Regulation of the Sex Industry: Assumptions of Offence, Awareness and Impacts on Safety and Amenity

摘要: The state has often sought to regulate sex work on the basis of a variety of concerns, including that it is a form of gendered exploitation. 1 Those concerns have extended to the businesses in which sex work takes place, which some have argued represent a source of medico-moral impurity, embodying a threat to public health and hygiene. 2 Regulation also proceeds from the assumption that sex services premises promote crime, nuisance, and public disorder in their vicinity. 3 There is limited evidence about the nature and extent of the impacts of commercial sex premises: currently, there is a reliance on a small number of United States studies which have focused on ‘secondary effects’ which draw markedly different conclusions about the impacts of sex businesses in different cities. 4 Several of these studies have also been critiqued because of their reliance on realtor’s judgments of impacts on property price decline