canela Queer Safety Atlas
A responsive country-context tool that helps family violence practitioners ask safer questions about disclosure, migration risk, family pressure and LGBTQIA+ support pathways.
The Problem
Country context mattered, but the information practitioners had was fragmented, legalistic and hard to apply in a real conversation.
Practitioners supporting victim-survivors from migrant and refugee communities often need to understand how sexuality, gender identity, disclosure, family reputation, visa status, diaspora networks and return-to-country fears can interact with family violence risk.
The available information lived across separate places: legal databases, human-rights reports, advocacy pages, training notes and community knowledge. Useful, but not designed for the moment when a practitioner needs a safer question, a sharper risk lens or a referral starting point.
The design challenge was not “make a map.” It was: make country context usable without turning people into country profiles.
How We Approached It
Start from the practitioner decision.
The atlas is organised around what to ask, what not to assume, what could make disclosure unsafe and where to verify support pathways.
Separate legal status from lived risk.
Each card distinguishes legal context from discrimination, cultural attitudes, health access, media visibility and family violence implications.
Make the first read quick.
Hover states show rapid FV cues. Click opens a deeper card. Search and filters help practitioners move by region, risk band and practice keyword.
Build in consent and verification.
Organisation links are framed as practitioner starting points, with explicit reminders to verify safety, confidentiality and client consent before contact.
Design Decisions
Risk bands are visible, but not final.
The interface marks legal and disclosure risk, while the card text keeps reminding practitioners that individual safety depends on family, community, migration and service context.
Hover and click do different jobs.
Hover gives quick cues. Click opens the full card. The panel can be closed so the map stays explorable on desktop and phone.
Country cards include support pathways.
Where local organisations are known, they are linked. Where they are not, regional and global LGBTI networks are used as safer verification starting points.
The gallery broadens the frame.
The community section includes non-Western gender and sexuality terms so practitioners do not flatten all experiences into one identity model.
A live atlas that translates complex country context into safer practice conversations.
The final prototype combines a searchable map, country cards, quick FV cues, support contacts and a community gallery. It is designed for training, reflective practice and referral planning, not as a replacement for client-led assessment.
What This Shows
Interactive learning tools can hold nuance when they are designed around practitioner judgement.
The atlas does not tell a practitioner what a client’s life is like because of a flag on a map. It gives them a better starting point: what legal context might matter, what family or community pressures may shape disclosure, what digital risks to ask about, and where to begin verifying support.
For Canela, this is the kind of digital learning asset social sector teams need more often: practical, careful, visually clear and built for the real conditions of frontline work.