From prostitution assumed only to be female was regulated in Europe, but it was tolerated as it was deemed necessary for male sexuality. The system of regulationism, accused in the s of iniquity by the abolitionist movement, was then called into question by the development of a White Slave Trade involving innocent victims. Addressed by international organisations the League of Nations and United Nations the issue became topical again in the second half of the twentieth century owing to the influx of prostitutes from Eastern Europe.
The European Union attempted to respond to the challenge posed by what was now described as human trafficking, but respected the diversity of national policies towards prostitutes and the potential normalisation of prostitutes as sex workers. Even before this expansion, the desire of states to control prostitution led to the spread of systems of state regulation throughout Europe after their first introduction in France in European regulationism varied from place to place according to the prioritisation of objectives public health, morals, policing , the distribution of authority national, regional, municipal and its basis in legislation, which was usually lacking apart from in a few exceptional cases Belgian municipal law of , Hungarian national laws of and There were even differences in the way prostitution was identified: Nevertheless, the similarities tended to outweigh the differences, evidence that the management of prostitution was shaped by a common ideology: It rested on four elements upon which all agreed.
Firstly, nineteenth century Europe accepted prostitution. According to the vocabulary of the time, Europe was not, therefore, prohibitionist, because prostitution was considered necessary. This claim was based, secondly, on a shared understanding of masculinity. Male sexuality, it was argued, had to be satisfied in the name of physical and mental equilibrium.
Resorting to prostitution was viewed, moreover, as part of the process by which masculinity was learned or acquired, and was therefore also a feature of male sociability. Attitudes varied from judging prostitution a necessary evil to considering it an absolute evil, a notion more common in Northern Europe. Such diversity is reflected in a veritable Europe-wide lexicon of prostitution. Representing prostitution in this way inferred that the clientβthough certainly reverting to a state of nature or to uncontrollable urgesβwas never called into question, and rarely even named.
It was claimed that male sexuality could not be repressed and, if left unsatisfied, could overflow causing social unrest. A desire to combat this was the third element on which European support for regulationism was based. Indeed, this system was viewed as a guarantor of law and order closely linked to moral order, and above all a guarantor of public health at a time when hygiene was becoming an essential preoccupation, even an obsession, among the authorities and the well-to-do classes out of a fear of the spread of syphilis.
