Ex p. Simms: Lessons for Litigation under the Human Rights Act

Prostitutes and popular history: notes on the ‘underworld’, 1918-1939

“…The law mediated social relations between prostitutes and the community, for as Philippa Levine observes, legislation dealing with offences associated with prostitution denied « women engaged in prostitution a separation between their private and public lives, because they insisted on maintaining an inappropriate and public persona » 81 . The question as to whether prostitutes were mainly part of the workingclass community, formed their own sub-culture, or were part of the criminal underworld has been analyzed by historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 82 . There is little reference to prostitutes' involvement with wider crimes.…”