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In this chapter, I analyse the social profiles of real prostitutes over the past four hundred years. However, gender has not been taken into consideration here, and male prostitutes are not integrated into the analysis. The main aim of this undertaking is to determine if female prostitutes form a distinct group within society or not.
To that end, I analyse whether certain populations are overrepresented in the sex industry and if their profiles can explain why they turned to prostitution, whether voluntarily or otherwise. Profiling is not a new approach. The first is related to the available data. Registration lists, for instance, only include the names of legal prostitutes, while criminal statistics only contain data on those prosecuted.
All sources reflect the attitudes of the socio-political climate in which they originated and are thus unique, yet there are some common characteristics.
