Policies, media articles, NGO campaigns and academic publications often use the terms ‘vulnerable’ and ‘vulnerability’ to describe entire groups or communities. Individuals who engage in sex work, particularly women, are commonly portrayed as fundamentally ‘vulnerable’ subjects who need to be rescued from exploitation. This flattened and externally constructed understanding of vulnerability fails to capture the complex lived experiences of people working in the sector. As a result in this context, ‘vulnerability’ ends up being either too broad or too narrow, ultimately undermining effective protection from harm.

My doctoral research, ‘Manufacturing vulnerability: sex work, migration, and trafficking on the southern borders of Europe’ contributes to growing critical thought that attempts to understand the ’vulnerability’ of those who are labelled as such. Drawing on approximately thirty qualitative interviews with migrants involved in the sex industry living in Malta, the research rethinks ’vulnerability’ from the bottom-up. To date, this study presents the largest academic sample in research on sex work in the Maltese context.

Vulnerability as lived experience

During two years of fieldwork, I spoke with migrants of different ages, genders and backgrounds. Some had moved to Europe looking for more profitable work, others entered sex work only after arriving in Malta or combined it with other forms of insecure, poorly paid labour. Several participants reported experiences of trafficking and exploitation after being deceived into selling sexual services. Considering the diversity of those interviewed a striking finding emerged across the interviews.

Vulnerability was widely described as a shared human experience, rather than a condition tied to specific individual characteristics such as gender, age or migrant status. Nor was it seen as an inevitable product of sex work itself. Instead, the interviewees saw vulnerability as something that emerges in relationships, with oneself (body and mind), with clients, with social norms and beliefs or with systems, such as law and policy. It was also associated with space and time, as vulnerability shifts across migration trajectories and life courses. Importantly, vulnerability was also closely connected to resistance. Where vulnerability arose, people attempted to tackle it through individual or collective strategies, drawing on whatever social and personal resources were available to them.

Law, policy and structural vulnerability

Although vulnerability appeared in multiple shapes and forms, it was predominantly associated with systems, particularly migration and sex work laws and policies. Participants consistently rejected the idea that sex work clientele is inherently violent. As one interviewee from Latin America put it: ’In this work, one sees everything.’ Violence was commonly seen as consequence of structural conditions, especially the absence of legal protection.

In Malta, sex work itself is not illegal, but many related activities are. Legal ambiguity leads to migrants, particularly those from outside Europe, becoming targets of racialised policing, detention and deportation. It also creates a generalised sense of vulnerability, where individuals avoid seeking help, for fear of negative repercussions. This uncertainty is sometimes exploited by abusive clients. While migrant sex workers attempt to avoid vulnerability through informal networks, or tapping into their own resources, the absence of a sex worker collective in Malta reinforces isolation and self-reliance.

Rethinking vulnerability

Drawing on the situation in Malta, this research calls for frameworks that aim to reduce vulnerability based on a notion of vulnerability that reflects the lived experiences of those deemed ‘vulnerable’. This requires comprehensive reforms across legal systems that govern migration, sex work, labour, and trafficking to prevent informal criminalisation, racial profiling, and selective enforcement. Vulnerability reduction should also reflect the realities of affected communities, rather than imposing externally defined categories of risk.