This dissertation was initiated by a scoping review (Study I). It identified Denmark as having an under-researched sex work policy that relied strongly on sex workers’ voluntary participation in publicly financed social work programmes to reduce sex work. Due to its emphasis on voluntary participation, the policy was subjected to analysis using basic Foucauldian governmentality theory as a lens. The aim was to explore how social work programmes were strategized to govern sex workers by transforming their subjectivities. Empirical materials were collected from three bureaucratic levels: the government of Denmark (Study II), the four municipalities that had applied for funding from the government to conduct social work programmes between 2020 and 2023 (Study III), and some of the key stakeholders in these programmes (Study IV). The materials were analysed with inspiration from Bacchi’s post-structural analytical frameworks ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ and ‘Post-structural interview analysis.’ The analysis suggests that outreach work, counselling, bridge-building, and therapy were strategized to turn unreflective, risk-taking, and unknowing sex workers into people who became aware of where to turn for help, realised their inner potential, actively managed their risks, and became knowledgeable about the psychosocial factors in their background that had ‘pushed’ them into sex work. In this way, sex workers were supposed to develop self-reflection and a wish to make a change. Furthermore, the analysis of Study IV suggests that this transformative process was dependent upon the sex workers’ ability to devise technologies of the self, that is to critically reflect on the potential problems with sex work, if they could take care of themselves properly while selling sex, why they repeated destructive behaviours, and how they could reinvent their life contexts by developing self-care. As an alternative to this largely individualised problematisation of sex work, the possibility of reconceptualizing the problem of universal vulnerability is discussed. Based on the notion that almost all people face vulnerability at some time in their life, social work strategies could be reshaped into strategies that emphasise intersubjectivity and the sufficient redistribution of resources to people facing vulnerability. Implications for research, policy, and social work practice are discussed.