Poland-Based Sex Worker Support Organisations as Mediators in the Interactions Between Sex Workers and Professionals

As noted by Goffman, social interactions between ‘stigmatized persons’ and ‘normals’ are difficult for both parties. Consequently, the former often avoid contact or adopt various strategies of stigma management. I refer to such contacts as mixed contacts or interactions throughout the article. This article aims to analyze coping strategies in mixed contacts that rely on incorporating a third partner into the interaction. This task usually falls to the members of sex workers’ support organizations. Apart from offering support for sex workers, these members are involved in gatekeeping, preparing, moderating, and controlling mixed contacts. I discuss their roles based on an analysis of how outreach workers in Poland describe their contribution to the interactions between sex workers (‘stigmatized persons’) and various types of specialists and professionals (‘normals’). In my article, I set out to demonstrate that outreach workers engage in subtle mediation work during mixed interaction. The empirical basis of the article is qualitative interviews with outreach workers in Poland as analyzed according to grounded theory procedures.