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 a European regulationist consensus based on a common ideology. 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: in Germany, the regulations only applied to transactional sexual relations that had been proven, while in Austria a mere suspicion was sufficient.
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.
