By the late nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries a wide range of national legislation and local by-laws meant that the Scottish police had considerable powers to arrest those involved in prostitution. However, rather than prosecutions increasing due to this legislation, the number of arrests and convictions sharply declined after the First Word War. There are many possible reasons behind this decrease, but one of the most significant was down to how the police and magistrates in Edinburgh and Glasgow chose to implement the law on an everyday basis. This chapter will examine how police attitudes towards prostitution influenced the methods that were used to police different types of indoor and outdoor prostitution, and how this approach shaped the ways that individual men and women were treated under the law. The first half of the chapter will begin by examining the policing of street prostitution and the second half will explore the policing of brothels and ‘pimps’.

Policing Street Prostitution

Three key acts were used to police prostitution in Scotland during the early twentieth century. The most commonly used piece of legislation was the 1892 Burgh Police (Scotland) Act. Section 381, subsection 22, made it an offence for a ‘common prostitute or street walker’ to importune for the purposes of prostitution, and subsection 23 criminalised anyone who ‘habitually and persistently importunes or solicits, or loiters about for the purpose of importuning or soliciting women or children for immoral purposes’. In addition to this there were two main local by-laws. In Edinburgh this was the 1879 Municipal and Police Act which penalised the ‘“common prostitute” or “night walker” who loiters or importunes passengers for the purposes of prostitution in or near any street or court’. In Glasgow, the Glasgow Police (Further Powers) Act 1892 – section 18 stated that:

During the late nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century these laws resulted in a large number of arrests. However, the number of prosecutions declined drastically after the First World War. Table 2.1 shows that, whereas in 1908 there had been 3,192 proceedings against women for soliciting offences in Scotland, by 1918 there were only 460.