in Greater Manchester, it is significant that half of all police forces reported less than
one arrest per 100,000 population. Similarly, whilst the figures for kerb-crawling

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 Red-light districts and Toleration Zones 131

*>30
*15 -30
*1-15

0 50 100
km

Figure 1 Soliciting prosecutions by police force area per 100

provided by Home Office Research and Statistics Depa

arrests are lower overall, Greater Manchester, West

and London still appear as over-represented relative to
force areas. These distributions suggest that street
overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, concentrated in
Of course, the limitations of such data for revealing t
'victimless crimes ' such as prostitution need to be ackn
much a reflection of police practices as they are an indic
prostitution (Fyfe 1991, 257). Rather than displaying the
street prostitution, Figures 1 and 2 might be more corre
the uneven nature of the policing of prostitution, refl
police forces about which prostitution laws to uphol
whom. In relation to street prostitution, the 1959 Stree
Sexual Offences Act are the principal forms of legi
behaviour of prostitutes and their clients.2 The former
' common prostitute ' (labelled as such following two un
to loiter or solicit for the purposes of prostitution. This
offence, but is punished by way of fine, which varies fr

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 132 Hubbard

-J I

0 50 100

Figure 2 Kerb-crawling prosecutions by police force area per 100,000 p

(figures provided by Home Office Research and Statistics Departmen

different police force areas (Benson and Matthews 1995). Overwh

power is used in a selective manner by the police, ostensibly in respo
complaints.
The failure of this act to effectively prevent complaints from those affected by
street prostitution was acknowledged in the passing of the 1985 Sexual Offences Act,
which aimed to minimise the disruption and nuisance caused by the prostitutes'
clients, particularly car-borne kerb-crawlers. This essentially targeted ' persistent '
kerb-crawlers or those whose behaviour was deemed as likely to cause annoyance
(though no definition of annoyance was given). While kerb-crawling legislation was
supposed to bring equality in the treatment of both prostitutes soliciting clients and
clients soliciting prostitutes, and in spite of the fact that clients clearly outnumber
prostitutes, prosecution figures suggest that this has not occurred (with 7231
prosecutions for soliciting and 1113 for kerb-crawling in 1994).3 In part, this is
because of the difficulty of proving ' persistence ', yet Figure 2 demonstrates that
there are clear disparities in the extent to which different police forces prosecute
kerb-crawlers, with many still choosing to focus on the ' supply ' rather than
' demand ' side of the prostitution transaction. It should similarly be noted, however,
that many vice squads now no longer arrest street prostitutes, preferring instead to

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 Red-light districts and Toleration Zones 133

