Schmölder[373] has shown beyond dispute that the compulsory inscription of prostitutes, introduced from France, is in our country an utterly illegal measure, arbitrarily enforced by the police. It has been amply proved that this illegal compulsory inscription has actually made prostitutes of many girls who had no inclination to permanent professional prostitution; that this method produces artificial prostitutes. What errors of judgment, what abuses of power, occur on the part of the police, in connexion with this compulsory inscription! How often does the inscription result from a denunciation made on grounds of private spite! The “Committee of Fifteen,” constituted for the study of prostitution in New York, declares in its report:
“Men with political insight are of opinion that every limitation of the freedom of the individual is in itself an evil, and that such a limitation can only be justified in cases in which the good derived from the infringement can really be estimated at a very high valuation. A system which permits the police, simply on grounds of suspicion, to arrest a citizen, to submit him to an injurious examination, only with the aim of discovering a disease he is suspected to have, and then to put him into prison, on the suspicion that he might have indulged in immoral intercourse if he had been left at liberty, cannot possibly be regarded as harmonizing with the principles of personal freedom.”[374]
Blaschko and Fiaux have proved that regulation concerns only a small fraction of prostitutes, usually the older ones; whereas the beginners, who are precisely those most dangerous in respect of venereal infection, and, further, the army of secret prostitutes, half prostitutes, occasional prostitutes, and the half-world, remain free from regulation—are probably left free deliberately—and anyhow could not possibly be supervised, on account of the enormous cost of supervision. In Berlin, speaking generally, only one-fifth part of the girls arrested are subjected to regulation, four-fifths are simply “warned and discharged”; and even of this fifth part, in reality a large percentage does not come under control because “escape from the lists” renders permanent observation impossible. Fiaux proves that more than 50 % of the medical examinations which ought to have been made on the 4,000 women under regulation in Berlin during the years 1888 to 1901, were in fact neglected.[375]
It is certain that regulated prostitution is more dangerous from the point of view of public health than free prostitution. The prostitute remaining under surveillance is in constant fear of compulsory treatment in the lock hospital, and therefore endeavours to conceal her illness as long as possible, or temporarily to avoid medical examination altogether. The free prostitute has a personal interest in becoming well again as soon as possible, and generally goes voluntarily and at once to seek treatment from a physician. Thus it happens that, among the regulated prostitutes, the number of those infected appears surprisingly small. In addition, we have to consider the inadequacy of the medical examination, because the number of the physicians and the time assigned to them are too small. And whilst it appears to be a fact that every third prostitute is infected with gonorrhœa, in Berlin, during the year 1889, as the result of official examination under regulation, only one prostitute in 200 was declared infected, and in 1884 only 1 in 1,873. Moreover, very many infected prostitutes under compulsory medical treatment are, as Blaschko proves, allowed to resume their professional occupation in an uncured state, and to diffuse their illness freely once more. The figures given by Blaschko speak very clearly on this point:
| Place. | Date. | Annual Percentage of Prostitutes attacked by Syphilis. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regulated. | Free. | ||
| Paris | 1878-1887 | 12·2 | 7·0 |
| Brussels | 1887-1889 | 25·0 | 9·0 |
| St. Petersburg | 1890 | 33·5 | 12·0 |
| Antwerp | 1882-1884 | 51·3 | 7·7 |
From this it is clear that the abolition of the regulation of prostitutes will not have an unfavourable, but, on the contrary, will have a thoroughly favourable, influence in respect of the frequency of venereal diseases. The conditions in England and Norway show this very clearly. In Christiania, after the abolition of regulation in the year 1888, syphilis declined in frequency—in the first place, because the number of girls who applied for treatment increased, whilst prior to the abolition of regulation they had concealed their illness in order to avoid falling into the hands of the police; and in the second place, because now the fear of venereal infection kept many young men from having intercourse with prostitutes, whereas previously they had erroneously believed that the “control” would free them from the danger of venereal infection. The same was the case in London, where there is no regulation; the frequency of venereal disease has decreased because young men now avoid intercourse with prostitutes as much as possible. In France, the country in which regulation was first introduced, the commission formed for the study of prostitution came to the conclusion that “regulation of prostitutes should be abolished.” The principal reason for which the police continue to advocate the preservation of the system of regulation—namely, that they have an interest in the matter on account of the intimate connexion between many prostitutes and criminality—will not bear examination. It is true enough that soutenage[376] is inseparable from prostitution. Moreover, the world of criminals is very near to prostitution, in the first place, because the prostitute also has need of a man on whom she can lean, who can be something to her from the personal point of view, to whom she is not simply a chattel;[377] and, in the second place, because the prostitute is, like the criminal, despised and defamed—she shares with the criminal the pariah nature. Lombroso’s doctrine that prostitution is throughout equivalent to criminality is certainly not justified. It is only by the outward circumstances of their life that the bulk of prostitutes are driven into intimate relations with criminality. And among these outward circumstances, regulation, and the expulsion of prostitutes from honourable society (which is a necessary part of regulation) play the principal rôle! For this reason, if for this reason alone, regulation must be abolished, because then a strong supplement to criminality from the circles of prostitution would be cut off.
