Questioning Solidarity: Outreach with Migrants Who Sell Sex

Abstract

Sex-industry culture includes large numbers of people offering to help people selling sex. Outreach, a concept developed to take health products and services to hard-to-reach groups, involves complicated cultural interactions. As with others who apply governmental technologies, social figures inventing and carrying out outreach projects often justify their actions without reference to what the `needy' actually need, relying instead on discourses of solidarity, empowerment, self-esteem and social inclusion. Narratives of scenes from outreach with migrants who sell sex in Spain provide an opportunity to examine and question aspects of a social project usually considered transparently benign but which can be more than a little troublesome.