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This qualitative research deals with the impact of sexuality in healthcare or social help relationships from the professionals’ point of view, as they are daily faced with various expressions linked to the sexual life of the people they are in charge of, without – in many cases – being trained for it. Our aim here is to understand how these professionals build and adapt sexuality as a subject for specialized knowledge and intervention. The thematic and lexicographical analysis of 60 in-depth interviews, made in 2006 among socio-medical professionals working in Lorraine, shows that sexuality is represented over 5 lexical fields (the eroticization of the relationship and how it is managed, the users’ sexuality when in institutions, the medicalization of sexuality, sexual violence on children, young people’s deviant sexuality in suburbs) developed around the central image of sexual « abuse » which calls for a prescriptive supervision type of work made by health professionals and social workers.