discourage or prosecute kerb-crawlers (Edwards 1987). Such variations begin to

explain why some police force areas (for example Northumbria, Kent and Cheshire)
which contain known areas of street prostitution, have no recorded prosecutions for
either kerb-crawling or soliciting, whilst others such as Devon and Cornwall and
North Yorkshire have prosecutions for kerb-crawling but none for soliciting.
To understand this variability in policing it is necessary to examine the avowed
aims of current prostitution legislation. Significantly, although virtually all the acts
connected with prostitution (soliciting, kerb-crawling, living off immoral earnings)
are currently illegal in England and Wales, prostitution itself is not. According to the
Home Office, this is because the legal regulation of prostitution does not aim to
eradicate prostitution, but attempts ' to prevent the serious nuisance to the public
caused when prostitutes ply their trade in the street ... and to penalise pimps,
brothel keepers and others who seek to encourage, control and exploit the
prostitution of others' (cited in Edwards 1987, 928). Whilst this proclaims a concern
for the working conditions and safety of women prostitutes, the low number of
prosecutions for living off immoral earnings (pimping)4 suggests that such concerns
are given a low police priority (Boyle 1994). Similarly, prosecutions for kerb-crawling
rarely, if ever, appear to have been made against clients accused of causing persistent
nuisance to prostitutes (Lopez-Jones 1990). Instead, current prostitution legislation
is principally designed to reduce the 'nuisance ' experienced by people living in
areas of street prostitution. According to the Wolfenden Report (1957, 23), which
preceded the introduction of the 1959 Street Offences Act, the main justification for
the control of prostitution was ' the right of the normal decent citizen to go about the
streets without affront to their sense of decency '. As such, the judicial system only
seems to regard prostitution as an offence when it is visible in the public realm,
considering it as an assault against standards of public morality and decency (see
Kirby 1996, 132-6). Jackson (1989, 115) supports this assertion, stressing that it is
the inherent visibility of street prostitutes, and the eroticisation of the public realm
emphasised by their adoption of specific forms of dress and behaviour, that provokes
a legal and moral response. Such claims support the views expounded by many
scholars of urban life that gender, sexual and bodily identities often interact to
constrain participation in the public realm: as Wilson (1995, 69) notes, with the
presence of women in the public spaces of the city frequently interpreted as
pathological or immoral, there is rarely any possibility of a female fldneur, only the
prostitute.
Nonetheless, while current legislation seeks to reduce the visibility of prostitutes
in the public realm, dominant moral geographies appear to dictate this visibility is
more acceptable in some spaces than others. In the majority of British cities, for
example, street prostitution is characteristically concentrated into distinctive ' red
light ' districts. A recent survey of the 39 vice squads established to monitor
prostitution in England and Wales reveals that 80 per cent of these squads focus their
activities on an area of no more than one square mile (Benson and Matthews 1995,
7). In these areas, street prostitution often coexists with off-street sex work, yet it is
the visible concentration of street workers that lends such locations their notoriety as
red-light districts. Interviews with clients and kerb-crawlers (McKeganey and
Barnard 1996) suggests it is this notoriety that initially attracts them, with the
relatively high ' choice' of prostitute women subsequently drawing them to the
red-light districts. According to Winchester and White (1988, 40), such red-light
districts are contiguous with areas of economic marginalisation, frequently located in
mixed residential/industrial inner city areas. In seeking to explain the concentrations

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 134 Hubbard

of street prostitution in such districts, as opposed to outer suburbs or peripheral

council estates, some have suggested that these are established areas of ' lower-class '
prostitutes catering for a localised and economically marginalised market (see
Ashworth et al 1988, 203). However, the idea that street prostitutes cater solely for
a local market, with off-street workers catering for tourists and visitors, is erroneous.
A survey of kerb-crawlers cautioned in Birmingham's Balsall Heath district, for
example, found that only 45% came from Birmingham itself, and that 28% came
from beyond the Midlands.5 Nor do street prostitutes necessarily originate from the
local area: in fact the converse is often true, with sex workers often living at large
distances from their work, seeking to maintain an important distinction between their
family and working lives (Hart 1995). Evidently, the location of red-light districts is
not something that can be comprehended solely through an appreciation of supply
and demand relationships, but requires a broader comprehension of how, as an
activity at variance with the prevailing moral order, street prostitution is generally
only tolerated in areas which are reserved for it.

