Community action and the displacement of street prostitution: Evidence from British cities

This paper focuses on recent community protests against female street prost itution in Birmingham and Bradford (UK), where groups of mainly South Asian male campaigners have succeeded in displacing soliciting and kerb-crawling from the inner city districts of Balsall Heath and Manningham respectively . Through an examination of the geopolitics of these community protests, an d their subsequent impacts on prostitute women, this paper seeks to examine why these residential groups identified prostitutes as a social problem an d consequently sought to remove them from their neighbourhood. Specifically drawing on both locational conflict theories and psychoanalytical ideas ab out 'difference' and exclusion, the paper suggests that this NIMBY ('not-in -my-back-yard') syndrome reflects a complex mixture of popular anxieties ab out prostitution which are connected to deep-rooted fears and fantasies abo ut commercial sex-work. In doing so, the paper documents how legal and soci al processes combine to shape geographies of prostitution, concluding that the regulation of prostitution serves to spatially marginalise sex workers without necessarily solving any of the problems associated with commercial sex work. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.