Challenging Place: Leaving home for sex

Laura MaAgustín delves into the marginal world of migrant sex workers. She argues that there is a discontinuity between the images that NGO workers, government agents and others have of them as deprived of their home and undergoing traumatic experiences as trafficked sex workers, and the experiences, expectation and narratives of the migrant prostitutes themselves. Migrant sex workers are not always forcibly displaced, and even when they are, their trajectories after leaving home can, and often do, lead them into positive outcomes (meeting new and interesting people, finding their 'place in the world', etc.). Agustín offers a description of the places - the 'milieux' - created and lived in by migrant women and transsexual sex workers.