Prostitution and geographies of social control

According to Sibley (1995), exclusion has proved the dominant process in the
creation of social and spatial boundaries, and a fundamental means of controlling
those who do not conform to dominant norms and practices. He thus argues that
the process of boundary erection is a key means by which dominant (predominantly
male) interests are able to define certain groups, classified by virtue of their ' other '
race, ethnicity or sexuality, as deviant or ' polluting'. Although Cohen (1985) has
asserted that isolation and separation are not always necessary features of
social control, the notion of social and spatial exclusion appears apposite in
exploring the geographies of prostitution. Historically, the media has always
perpetuated images of prostitution which create strong feelings of abjection,
distinguishing this 'deviant' group from 'normal' purified populations. Several
authors have focused on the importance of such representations in the nineteenth
century (see, for example, Walkowitz 1980; Mort 1987; Ogborn 1992), suggesting
that themes of sexual immorality, environmental degradation, criminality and disease
were dominant. Although contemporary narratives are more likely to depict
prostitution as a social problem than as a social threat, it has been contended that
many of these themes persist, and that the marginalisation of prostitutes has actually
increased with the moral panic concerning the transmission of HIV-1 (Roberts 1992).
Based on the assumption that prostitutes have a high number of sexual contacts,
prostitutes are often portrayed as a pivotal group in the transmission of HIV-1, an
assertion supported with reference to the high incidence of HIV-infection among
prostitutes in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Nonetheless, British studies have
suggested that, because of awareness of safer sexual practices, as well as the
comparatively low epidemiological risk of female to male transmission, such
assertions are erroneous (Barnard 1992). For example, one reputable study of 228
female prostitutes in London (Ward et al 1993) revealed only two were infected with
HIV-l, whilst 98% of all prostitutes claimed to always use condoms with commercial
clients.6
The role of the prostitution laws in perpetuating such deviant practices has been
subject to little analysis as of yet, but Duncan (1994) has persuasively argued that
current prostitution laws themselves can be read as examples of dominant male
discourses:

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 Red-light districts and Toleration Zones 135

The law creates potential offences in every aspect of the prostitute's life, raising
the spectre of an offence for everyone she comes in contact with, constituting her
as a pariah. . . . Beyond the surface of order and innocence, prostitution laws
create and extend the power which underpins male sexuality by facilitating the
buying of women on their own terms (Duncan 1994, 25-26)

The way in which such legal discourses contribute to this stigmatising process is
particularly pronounced in that women convicted of soliciting are labelled as
' common prostitutes ', a term that dates back to the Contagious Diseases Acts of the
late nineteenth century. Through this label, Lopez-Jones (1990) contends that the
current prostitution laws effectively distinguish between the civil rights afforded to
sex workers and those offered to other women: once labelled as a ' common
prostitute ', the guilt of prostitutes is assumed in the eyes of the law, with any legal
protection sought by the prostitute with respect of violence or exploitation under
mined by the court's awareness of her status as common prostitute. In this sense, the
dominant discourses encoded in prostitution laws appear to combine with political,
medical and religious narratives to construct the prostitute as separate from ' decent'
women.
From this perspective, the historical evolution of red-light districts can be viewed
as a part of continuing (but contested) process involving the exclusion of disorderly
prostitution from orderly sexuality (or 'bad girls ' from ' good girls '), removing
prostitutes from areas where they would stand out as unnatural or deviant,
potentially ' polluting' civilised society. On the basis of this, it could be argued that
the location of street prostitution reflects the differential ability of social groups to
purify space, with the visibility of prostitutes being higher in socially disadvantaged
areas (see Larson 1986). Furthermore, the fact that red-light districts are typically in
marginalised inner city areas, which in themselves have a series of stereotyped
connotations (deprivation, criminality, environmental pollution, etc), must be
regarded as important in shaping the now well-established social responses to
prostitution. The identification of particular residual or excluded spaces as red-light
districts can therefore be postulated as a crucial means by which the deviance of
prostitutes is constructed through realms of discourse.
That the legal regulation of prostitution serves to reinforce this exclusionary
process is unequivocal. Based on his review of the control of prostitution in the
United States, Symanski (1981, 112) concludes that repression and containment are
the most usual ' geopolitical strategies ' used in policing prostitution, with the pQlice
tending to tolerate, though seldom encourage, street prostitution in unofficially
designated areas. Lowman (1992a, 243) concurred with this claim, arguing that
changing geographies of street prostitution in Vancouver since 1980 were a direct
result of law enforcement efforts. It is similarly apparent that the policing of street
prostitution in England and Wales takes an explicitly spatial form, with, for example,
many vice squads attempting to contain prostitution in specific areas where they are
able to monitor and control the situation. McKeganey and Barnard's (1996)
exhaustive ethnographic study of street workers revealed that the changing definition
of a permissible working area is at the heart of the everyday negotiations between
police and prostitutes, with workers who transgress beyond boundaries deemed
acceptable by the police undoubtedly charged if caught. Lopez-Jones (1990)
therefore proposes that it is the policing of prostitution that is fundamental in the
creation of red-light districts, by effectively making it impossible for clients and
prostitutes to meet elsewhere.

