Safety and solidarity: Using collective documents to share sex workers’ insider knowledges

Abstract

Western culture and Western health care systems have created places of sexual health care that are highly individualised, privatised and professionalised. For people engaged in sex work, this reduces the possibilities for sharing skills and knowledges and instead leaves people with internalised feelings of shame, guilt and isolation. This paper describes collective therapeutic work that elicited insider knowledges, skills and sparkling moments from sex workers. These accounts sidestepped negative identity conclusions and fostered mutual support among the workers, even though the participants never met each other. The work was guided by narrative practice concepts including externalising, double listening, re-authoring, privileging insider knowledges and developing collective documents.