Taking as our point of departure a prevention initiative involving Arabic-speaking mothers and local emergency services in a designated ‘vulnerable area’ in Sweden, the chapter aims to show how shifting notions of vulnerability and corresponding ideas of learning and responsibility work to entrench ethnic and gender divides and stereotypes, even as they promote an ethics of attentiveness and awareness. While a conventional understanding of vulnerability, in accordance with established in/equality metrics, conceives of minority-ethnic populations in deprived areas as amongst those most in need of empowerment and capacity building, a more affirming approach views vulnerability as a precondition for mutual learning, not limited to deprived or minoritized people, groups or spaces. As the term vulnerability has dispersed through contemporary prevention discourses, the ‘classical’ us/them or friend/enemy distinction is being increasingly displaced, amounting to a ‘flattening’ and ‘whitewashing’ of differentiations. The disavowal of the structural conditions of those involved in prevention measures is not simply a decoupling of vulnerability from power relations, but is itself a political strategy.