Prostitution in Algeria is illegal under Article 343 (Ordinance of 17 June 1975) of the Algerian Penal Code.Penal Code of Algeria. This article also prohibits the use of prostitution services, pimping, living with a prostitute, soliciting, and forcing others into prostitution.
According to the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (OFPRA), until 2011, there were 19 brothels under police control out of the 171 that had previously existed in Algeria during the French colonial period, as was the case in Tunisia.
Despite the de jure prohibition by the Algerian Penal Code, clandestine prostitution exists in contemporary Algerian society. Men are also involved in homosexual and heterosexual prostitution..
History Ottoman rule During Ottoman rule, prostitution was tolerated and regulated.
A class of prostituted women was established in order to serve the celibate corps of janissaries sent to Algeria after the Ottoman occupation in the 16th century, mostly composed of Black (usually slave) women who had left their enslavers.Lazreg, M. (2014). The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. Storbritannien: Taylor & Francis. p.23
An official called the Mezouar was in charge of regulating prostitution. This official was always a Moor. The position was lucrative, as he collected a monthly levy per prostitute. He kept a register of prostitutes, and the women were not allowed to leave the brothels and public baths they worked in. A request for a prostitute was processed by the official, who authorized the prostitute to make an appointment and then taxed the fee for state revenue; however, prostitutes selected to serve ethnic Ottoman Turks were exempted from taxation. Any free Algerian woman, including a prostitute, could be killed by drowning if she violated the law by having sex with a European male slave.
Prostitution was also connected to slavery in Algeria. The Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution. However, since the principle of concubinage in Islam in Islamic Law allowed a man to have sexual intercourse with his female slave, prostitution in the Islamic world was commonly practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who was then allowed to have sex with her as her new owner; the client would then cancel his purchase and return the slave to her pimp on the pretext of discontent, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world.B. Belli, "Registered female prostitution in the Ottoman Empire (1876-1909)," Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2020. p 56
Prior to the French takeover in 1830, it was estimated that there were 300 to 500 prostitutes in Algiers. The women were Moorish, Arab, and sub-Saharan Africans. Jews were not permitted to become prostitutes.
French rule
After French colonization in 1830, the French authorities introduced regulatory prostitution to try to prevent the spread of STIs. The regulation system was based on the Ottoman regulations that were previously in place, and the Mezouar was retained, although he had to pay an annual fee of 2,046 francs. Compulsory medical examinations for prostitutes were introduced by decree in July 1830. The main articles of the decree read:
"We, Civil Intendant of French possessions in North Africa; Having regard to Articles 10 and 46 of Title I of the Law of 19–27 July 1791, considering that experience has made it necessary to revise the regulations in force concerning public girls; have stopped and stop the following: Art. 1. Any girl known to be engaged in prostitution shall be registered by the Commissioner of Police, Head of the Central Office, in a register kept for that purpose in the said office. Art. 6. As of 1 October, all public women will be required to be visited twice a month and at intervals of fifteen days to have their state of health ascertained. Art. 7. This visit will take place at the clinic. However, public women who wish to be visited at home may obtain the faculty by paying an extraordinary fee of 3 francs per visit, as a fee, in favor of the doctor. Art. 11. The public girls visited at the clinic and recognized as suffering from venereal diseases will be held in this establishment for immediate treatment. As for those who would be visited in their homes and who would be in the same situation, they will be taken to the dispensary by the Police Commissioner. Art. 12. To meet the expenses which will result from both the visit and the treatment of the public wives, it will be paid for and by each of these women, at the time of the visit, a remuneration of 5 francs, or 10 francs a month. Art. 22. No public girl will be able to leave the city to visit the surrounding tribes without the written permission of the Police Commissioner, head of the Central Office; the same permission will be required to go to the feasts that are given either in the interior or outside the city. Art. 24. The remuneration to be paid for each of the girls whose application will be made remains fixed, for the exterior, at 10 francs, and for the interior, at 5 francs."
In spite of the regulations, there were women who worked on the streets illegally. As there was no longer a prohibition for Jewish women, some turned to prostitution.
+ Number of registered prostitutes and their ethnicity in Algiers by year(data from the dispensary of Algiers) 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 Indigenous 254 257 254 299 282 203 181 183 248 170 European (Non-French) 63 67 91 95 97 93 77 90 89 60 French 31 34 44 51 70 107 78 82 113 81 Jewish 27 38 37 43 38 26 28 22 19 12 Black 0 17 20 19 23 22 23 24 24 16 Total 375 413 446 512 510 441 387 395 479 342
Brothels were established in all the main garrison towns, generally in the Muslim quarters so as not to offend the European residents. In 1942, the morality police recorded 46 brothels, 79 hotels, 600 furnished apartments, and a hundred clandestine houses used for prostitution in Algiers alone. These numbers remained about the same until independence in 1962.
