LGBT+ advocacy risk assessment

The brief

OneWorld UK was running a social media advocacy program for LGBT+ rights, aimed at people in Cambodia's provinces, where there are few places to connect with other community members or push for legal rights. Before asking anyone to share their story publicly, they wanted to understand what that sharing might cost. They hired us to find out.

Listening without assuming

This project demanded more care than most. We could not project our own understanding of the risks onto people whose lives we don't live, so the research was built around open-ended questions and a lot of silence. Our facilitators would ask, then step back and let the question sit. LGBT+ rights are a hard subject to talk about in Cambodia, and the most honest answers came after the pauses. It's easy to talk about being user-led until you're in a room where you actually have to give up control of where the conversation goes.

We interviewed ordinary citizens across demographics in provincial areas to understand how LGBT+ people are perceived, then ran design workshops with representatives from LGBT+ communities. Using visual tools built from what we'd heard in the field interviews, participants explored how their own story might be received if it traveled beyond the room.

What we found

People often expected acceptance in their immediate, local relationships. What worried them was the reach: social media carries a story far past the people who know you, to employers, extended family, strangers. And the standard advocacy practice of collecting consent to share a story and a photo assumes a comprehension that often isn't there. Many participants could not fully picture what saying yes actually meant.

That gap became the center of our report. OneWorld came away with the risks as participants understood them, and the risks participants didn't yet see, which put them in a position to inform people properly before asking for their story.

The project made the advocacy slower and more careful. That was the point.