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 136 Hubbard

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that this attempt to spatially constrain prosti
tution facilitates the arrest of prostitutes and kerb-crawlers when public complaints
precipitate a crackdown on street prostitution. This was certainly the case in Balsall
Heath, where a series of covert (but subsequently highly-publicised) operations
between June 1989 and September 1990 resulted in 846 arrests for soliciting and 350
for kerb-crawling (Birmingham Evening Mail, 27 October 1990). These operations
were prompted by public complaints about the nuisance caused by street prostitutes
and kerb-crawlers in the area (with noise and litter as the most frequently cited
problems), and although these complaints may have been legitimate, it appears that
they were provoked by a more deep-rooted moral anxiety about the presence of
prostitutes on the streets. In short, it appears that public apprehensions about drugs,
environmental degradation and crime were interlocuted onto the stigmatised figure of
the street prostitute, and that prostitutes were mistakenly scapegoated as a cause,
rather than a symptom, of the economic, social and environmental problems which
afflict marginal red-light districts. Ultimately this concern led to the organisation of
community pickets by a ' neighbourhood-watch ' type group, Balsall Heath Street
Watch, which has sought to drive prostitutes from the area by imposing new
constraints on access to the public realm.
Despite attempts by such groups to redefine the moral geography of the city by
relocating street prostitution, the trend for the ' ghettoisation ' of prostitution,
whereby authorities are seemingly content to see street prostitution restricted to
marginal areas, continues to have profound implications for prostitutes' health and
safety (as well as their self-identity as a criminalised and stigmatised group). Based
on a survey of 115 prostitutes in Balsall Heath, 48% of whom worked predominantly
off-street, Kinnell (1993) found that out of 211 separate acts of violence reported by
the women (including serious assault, burglary, kidnap and rape), 178 had occurred
on the street. On the basis of this evidence, she concluded that:

The physical location of the prostitute appears to affect her exposure to rape and
other forms of violence very strongly . . . neither the location of street soliciting in
residential areas, nor the ubiquitous presence of the police serves to protect
prostitutes from rape or other violence (Kinnell 1993, 11)

One implication from this is that the most effective way to improve the working
conditions of prostitutes would be to facilitate their working in safer, presumably
off-street, locations. Nonetheless, current legislation, by effectively criminalising
prostitutes, increasing their stigmatisation and restricting their location to marginal
areas, seems only to heighten their vulnerability to violence and exploitation. Indeed,
an announcement by British Telecom that they will block the lines of prostitutes
who place calling cards in telephone boxes may result in a further increase in the
number of sex workers forced to ply their trade on the streets (The Guardian
21 August 1996).

Prostitution laws: directions for change.

The arbitrary way in which prostitution is policed in red-light districts has exposed
the extent to which current prostitution laws are outmoded, cumbersome and
difficult to implement. It is clear that they are not reducing the nuisances claimed to
be experienced by residents of red-light districts and are failing to provide adequate
protection for prostitutes (Roberts 1992; O'Neill 1996). Furthermore, since the

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 Red-light districts and Toleration Zones 137

introduction of the 1982 Criminal Justice Act, when imprisonment of convicted

street prostitutes was replaced with a system of fines, many prostitutes have been
caught in a vicious circle of arrests and fines as they continue soliciting for trade to
pay off fines (Edwards 1987).7 Moreover, the red-light residents in whose interest
such acts have been enforced have never had to substantiate their allegations of
nuisance caused by prostitutes and their clients, leading Lopez-Jones (1990) to
suggest that the law assumes guilt on behalf of prostitutes on police evidence alone
without the need of corroboration. Remarkably, the possession of condoms is
commonly used by police as evidence to arrest women for loitering and soliciting
(Duncan 1994).
Despite the arguments for reform of prostitution legislation, the Home Office have
contended that the current powers are sufficient to deal effectively with a wide variety
of nuisances associated with prostitution. Rather than legal reform, the government
has asserted that technical solutions intended to ' design-out ' prostitution are more
effective in policing prostitution:

