A STUDY OF THE CAUSES OF PROSTITUTION, ESPECIALLY 

 CONCERNING HEREDITARY FACTORS 



TAGE KEMP 



University of Copenhagen, Denmark 



Prostitution and the causes of prostitution have been the subject of 

 numerous scientific investigations. Several extensive surveys have been 

 written on this subject, as for instance, "Die Prostitution," by Iwan Bloch, 

 "Prostitution in Europe," by Abraham Flexner, and "Prostitution in the 

 United States," by Howard Woolston; besides, many extensive and impor- 

 tant papers on social-hygienic, criminal-biological and psychiatric investiga- 

 tions of this question have appeared both in Europe and America. 



All agree that the causes, which result in women becoming prostitutes, 

 are very complex; it is not possible to single out a few factors to which we 

 can point as predominantly causative, and from different points of view, 

 thorough investigations on the different strata of prostitution in different 

 countries and cities are still required. 



The conception of prostitution is also subject to rapid changes in the 

 course of time, as it always depends on the actual social order and on the 

 generally prevailing ethical standard. In a communistic state, prostitution 

 will be of a nature differing from that practised in a capitalistic country, 

 and as soon as the ideas of marriage and sex-moral on the whole are modified, 

 as has been witnessed not least during the last decades, prostitution will 

 also be looked upon in a different manner. However, there will under all 

 circumstances remain a difference between marriage and free-love on the 

 one hand and commercialised prostitution on the other hand. 



The investigation, which will be discussed in the following, was carried 

 out in Copenhagen from 1931 to 1932 in cooperation with the morals police, 

 whose chief is police superintendent Schepelern-Larsen, and it is the first 

 time that such a research has been made in Denmark. 



Of special factors, which may be supposed to affect the character of prosti- 

 tution in Denmark, can be mentioned that the population is fairly homo- 

 geneous, the rural population amounting to about half of it, and that there 

 is but one really great city, Copenhagen, with about three-quarter million 

 of inhabitants; the social differences are not so great as in most other coun- 



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