Prostitutes, sex workers and honest citizens: politics of prostitution in the Czech Republic

After the frontiers were opened in 1989 and the law outlawing prostitution was abolished in 1990, the number of prostitutes grew massively in the Czech Republic. During the 1990s, prostitution was constructed by the most influential actors (experts and politicians) as an important social pathology, and the prostitutes, the pimps and the clients as foreigners, coming from abroad, or ethnically different – simply “the others”, not “us”. This construction lead to the polarisation of actors in the issue: the “us”, honest citizens, properly paying taxes and insurances and raising our children, and “them” – those who disturb the public order and abuse the health care and welfare system. The “them” category was not further deconstructed in the experts and politicians discourses – even though the knowledge of the differences between prostitution with and without consent was already available. The legislation then mirrored this division and concentrated only on the possibilities of preserving the public order and of raising the taxes from the sex business.

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