Regulating Sex/Work: From Crime Control to Neo-liberalism? addresses the rise in sexual commerce and consumption by challenging traditional responses and offering a fresh approach to sex industry regulation.

1. Introduction: The Changing Social and Legal Context of Sexual Commerce: Why Regulation Matters (Jane Scoular and Teela Sanders).

2. What's Law Got To Do With It? How and Why Law Matters in the Regulation of Sex Work (Jane Scoular).

3. Mainstreaming the Sex Industry: Economic Inclusion and Social Ambivalence (Barbara G. Brents and Teela Sanders).

4. The Movement to Criminalise Sex Work in the United States (Ronald Weitzer).

5. When (Some) Prostitution is Legal: The Impact of Law Reform on Sex Work in Australia (Barbara Sullivan).

6. Labours in Vice or Virtue? Neo-Liberalism, Sexual Commerce, and the Case of Indian Bar Dancing (Prabha Kotiswaran).

7. Male Sex Work: Exploring Regulation in England and Wales (Mary Whowell).

8. Bellwether Citizens: The Regulation of Male Clients of Sex Workers (Belinda Brooks-Gordon).

9. Extreme Concern: Regulating `Dangerous Pictures' in the United Kingdom (Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith).

10. Consuming Sex: Socio-legal Shifts in the Space and Place of Sex Shops (Baptiste Coulmont and Phil Hubbard).

11. Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research (PAR) (Maggie O'Neill).

Recent years have borne witness to an unprecedented rise in - and an increased visibility of - sexual commerce and consumption, with a corresponding growth in associated forms of regulation. Regulating Sex/Work: From Crime Control to Neo-liberalism? works on addressing these trends by challenging the traditional responses and offering a fresh approach to sex industry regulation. By documenting changes in regulations relating to a range of sex markets from the UK, France, USA, Australia, and India, this volume reveals an apparent paradox: that the increase in oppressive and punitive approaches to regulating the sex industry comes at a time when evidence suggests that the supply and demand that fuels the sex markets, the diversification of sex markets, and their embedded nature in socioeconomic infrastructures is more intense than ever.

Each chapter in this book addresses contemporary empirical examples of the regulation of the sex industry in a specific country and reveals theoretical connections between the implications of regulation and sexuality, gender and control. While many common themes run throughout the collection, consideration of the wide diversity of sex markets challenges traditional academic concentration on narrow forms of prostitution and allows for a more complex portrait of sex industry regulation to emerge.