ABSTRACT
An appreciation of current legal and policing processes sheds considerable light on the way that the state attempts to construct boundaries between moral expressions of sexuality and immoral prostitution. However, it is useful - and perhaps essential - to look beyond overt expressions of state control to examine the processes of regulation and normalisation that lie outside the explicit sphere of the state and formal processes of the law. On another level, community campaigns designed to expel prostitutes from specific spaces also seem to be borne out of frustration with the police’s inability to successfully regulate prostitution and reduce its visibility. In the 1980s police crackdowns against street prostitution in the area did increase in response to public complaints, although many prostitute women responded by renting houses to work from on a more permanent basis. Perhaps most pervasive theme in discursive identification of prostitutes as immoral in Balsall Heath was the forging of a connection between prostitution and local crime.
