Social Work with People Practicing Same-Sex ... - ILGA Europe

in general, and interests of MSM in particular, are represented by HIV-servicing
organizations.
• Broad-scale public campaigns.
In order to achieve goals of advocacy, we can utilize quite effective method of
organization of comprehensive public awareness campaigns. We all remember examples
of political public campaigns, which proved to be more or less effective (“Ukraine
without Kuchma”, “Pora!” and the like). There also exists an example of anti-homosexual
campaign — ”Love against Homosexuality” . Its initiators believe that such activity is
one of methods to achieve their objectives, including legislative ban of “propaganda
of homosexuality”.
Now let us consider more specific methods (tools) of advocacy campaigns.
Tools of Advocacy
1. Official correspondence with government authorities.
Correspondence is one of the basic forms of advocacy work. Government authorities
and local self-governments are obliged to respond to all written inquiries they receive.
Official correspondence makes it possible to present the issue of advocacy to officials
and bureaucrats. Even if we fail to settle it, at least we will make them speak about it:
“the pen is mightier than sword”. So, the things we have written about our problem in
the letter, can be referred to in the next letter. Closely related to this simple mechanism
is another tool, called “open letter”.
2. Legislative and rule-making developments.
In most cases, the issue, addressed by the advocacy, can be formally settled through
introduction of necessary changes in current regulatory and legal basis, or through
passing of new normative documents. The most efficient way to achieve legislative (rulemaking)
changes is to submit prepared drafts of normative and legal acts (developed in
full concordance with requirements to such documents) to relevant agencies.
In order to resolve a number of procedural issues, related to correction of sexual identity
of transgender people, in 2008 the LGBT organization “Insight” submitted proposals to
the draft Order of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine “On Provision of Medical Assistance
to Persons Requiring Correction of Sexual Identity”, which is currently considered by
the management of MOH and being prepared to signing.
3. Open letters.
Open letter is another type of petition of the advocacy campaign implementer to the
targets of advocacy, which was made public. It is general practice to publicize open
letters through mass media. The LGBT has been utilizing this methodology for a long
time. In particular, broad public response was given to an open letter of the heads of
non-governmental and charitable gay and lesbian organizations, issued on August 19,
2006. It contained principal (at that time) demands of LGBT community. Still we should
remember that it is not enough just to publish our letter in the press. It needs to be
delivered to addressee officially — in other words, the letter with signatures has to be
mailed. Only on this case we can expect official response.
4. The use of voices of celebrities.
This interesting tool uses the influence of famous and popular people on public
opinion. Its application is two-fold. One method is to receive special comments of the
celebrity on the issue of our interest with subsequent publication of these comments.
The other methodology is more sophisticated. The idea is to find some old and already
forgotten comments or statements of the celebrity on our issue. Then we make it public
in the context of our advocacy objective. For example, in order to foster more tolerant
attitudes towards LGBT in the society, we could use the 2004 statement of Ruslana
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