A number of dominant themes arise in this book. Each of the chapters has sought to analyse specific aspects of the UK's emerging prostitution policy and has done this through using both empirical and theoretical research. All of the authors have posed questions about how particular categories of individuals are constructed within the key documents that have shaped and given rise to the policies now in place and the legislation being proposed. Similarly, all of the authors have called into question not only the assumptions underpinning these documents and policies, but also the myths and misconceptions about what individuals in the sex industry ‘need’ or ‘want’. Taken together, these chapters provide a damning critique of New Labour's ‘coherent’ strategy on prostitution, and especially on the abolitionist objective and the strategy of ‘enforcement plus support’, in which welfare interventions are placed alongside criminal justice mechanisms. The chapters also challenge a number of all-too-easy assumptions:

• • that sex work somehow threatens community cohesion, safety and security;

• • that forcing drug-using sex workers to seek treatment for their drug use and misuse will lever them out of prostitution;

• • that men in sex work can (or should) be treated like women in sex work; and

• • that child protection methods of work are most appropriate for sexually exploited children and young people.

Notwithstanding the specific critiques contained in each chapter, as a whole this volume raises a number of questions on prostitution policy and its reform more generally. This chapter addresses some of these wider questions.

The battle over meanings

First among these wider questions is the question of how to critique or engage with policy in a field where the key signifier (that is, prostitution) is one which is both highly contested and, as argued in the Introduction, capable of signifying almost any type of social anxiety about sex, danger, violence and community destruction. One of the dominant themes running throughout the book is the dispute over meaning that is taking place between the individuals living with or engaging in prostitution (including sex workers, non-governmental organisation workers, local community members and residents of areas with a street-based sex-work scene), central government, academics and campaigners. Of course, this is not new. Contestation and challenge over the meanings of sex work have occurred for at least two millennia.