ABSTRACT
Through an ethnographic approach rooted at multiple institutional sites in Norway, this chapter analyses the high level of discrepancy between the rhetoric of officially stated policies aiming to coordinate and streamline national policies against human trafficking and the institutional conflicts that arise between agents who implement prostitution policies. During rising conflicts between health personnel, social workers and police officers, we find a mute object, the condom. This object moves across and within institutional borders and spaces. This chapter aims to make the condom ‘speak’ by interrogating it as a locus for institutional conflict, interaction and exchange, but also as potential site for negotiation and reconciliation. The chapter explains why and how a zero-tolerance approach to prostitution comes in conflict with social workers’ and health personnel’s methods to tolerantly reduce harms within prostitution within a broader perspective on human vulnerability.
