Prostitution in Turkey is legal and regulated. The secularization of Turkish society allowed prostitution to achieve legal status during the early 20th century.
State-run brothels , known as "general houses" genelevler , [ 1 ] receive permits from the government. The regulatory agencies also issue identity cards to sex workers that give them rights to some free medical care and other social services.
By the early s, the approximated number of registered prostitutes in Istanbul was 2, Throughout the years, an increasing number of women began to resort to prostitution as a means of financial income. Many women who resorted to prostitution did so due to being single mothers, homelessness, poverty, and to afford childcare services. During the era of slavery in the Ottoman Empire , prostitution was connected to slavery.
The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since the principle of concubinage in Islam in Islamic Law allowed a man to have intercourse with his female slave, prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who was allowed to have intercourse with her as her new owner, and who after intercourse returned his ownership of her to her pimp on the pretext of discontent, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world.
Prostitution of non-enslaved free people were prohibited in the Ottoman Empire, but there are legal cases of free Ottoman prostitute women brought before the legal courts who appear to have engaged in sex work on an individual basis. In the early s, there were about registered prostitutes in Istanbul.