Police success has come when they have worked with local authorities to design
out prostitution through street lighting and traffic management designed to make
the area as unattractive as possible to prostitutes and their clients (MacLean cited
in Hansard 1994, column 289)

This type of solution, embracing the technocratic logic of New Right law and order
policies (see, for example, Fyfe and Bannister 1996 on CCTV surveillance), has been
subject to considerable scepticism. Although some criminologists have suggested that
prostitution is an opportunistic crime that can be ' designed ' out of existence (see
Matthews 1986 on the Finsbury Park initiative in the early 1980s), the overwhelming
consensus is that punitive policing and increased surveillance of red-light districts
merely serves to displace prostitutes to other areas (Lowman 1992b). With recent
community picketing of Balsall Heath in Birmingham, for example, prostitutes
moved to work different ' patches ' in other areas of the city, as well as further afield
in Coventry, Wolverhampton, Cardiff and Leicester where they are inevitably
working less familiar and thus more vulnerable areas. Similarly, expensive traffic
management measures in Bristol's red-light district designed to prevent kerb
crawling backfired when other crimes in the area rose: contradicting well-worn
popular stereotype that prostitution and other crimes go hand-in-hand, it appears
that the presence of prostitutes on the street actually serves to heighten surveillance,
and lowers crime rate (The Independent 4 January 1995).
Opposing such strategies are a growing number of campaigners, including the
prostitutes' union (the English Collective of Prostitutes), legal experts and even
some police officers, who support the liberalisation of prostitution laws. However,
there remains some disagreement as to whether the legalisation or decriminalisa
tion of prostitution would be the most appropriate solution. Citing the example of
Germany's state-run Eros Centres, supporters of legalised brothels claim that they
would cut down the incidence of child prostitution, provide a safer working
environment and eradicate street prostitution. It is argued that the state would
profit from the revenue from these brothels, whilst prostitutes would potentially
benefit from improved health checks and welfare support. However, the English
Collective of Prostitutes regard them as 'a form of state-regulated exploitation,
with the state taking the role of pimp' (cited in The Guardian 6 May 1995).

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 138 Hubbard

Although the English Collective of Prostitutes cannot be said to speak for all
prostitutes, and lacks significant representation outside London, most street
prostitutes in Birmingham seem similarly opposed to legalisation, claiming that the
payment of taxes would be little different from the soliciting fines that they have
to pay off in their current working situation (see also McKeganey and Barnard
1996). Legalised brothels have thus not necessarily proved popular with sex
workers in Europe-for example, it is estimated that there are about 3,200
clandestine (street) prostitutes to around 450 registered prostitutes operating in
Dusseldorf (Roberts 1992).
Instead, most prostitutes and prostitute support groups suggest that nothing short
of decriminalisation of all laws that prevent women working safely and legally would
provide an adequate response to the deficiencies of current prostitution laws.
Supporters of decriminalisation claim it would allow prostitute women to chose their
own working environment and practices, which, in most cases, would mean working
from their own homes or rented accommodation and advertising in contact
magazines without being charged with brothel-keeping, thus eradicating the need for
red-light districts which thrive on the visibility and notoriety of street soliciting
(Boyle 1994). However, as Benson and Matthews (1995, 44) suggest, it may be a
fallacy to suggest that the extension of off-street trade will substantially reduce the
level of street prostitution, as ' there is limited mobility between women who work in
off-street locations and those who work on the streets, as well as a significant
percentage of kerb-crawlers who would not visit massage parlours or saunas '. This
is certainly the case in Birmingham and other cities, where kerb-crawlers persist in
seeking street prostitutes despite authorities beginning to turn a blind eye to sex work
in saunas. It might also be supposed that, even considering the vulnerability of
working on the streets, there may always be women who choose to work there,
preferring the familiarity of street work ' culture ', where sex workers may form
long-lasting friendships and peer networks (McKeganey and Barnard 1996, 20). In
Balsall Heath, this included the provision of an informal creche, operated from one
of the houses used by the sex workers.
While the government has claimed it has no intention of decriminalising or
legalising activities connected to prostitution either ' as a matter of general appli
cation or in specific geographical areas' (MacLean cited in Hansard 1994, column
289), many local authorities in England and Wales (including Birmingham, Bristol
and Leicester) are currently exploring the idea of designating areas where street
prostitution would be selectively decriminalised. Supporters of ' Toleration Zones '
cite the scheme that has run successfully in Utrecht (Netherlands) since 1984,
where prostitutes are allowed to solicit in a designated area in an industrial sector
of the city, taking clients to a specially constructed and monitored 12-space car
park. However, the notion of an officially-designated toleration zone, in many
senses, appears to be little different to the unofficial toleration zones which
currently exist in British red-light districts, and the choice of an appropriate
location would clearly be fraught with difficulty. While the relocation of street
prostitutes from residential to industrial areas might reduce the nuisance caused by
persistent kerb-crawlers, such zones would need to be created with due regard to
the safety of workers themselves, with constant assistance and police support
available (Kinnell 1993). However, given the preceding arguments that the
stigmatisation of prostitute women has traditionally been reinforced by their spatial
exclusion, it is difficult to see how such ghettoisation of street prostitutes would
improve their marginal status.

