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

of rights of commercial sex workers is possible, but protection of rights of teachers to
receive pending salary for March will not constitute advocacy. We should emphasize
that protection of human rights may concern specific individual, but advocacy concerns
the group of people. For example, protection of legal rights of Vadim Zhilin by LGBT
organizations in 2005, who was expelled from the Economy and Law College at the
Interregional Academy of Personnel Management on the basis of explicit demonstration
of his sexual orientation, was the type of human rights protection, but not advocacy.
Protection of human rights always aims at restoration or safeguarding of rights that
are already guaranteed by the law, but advocacy may be targeted at the expansion
of current list of guaranteed rights. We believe that such area of work as guaranteeing
rights of members of the same-sex families to receive sick-leave certificate to care for a
family member with serious heath condition, would be advocacy, rather than protection
of rights.
So we see that not every protection of human rights is advocacy, and not every advocacy
activity envisages rights protection.
Community mobilization has nothing much in common with advocacy. Community
mobilization envisages capacity building of the community to identify and to address
issues, common for all community members; it is always aimed it the development of
community's internal potential. Advocacy, however, does not specifically aim at the
development of a particular community; it aims at the improvement of quality of life
of community members regarding certain social aspect through external changes,
rather than internal transformations within the community. Say, mobilization of
lesbian and gay community envisages the development of networks of LGBT NGOs as
an end in itself. But within the advocacy campaign, LGBT organizations become agents
of specific advocacy measures. In other words, one and the same objective entity —
LGBT organizations in our case — represent goal for mobilization and the originator of
certain activity for advocacy.
It is obvious that the higher is the level of mobilization of LGBT community, the more
effective advocacy activities can be implemented by LGBT community.
Some of the least competent activists of LGBT movement may find something in common
between advocacy and fundraising. Both words sound nice and sophisticated, but they
have no links between them.
Fundraising is the process of seeking and attracting donor (external) funding to
support socially important work of individuals, groups of people and organizations.
If one of HIV-service organizations prepares project to Elton John AIDS Foundation, it
would be fundraising, but not an advocacy measure. At the same time, money, collected
by the organization as a result of successful fundraising, can be channelled to advocate
the rights of HIV positive MSM.
In order to find out whether specific planned or implemented actions would be advocacy,
one should give correct answers to two key questions:
1. Whose rights are protected? Whose interests are vindicated?
In implementing advocacy measures, advocates vindicate interests of a specific social
group (groups), rather than individual, collective of individuals, or legal entity.
For example, a fight to provide the immigrant from Pakistan with political asylum in
Ukraine because he is gay, would not constitute advocacy; on the other hand, lobbying
for opportunities to provide asylum in Ukraine to any foreign citizens, who are being
persecuted by their authorities because of their sexual orientation, would represent an
advocacy.
2. How the protection of rights and vindication of interests is carried out?
In advocacy, protection of rights and interests is carried out by means of targeted
influence on the government policy, legislation, public administration practices, social
processes and phenomena. If there is no targeted influence, there will be no advocacy.
There is nothing wrong with
going to bed with someone of
your own sex. People should be
very free with sex, they should
draw the line at goats.
Elton John (born as Reginald
Kenneth Dwight), an English
singer and songwriter, born in
1947
Homosexuality is assuredly no
advantage, but it is nothing
to be ashamed of, no vice,
no degradation, it cannot be
classified as an illness; we
consider it to be a variation of
the sexual function produced
by certain arrest of sexual
development. Many highly
respectable individuals of
ancient and modern times have
been homosexuals, several of
the greatest among them (Plato,
Michelangelo, Leonardo Da
Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice
to persecute homosexuality as a
crime, and cruelty too.
Sigmund Freud, an Austrian
psychiatrist and psychologist,
1856—1939. Extract from
the letter to mother
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