Prostitution and the heavy silence of the law

Nowadays, prostitution is one of the most profitable businesses in the world. Since Iran, too, is not safe from the impairments of the crime, adopting preventing policies to restrain the epidemic of corruption and prostitution in the society and, hence, to prevent the deterioration of families seems necessary. From the viewpoint of criminology, penal law, and the Imamite Fiqh, the paper is to bring into consideration different faces of prostitution, including a semantic and historical study of prostitution in Iran, an analysis of the laws concerning prostitution before and after the Islamic Revolution, and the causes and aftermaths of prostitution. The results of the study show that not only is the term "prostitution" not defined by the Iranian penal law (and by the Islamic penal code, too), but the punishment of prostitutes is not also determined by the law, and as a result, judges in such cases consider it as adultery or anti-modesty crimes. However, investigations in the Shiite Fiqh, which is the basic doctrine of the Iranian penal law, show that "prostitution" and founding "brothels" under some circumstances can be proven to be cases of 'ifsad fi-al 'arz [corruption on the earth] and moharibah [enmity]. Thus, first the legal vacuum in this case should be removed, and after that legal measures should be enforced seriously along with cultural solutions.