Emily St.Denny

Title: The gradual transformation of a weak but enduring regime: Contemporary French prostitution policy in transition (1946-2015) Abstract: Historically, states have tended to opt for one of three prostitution policy regimes: prohibition; regulation; or the abolition of state regulation with a view to providing social support to the individuals involved. This last approach is referred to as 'abolitionism'. This is the approach France has espoused since 1960. Nevertheless, while the state has remained committed to abolitionism, the policies and laws adopted in the context of this regime have varied considerably over the last fifty years. This coexistence of stability and change challenges current assumptions of how policy regimes such as the contemporary French abolitionist regime behave and evolve. This is because internal policy change suggests that the regime is weak, and weak regimes that experience strong political challenges are assumed to wither away or collapse. Consequently, this paper presents the historical case study of contemporary French prostitution policy, and seeks to explain how and why this policy regime has changed the way it has since World War II. In doing so, it describes the three phases that have contributed to the evolution of this policy area, from the emergence of a nascent sex workers' rights movement in the mid-1970s, to the introduction of a demand-side ban on prostitution in 2016. It argues that our current understanding of policy regimes' strength and durability is underdeveloped, and explains how strong commitment to policy ideas can help sustain and otherwise weak or ineffective policy regime.

Unlike academic and policy discussions over enduring and pervasive social problems like poverty or ill health, which focus on how they should be tackled, debates concerning individuals in prostitution are divided over how, and to what extent, prostitution even is a problem. This has led to apparently intractable disagreement over the legitimate representation of a subject at the juncture between vulnerable invisibility and liberated agency.  Concretely, this raises a paradox whereby  feminist researchers, seeking to  facilitate emancipation through the illumination of the experiences of a stigmatised and invisible subject, must  carefully  give  voice  to  the  voiceless without speaking on their behalf. Drawing on contemporary feminist scholarship on prostitution, this essay argues that, to begin resolving this paradox, the field must explicitly engage with the underlying epistemological and methodological implications of conducting emancipatory social science research on prostitution. The essay concludes that, in order to contribute meaningfully to the feminist research agenda on prostitution, practitioners must  acknowledge the inherently political nature of emancipation, as the expression of choice and power.

Despite the primacy of the abolitionist policy regime, adopted in 1960 and which is centred on concerns about the wellbeing of the “victims” of prostitution, contemporary French prostitution policy has sustained a variety of inconsistent policies. Alone, these reforms have not threatened the established abolitionist regime. Together, though, they amount to a cumulative transformation of what French abolitionism stands for. This challenges traditional conceptions of significant institutional and paradigmatic change as predicated on critical junctures. This paper therefore argues that understanding the manner in which policy actors, seeking to further their preferred policy options, garner legitimacy and support for their project within established institutional frameworks requires analysing the interplay between the constraining effect of institutions and the creative and constituting effect of strategic framing. Presenting evidence from the preliminary process tracing of recent two policy reform projects, this paper consequently suggests that framing prostitution policy proposals as compliant with the dominant ideational framework is necessary but insufficient to guarantee reform success. Drawing on ideational and institutional policy theory, the paper concludes that, by virtue of the continuously (re)constructed and negotiated nature of dominant ideational frameworks, the abolitionist paradigm is rendered capable of housing an inconsistent variety of policies through the strategic framing of policy options.

In April 2011 the French information mission on prostitution called for the implementation of a policy of client criminalization inspired by the 1998 Swedish law. However, despite presenting a “Swedish model” of prostitution policy as a new and desirable alternative, the same policy actors had in fact made a previous unsuccessful attempt to bring about client criminalization almost a decade earlier in which they had criticized the Swedish version of this law. In light of this, traditional approaches to policy diffusion predicated on the inherent worthiness of ideas and norms cannot adequately account for such a strategic repackaging of a previously rejected idea. Therefore, drawing from the diverse literature on policy change, policy learning and diffusion, this paper deploys an ideational approach to account for the reemergence of a debate over client criminalization in France. This paper argues that domestic actors seeking to remove the constraints on reform posed by path dependency and uncertainty can strategically use knowledge and ideas gleaned from abroad, and the reference to successful foreign models, in a bid to generate credibility and legitimacy for their preferred ideas. In particular, evidence from the comparison of the two policies suggests that during windows of opportunity offered by the collapse of a current policy, such ideas can serve as the basis for a new ideational consensus around which to consolidate a policy coalition.

On April 13th 2011, the French Parliamentary Information Commission on prostitution called for the implementation of a demand-side ban on prostitution inspired by the 1998 pioneering Swedish law. The report was almost immediately used as the basis for several law and policy proposals that, if enacted, could represent one of the most significant shifts from France’s two-pillared abolitionist system adopted over 50 years before. Yet, what is now being presented as a novel approach to an old problem is in fact the outcome of an ideational Cinderella story: an idea once jettisoned for its purported weakness has subsequently been skilfully repackaged and presented as this year’s hottest policy import. This article provides a brief overview of this development in French prostitution policy and argues that they stem from a wider project centred on the redefinition of French abolitionism.

On December 6th 2011, French parliamentary deputies unanimously approved a non-binding motion reaffirming the country’s abolitionist position in matters of prostitution. This is the first step in a plan to institute a policy of client criminalization inspired by the pioneering 1998 Swedish law. This debate has been driven by an unwavering political commitment to abolitionism but risks yet being undermined by conflicting views over the specific form future French prostitution policy should take. Indeed, whilst the political position of France regarding prostitution has been reiterated and clarified, whether or not the current abolitionist project will be successfully used as a platform to criminalize clients remains to be seen.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina affected the entire population, but none as extensively as non-Serb males. At the end of the conflict, these individuals accounted for over 65% of total conflict deaths. This postgraduate dissertation departs from an overview of the literature on wartime anti-male violence in order to investigate the forms and functions of this phenomenon. It argues that historical constructions of masculinity in Yugoslavia opened men up to gender-specific vulnerabilities during conflict. Special attention is paid to the causes and implications of the normative exclusion of men from the category of protected civilian. Finally, these insights are applied to the case of Northwest Bosnia in order to test the extent to which anti-male violence was embedded within an official system of abuse, and to understand why this may have been the case.