Sex, Crime and the City: Municipal Law and the Regulation of Sexual Entertainment

Striptease venues have been the subject of considerable public debate following the emergence of highly visible 'lap dancing' clubs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Accused of promoting forms of criminality and nuisance, the state and the law has nonetheless stopped short of banning such venues in England and Wales, with Section 27 of the Policing and Crime Act 2009 allowing for regulation through locally devolved systems of licensing. This article accordingly analyses the licensing of sexual entertainment venues (SEVs) enacted at the local level and demonstrates how the deployment of these local powers is capable of removing such businesses from select cities simply on the basis that they are 'out of place'. Given this is a form of spatial regulation against which there is little legal recourse, the article highlights the particular role played by municipal law in the regulation of sexuality, stressing the growing importance of environmental, planning and licensing law - as opposed to criminal law - as a means of regulating sexual conduct. © The Author(s) 2012.