An empirical examination of prostitution policies throughout feminist perspectives. The Swedish, German and Italian cases

For years, feminism has been questioning the symbolic and political significance of prostitution, without finding a unified consensus on the position to be taken with the phenomenon. Moreover, in recent years, the attention of the feminist and women’s movement has grown to legislative policies that governments undertake to regulate prostitution. In this research we have chosen to focus on three European countries, Germany, Sweden and Italy, as examples of three different political regimes, neo-regulation, neo-abolitionism/neo-prohibitionism and ’classic’ abolitionism. The research shows a growing ’globalization of feminist thinking’ which, on the one hand, has freed the range of possibilities to be considered in the management of prostitution from the limits of geographical partiality and, on the other hand, risks losing sight of the influence of specific factors in each country.