Ouled Naïl
Scholars further situate such representations within a broader colonial and orientalist sexual imaginary that cast "the Orient"—and particularly Arab and Muslim societies—as spaces of heightened sensuality, harems and readily available women, thereby naturalising the idea that non-European women were exceptionally erotic and accessible to Western men.Edward W. Said, Orientalism, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.Thisaranie Herath, "Women and Orientalism: 19th Century Representations of the Harem by European Female Travellers and Ottoman Women", Constellations, vol. 6, no. 2, 2015. Malek Alloula has shown how early twentieth-century French picture postcards of "Algerian" women, often staged in pseudo-harems and posed for a metropolitan male gaze, produced a "colonial harem" that owed more to European fantasy than to Algerian domestic realities.Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Christelle Taraud's studies of colonial prostitution and of "Mauresques" in photography, together with Marnia Lazreg's work on Algerian women, demonstrate how eroticised images of North African women circulated alongside regulatory systems of sex work, turning Arab and Berber women into symbols of imperial domination and into commodities in a racialised sexual marketplace.Christelle Taraud, Mauresques. Femmes orientales dans la photographie coloniale (1860–1910), Paris: Albin Michel, 2003. This wider pattern of colonial "sexual romanticism" about the Arab and Muslim East helped popularise stock figures such as the Ouled Naïl dancer-courtesan in travel writing, painting and tourism, often with little relation to the actual diversity of women’s lives in Algerian society.
Some historians claim that some women from the Ouled Naïl tribal confederation, an Arab, Hilali-descended, Arabic-speaking pastoral group from the highlands of central Algeria, became well known in the colonial period as dancers and entertainers in towns such as Biskra and Bou Saâda; many of those who entered this milieu appear in the sources as socially marginal women, effectively detached from their tribal communities and male kin, including runaways, repudiated wives, urban migrants and, in some cases, former slaves or other dependants.Barkahoum Ferhati, "La danseuse prostituée dite ‘Ouled Naïl’, entre mythe et réalité (1830–1962). Des rapports sociaux et des pratiques concrètes," Clio. Histoire, femmes et sociétés, no. 17, 2003, pp. 101–113.Barkahoum Ferhati, Lecture d’histoire sociale de la prostitution en Algérie: le cas de la prostitution dite « Ouled Naïl » de Bou-Saâda (1830–1962), PhD thesis, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, 2002.Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question, New York/London: Routledge, 1994.Christelle Taraud, La prostitution coloniale: Algérie, Tunisie, Maroc (1830–1962), Paris: Payot, 2003.Imen Bennai, Entre récits et réalité: The French Narrative Construction and Representation of the Nailiyat in Algeria (1830–1962), PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2022. Recent historical and feminist studies argue that their position cannot be reduced either to “dancers only” or equated in a simple way with prostitution: their work combined paid performance and hospitality with, in some cases, sexual relationships organised as long-term patronage or concubinage rather than per-act commercial sex work.Willy Jansen, Women Without Men: Gender and Marginality in an Algerian Town, Leiden: Brill, 1987.
When the French authorities imposed a system of regulated prostitution, many of these performers were registered as filles publiques and concentrated in tolerated quarters, fixing an association between the name “Ouled Naïl” and prostitution in colonial administrative and popular discourse.Melissa Hope Ditmore (ed.), Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work, Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006. Travel accounts and visual sources describe their elaborate dress and jewellery, while later tourist literature accentuated a more eroticised and spectacular image of these dancers, a change often interpreted as a product of colonial economies of spectacle rather than an original tribal custom.For Ted Shawn and Western representations, see discussions in dance-history scholarship and secondary accounts that quote his descriptions of Ouled Naïl dancers; e.g. Andrea Deagon, "Dancing for Dowries, Part 2," The Gilded Serpent, 2009, drawing on Marnia Lazreg, The Eloquence of Silence.
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term Nailiya (from Ouled Naïl) could designate a registered prostitute irrespective of actual tribal origin, and streets or red-light districts named Rue des Ouled Naïl functioned as centres of regulated sex work in towns such as Biskra and Bou Saâda. Archival and military sources further indicate that some North African women – frequently labelled “Ouled Naïl” in French military slang, whether or not they belonged genealogically to the confederation – were recruited or coerced to work in bordels militaires de campagne in Algeria and Indochina, including at Điện Biên Phủ; many of the Nailiyat involved were socially marginal women effectively detached from male kin authority, such as widows, repudiated wives, migrants and, in some cases, former slaves or other dependants.Bernard B. Fall, Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina, London: Odhams, 1961.See, for example, François Reynaert, "Dans les bordels de l’armée française," Le Nouvel Observateur, 3 May 2014; and Christian Benoît, "L’armée a fermé son dernier bordel en 1995," Guerres & Histoire, 13 June 2013.
Rahbat al-Jammal