Police and prostitution in Yugoslavia: a nuanced relationship

The article aims to illustrate the attitudes of the police authorities towards prostitution in Yugoslavia between the two world wars. Drawing on press and archival sources, the article aims to investigate two main research questions: first, how and to what extent were Yugoslav authors part of inter- and transnational criminological debates; second, what were the approaches used by police officers when they had to react to complaints filed by private citizens, or to conduct investigations into alleged cases of commercial sex and/or immoral behaviour. The analysis of Policija, the most authoritative police periodical of the time, will show that police discourse about prostitution had interesting transnational features. The articles published in this police periodical were partly still under the influence of the older and internationally established criminological paradigm of Lombrosian origin, while at the same time developing a new consideration of socio-economic factors, assigning a new centrality to the asociality of the prostitute because of her ‘work-shyness’. Furthermore, an examination of police investigations will show the difficulties experienced by the police officers when confronted with the increasing number of borderline cases. Finally, the active contribution provided by ordinary citizens through lodging complaints suggests that we need to revise our understandings of dictatorship and social control in the first Yugoslavia. The analysis, thus, will show that the ‘national question’, generally at the core of historical interpretations of this Yugoslav period, actually played a marginal role in this field. Rather, it seems more useful to put this research issue in the framework of the social engineering projects which were developing in Yugoslavia and across the whole of Europe in those years.