The victims of the Suffolk killer lost their lives in the most undignified way imaginable, yet in death, oddly, they have been allowed to retain their humanity. This is not how prostitutes, dead or alive, are usually treated in this country.

True, the word “prostitute” has been deployed too widely and too easily, almost as if that term was itself an explanation for such terrible events. Some newspapers have slipped into pejorative shorthand, such as “junkie vice girl”.

But for the most part, police and media have tried to treat the five murdered women as individuals, rather than emblems of immorality. The women have emerged as mothers, daughters, sisters, people with homes, and hopes, and problems both mundane and tragic. The deaths of these “fallen women” have been reported largely without moralising overtones, excessive prurience or the sly implication that drug-addicted street-walkers must be held, in some way, responsible for their own deaths. Suffolk police have admitted being “emotionally overwhelmed” by the horror.

Is it too much to hope that after centuries of institutionalised hypocrisy, we may finally be developing a more realistic and humane attitude to prostitution? Peter Sutcliffe’s early victims might have been one stereotypical street-walker for all the interest shown in the details of their lives at the time of their deaths. His other victims who were not prostitutes garnered far more attention. Jack the Ripper’s prey are usually described only by their names and their profession. In most accounts of that legend they are dehumanised, merely immoral objects to titillate the imagination.

Prostitution is deeply embedded in our culture. The British have always had an appetite for commercial sex, but a profound aversion to admitting it, let alone establishing some framework to regulate it. As so often, the roots of this ambivalence may be traced to Victorian times — if not the heyday of vice, then certainly the high point of British sexual hypocrisy.

Huge numbers of prostitutes operated in Victorian Britain, openly, blatantly, sometimes lucratively, more often miserably. Hundreds of women would trudge up to Oxford at the beginning of every term to offer distinctly non-scholarly aspects of undergraduate education. “Don’t be a fool,” Charles Dickens told his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, when the American writer voiced his concern over the vast numbers of prostitutes in London. “Chastity in the male sex is as good as gone in our own time.” Conflicted Victorian attitudes to sex were epitomised by Gladstone himself, who toured the streets of London reclaiming women from a life of vice, while confessing to “adultery of the heart” in his diary, and probably self-flagellating in private.

Reformers might rush around picking up fallen women, but many Victorians studiously pretended that prostitution did not exist, while secretly paying for their exploitative pleasures. Victorians feared the sexual impulse, but indulged it fully. The sheer number of Victorian euphemisms for prostitute — a poule-de-luxe, nymph of the pavement, judy, tail, nemmer — is a measure of how widespread was the practice, but also of the general unwillingness to face the reality of prostitution.

Naturally, since the problem was either unacknowledged or condemned as sinful, there was little desire to find out what motivated prostitution, or to explore and understand the lives of women working the streets. All “unchaste women” were lumped together in an immoral mass. Victorian moralists could thus condemn the evils of prostitution by day and avail themselves of it by night.

Echoes of those double standards persist today. Women such as those murdered in Ipswich exist in every town and city of Britain, though for the most part we prefer not to see them. They are killed far more often than is reported, suffer repeated violence but are noticed only when they die in numbers.

Finally, it seems we may be casting off the legacy of Victorian moral prudery and approaching prostitution not as an ethical problem but as a treatable human and social issue. Germany and the Netherlands do not share British anxieties about paid sex; both countries have regulated brothels — and levels of violence against prostitutes have dropped significantly.

There has long been an established iconography of prostitution in this country: the grainy snap of the woman, wearing the scanty uniform of cheap allure, her face carefully obscured, standing on a street corner waiting to sell her body to a stranger. This week, that familiar image was replaced by snapshots that were strikingly unremarkable: women with children and boyfriends, dressed up for a party, holding up sporting trophies won in the days before heroin found them.

Amid all the debate about whether they should be called “prostitutes” or “sex workers”, it was notable that the victims were usually referred to by their own names: ordinary women from an ordinary town, plying a grimly ordinary trade.

There is still far to go before the stigma of prostitution is removed, but finally we seem to be moving on from a debate about whether cash for sex should be condoned or condemned, towards a discussion of how society can make provision for an activity as old as time.

Sutcliffe’s trail of death ignited public fury after he turned from killing prostitutes to murdering other women; Suffolk police moved into high gear when the third body was discovered. The notion that a prostitute’s life is worth less than others persists in our cultural prejudices. Yet this week Britain may finally have come to terms with an ancient hang-up about the oldest profession, with the discovery that the five dead in Ipswich were people long before they were prostitutes.

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