FRC member, Carlotta Rigotti, published her paper Prostituzione e diritto: alcune riflessioni sui modelli legislativi europei (Prostitution and law: considerations about contemporary legal frameworks across the European Union) in the special issue of MicroMega no. 6/2020.
By representing a major ideological target for policy makers and scholars, prostitution has often been a thorny issue to analyse. Accordingly, relating legal discourses tend to be extremely polarised in their theoretical premises and usually rely on the conflicting dichotomy between prostitution ‘as violence’ and ‘a job like another’. To date, whilst the European Union refrains from including ‘the oldest profession in the world’ in its Strategic Engagement for Gender Equality, Member States are reflecting such dualistic paradigm by means of prohibitionism (where all parties involved in the provision of sexual performances are liable), neo-prohibitionism (where criminalisation is merely addressed to the client), abolitionism (where all the ancillary activities are prosecuted) and neo-regolamentarism (where prostitution is legalised and regulated by law). Against this background, the paper will seek to understand to what extent the legal reasonings behind these frameworks are divergent and whether the legal solutions in force are suitable and effective within the multi-faced realm of prostitution. To this end, the author will carry out a comparative analysis, while focusing on the legal systems of Croatia, Italy, France and Germany.