Going out and making it home: on the roots, routes and homing of young queer men in Nairobi, Kenya

Public imagination and academic scholarship present queer migrants as being uprooted due to their embodiment of non-normative sexual identities. Drawing from ethnographic research with a male sex worker-led organisation (SLO) in Nairobi, including 41 in-depth interviews with members, this paper explores this perceived uprootedness by highlighting Kenyan queer migrants’ multi-layered and multi-dimensional social experiences of home. Using the concept of ‘homing’, the paper explores the men’s lifelong efforts to feel at home, and the embeddedness of queer identities in this process. The SLO generates feelings of safety, acceptance and recognition and provides a ‘second home’ in the city. In the process of creating ties with chosen families in the city, the men still maintain close ties with family back in their villages, while economic opportunities induce back-and-forth mobilities. The men’s individual trajectories might fluctuate yet still fit within a more linear route in which they aspire to acquire land and properties in their ancestral homeland. The analysis of queer homing supports a reimagining of queer people’s mobilities that stresses their embeddedness in society and illustrates how it relates to the ‘queering’ of queer in the African context

The myth of the one-day training: The effectiveness of psychosocial support capacity-building during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa

Fiona O'May - ORCID: 0000-0003-4417-2819 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4417-2819Alastair Ager - ORCID: 0000-0002-9474-3563 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9474-3563Background - In emergencies and resource-poor settings, non-specialists are increasingly being trained to provide psychosocial support to people in distress, with Psychological First Aid (PFA) one of the most widely-used approaches. This paper considers the effectiveness of short training programmes to equip volunteers to provide psychosocial support in emergencies, focusing particularly on whether the PFA training provided during the Ebola outbreak enabled non-specialists to incorporate the key principles into their practice. Methods - Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Sierra Leone and Liberia with 24 PFA trainers; 36 individuals who participated in PFA training; and 12 key informants involved in planning and implementing the PFA roll-out. Results - Findings indicate that many PFA ToTs were short and rarely included content designed to develop training skills. As a result, the PFA training delivered was of variable quality. PFA providers had a good understanding of active listening, but responses to a person in distress were less consistent with the guidance in the PFA training or with the principles of effective interventions outlined by Hobfoll et al. Conclusions - There are advantages to training non-specialists to provide psychosocial support during emergencies, and PFA has all the elements of an effective approach. However, the very short training programmes which have been used to train non-specialists in PFA might be appropriate for participants who already bring a set of relevant skills to the training, but for others it is insufficient. Government/NGO standardisation of PFA training and integration in national emergency response structures and systems could strengthen in-country capacity.https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-mental-health6pube5pu

When the Law Fails to Protect: Stigma, Violence and Sex Workers’ Multi-Layered Responses in the Kenyan Cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisii and Meru

In Kenya, criminal laws on sex work and same-sex activities, combined with stigma on sex work and homosexuality, shape sex workers’ vulnerability to violence. This paper explores sex workers’ responses to violence at various levels of social and legal organisation. Drawing from a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach including qualitative interviews and focus group data, the paper illustrates a close and mutually reinforcing nexus between criminalisation, sex work stigma and homophobia as well as a resulting climate of impunity for perpetrators. By understanding sex workers as agentic actors, it demonstrates how sex workers respond to, rework and resist this repressive landscape of violence. It argues that sex workers mitigate the risk of experiencing violence by ‘getting by’ and ‘getting ahead’, while sex worker organisations support them to engage in collective resistance. The paper demonstrates a need to reform sex work-related laws and argues that action should extend beyond legal reform to include efforts to mediate the social processes that undercut sex workers’ access to rights and social justice.&nbsp

When the law fails to protect: Stigma, violence and sex workers’ multi-layered responses in the Kenyan cities of Nairobi, Mombasa, Kisii and Meru

In Kenya, criminal laws on sex work and same-sex activities, combined with stigma on sex work and homosexuality, shape sex workers’ vulnerability to violence. This paper explores sex workers’ responses to violence at various levels of social and legal organisation. Drawing from a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach including qualitative interviews and focus group data, the paper illustrates a close and mutually reinforcing nexus between criminalisation, sex work stigma and homophobia as well as a resulting climate of impunity for perpetrators. By understanding sex workers as agentic actors, it demonstrates how sex workers respond to, rework and resist this repressive landscape of violence. It argues that sex workers mitigate the risk of experiencing violence by ‘getting by’ and ‘getting ahead’, while sex worker organisations support them to engage in collective resistance. The paper demonstrates a need to reform sex work-related laws and argues that action should extend beyond legal reform to include efforts to mediate the social processes that undercut sex workers’ access to rights and social justice