Even before investigators had become convinced of the uselessness and danger of regulation the cry arose: “Away with the brothels!” We have already alluded to the continuous decline in the number of brothels in all large towns. In 1841 there were in Paris still 235 brothels (to 1,200,000 inhabitants); in 1900 there were only 48 brothels (to 3,600,000 inhabitants); and for St. Petersburg and other large towns a similar decline in the number of brothels can be established, notwithstanding the fact that everywhere the population has markedly increased. This proves that the brothels no longer correspond to any real need.[378] At the present day, owing to the great development of intercourse in modern times, brothels are a public calamity; they bring the quarter of the town in which they exist into disrepute, and deprive the neighbourhood of its proper monetary value. Moreover, the time is past for slave-holding on the part of the brothel-owner. The existence of brothels favours the traffic in girls (the “White Slave Trade”), encourages sexual perversities, and increases the diffusion of venereal diseases. The prostitute living in a brothel is sometimes compelled to have intercourse with ten or twelve men in a single day, and is thus pre-eminently exposed to venereal infection, all the more because she must admit the embraces of every man who pays the brothel-keeper money; whilst the prostitute living freely can at least refuse to have anything to do with a man who appears to her to be ill. According to Lecour, Mireur, Diday, and Sperk, prostitutes in brothels suffer from syphilis about three times as often as free prostitutes.[379]
Other modifications of brothel life, such as the so-called “controlled streets,”[380] the best known of which are in Bremen[381]—that is to say, streets closed to ordinary traffic, the houses of which are inhabited only by prostitutes under control, but the girls being in other respects free and not living under the domination of a brothel-keeper; also the “Kasernierung”[382] of prostitutes, their confinement to particular streets, or special “quarters” of the town (“Dirnenquartiere”)[383]—are all to be rejected on the same grounds.
The whole nature of brothel life, and the very serious dangers it involves, have been discussed in excellent works by E. von Düring,[384] Henriette Fürth,[385] Karl Nötzel,[386] and Martin Bruck.[387] They illumine the whole question, and provide sufficient grounds for the condemnation of brothels.
A few authors, however, continue to advocate the preservation of brothels, and some of these wish to enforce medical examination, not only of prostitutes, but also of their masculine clients. This proposition is made, for example, by Ernst Kromayer in his work, which, notwithstanding many Utopian ideas, is nevertheless very stimulating, “The Eradication of Syphilis,” pp. 67, 68 (Berlin, 1898). Von Düring, in his criticism of these ideas, rightly points out that this recommendation would be quite useless in practice, because, in the first place, only a small proportion of men visit brothels at all. In the second place, in the hurry in these resorts no proper examination could be undertaken. In the third place, the doctors who were to be appointed as a kind of medical porters to brothels, would not easily be found to accept such situations. Lassar, who answers this last criticism, is of opinion that the brothel-master, or anybody with a little experience, could easily undertake this examination in the case of men.[388]