Preventing what? Preventing how? The development of contemporary preventive policy aimed at prostitution in the UK. Emily St.Denny and Paul Cairney University of Stirling Stirling FK8 4LA
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[email protected] Abstract With the potential to both cut public spending in the long term and to enable people to live better, longer, healthier lives, prevention is increasingly becoming a government priority in the UK. In particular, the Scottish Government has decided that a ‘decisive shift towards prevention’ would form one of the four pillars of its public service reform strategy. This move to prevention is presented as a holistic and integrated transformation of the way in which public services are developed and delivered predicated on shifting focus and resources away from short-term, reactive and acute services towards longer-term health, wealth and wellbeing goals. Yet questions remain around the development and implementation of prevention policy on the ground. Vagueness regarding prevention’s meaning, and how it is understood, is further compounded by the difficulties involved in articulating and delivering prevention in different policy fields. Thus, while there is relatively little divergence on the broad strategies for tackling child poverty or cases of smoking-related cancer, the prevention of other negative social outcomes is not necessarily as straightforward. This paper uses the development of contemporary prostitution policy across the UK as a lens through which to explore what happens when policy actors fail to agree on what exactly the problem to be prevented is. The varying manner in which ‘prevention’ is understood, implemented and evaluated across regions and levels of government in the UK is analyzed by means of a comparative case study of preventive policy on the issue of prostitution across Scotland, and the rest of the UK.