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 Red-light districts and Toleration Zones 139

Conclusion
There is now a clear consensus that current British legislation relating to the
regulation of street prostitution requires urgent and comprehensive reform to protect
prostitutes from violence and exploitation, residents and the public from nuisance,
and to promote health care for all. It is also clear that whatever form that revision
might take, it will have important spatial implications, potentially transforming
geographies of prostitution. Given the history of the (punitive) regulation of
prostitution, it seems that without changing underlying social and economic
conditions, legal change makes little impact on the existence of prostitution, but
merely serves to change its spatial distribution. Although the extent to which
prostitutes' working practices are constrained by dominant moral geographies has
been largely neglected by researchers to date, this paper has attempted to suggest that
such issues are central to multi-agency debate about the future regulation of
prostitution, and consequently, that geographers have an important role to play in
such debates. Nonetheless, in contributing to such debates it would appear essential
that more than lip service is made to incorporating the ' voices ' of sex workers
themselves, in an attempt to understand the importance of exclusionary spatial
practices as they impinge on street prostitutes in their everyday lives, fraught as they
are with constant risks of abuse, harassment and sexual violence.

Notes
1 This concern was reiterated in a more recent report on prostitution in Bradford by the charity
Barnardos, which offered help to nearly 50 prostitutes aged 12 to 17 in 1995 (The Guardian 21 August
1996).
2 The legal situation is further confused in that a variety of other acts, including the 1824 Vagrancy Act,
1361 Justices of the Peace Act and various sections of the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, have also been used
to regulate street prostitution.
3 The number of women prosecuted for soliciting offences has actually fallen from a peak of 10,674 in
1983, whilst the figure for kerb-crawling has risen steadily from 628 in 1988 (Lopez-Jones 1990).
4 There were 45 prosecutions for living off immoral earnings in 1994 (Benson and Matthews 1995).
5 Information from unpublished police survey presented to Birmingham City Council working party on
prostitution, 1992.
6 This reputable scientific study received rather less publicity than the uncorroborated claim from the
Metropolitan police that three out of four of the ' regular ' prostitutes in the King's Cross area were
either HIV-infected or had AIDS (cited in The Sunday Telegraph 29 April 1992).
7 Prostitutes imprisoned for defaulting on fines constitute around 6% of the female prison population
(Edwards 1987).

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the English Collective of Prostitutes, the Home Office Statistical and Research Office and
Birmingham City Council for information supplied in conjunction with this paper. Thanks are also due
to David Bell, Jenny Agg, Rosie Cox and Keith Lilley for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

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