‘It has a lot of pressure’: the impossible everyday labours of sex worker community paralegal volunteers in Nairobi

This article explores everyday pressures, as experienced by sex worker community paralegals in Nairobi. Community paralegals are important in national HIV response efforts, as they help to reduce the pressures on state structures, be it the justice system, where their mediation efforts help reduce the number of cases that go to courts, or in the healthcare system where their provision of HIV education and signposting sex workers to special clinics and services alleviates the pressure on health services. However, the design of this volunteer role contains limitations that produce multiple individual pressures and expose role holders to gendered harms. Focusing on social reproduction, this article explores community social reproduction work that the community paralegal role entails, alongside women’s income generating and familiar labours to demonstrate their intertwined nature and the set of numerous demands that they create on women’s time, energy, emotions and financial resources. Using the Space, Time, Violence framework, the article reveals the spatial and temporal dimensions of gendered harms that constitute the everyday lives of community paralegals in Nairobi. These harms are not fully recognised in the formal role design, and thus support to replenish community paralegals’ resources is very limited, so contributing to their struggles. Community paralegals’ attempts to bring justice to their communities are lived then as a daily expose to harms which cause them pressures and deplete them.