Brothel
place where people may come to engage in sexual activity with a prostitute
A brothel, strumpet house, bordello, bawdy house, ranch, house of ill repute, house of ill fame, or whorehouse, is a place where people engage in sexual activity with prostitutes. For legal or cultural reasons, establishments often describe themselves as massage parlors, bars, strip clubs, body rub parlors, studios, or by some other description. Sex work in a brothel is considered safer than street prostitution.
Legal status
On 2 December 1949, the United Nations General Assembly approved the Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others. The convention came into effect on 25 July 1951 and by December 2013, had been ratified by 82 states. The convention seeks to combat prostitution, which it regards as "incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person". Parties to the convention agreed to abolish regulation of individual prostitutes and to ban brothels and procuring. Some countries not parties to the convention also ban prostitution or the operation of brothels.
Various United Nations commissions, however, have differing positions on the issue. For example, in 2012, a Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) convened by Ban Ki-moon and backed by United Nations Development Programme and UNAIDS, recommended decriminalization of brothels and procuring.
“Brothel” enters the record as place where people may come to engage in sexual activity with a prostitute. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brothel, place and where can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Brothel” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Brothel, place and where provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q131295. The Library of Congress control number is sh2005004145. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1951, 2013 and 2012.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brothel” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.