Queering Ethics: Navigating Dual-Overlapping Relationships in Community Care

Watch time: 42 min

Ljudmila Petrovic, registered clinical counsellor at Collective Healing Counselling and Consulting in Vancouver, examines the unavoidable ethical terrain of providing care within small, overlapping 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, where providers may navigate professional and personal relationships with neighbours, friends, exes, or co-community members. Drawing on Vikki Reynolds's justice-doing framework and Ljudmila's own 15 years of experience in the mental health field (including frontline experience in anti-violence and harm reduction work), Ljudmila proposes a relational, community-accountable ethics of care that honours the complexity of small communities rather than defaulting to rules designed for anonymous, mainstream clinical contexts.

• Mainstream clinical ethics codes were built for contexts of anonymity and professional distance that do not and cannot exist in small, close-knit 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. Mainstream ethical guidance is both inapplicable and potentially harmful when applied uncritically.
• Dual and overlapping relationships in community care settings are not exceptions or failures but predictable features of care practice within marginalized communities, requiring nuanced ethical frameworks rather than blanket prohibitions.
• A justice-doing approach to ethics centres accountability to community, transparency with clients, and ongoing relational navigation (rather than rule-following) as the foundation of ethical practice in complex contexts.
• Care workers such as counsellors and social workers working with 2SLGBTQIA+ communities need practical tools for navigating power, consent, and boundaries that are contextually grounded and culturally accountable, not imported wholesale from dominant-culture clinical settings.
• Collective sustainability and community accountability are as central to ethical practice as individual professional codes. This is particularly true for practitioners doing high-stakes, trauma-adjacent work within marginalized communities."

Dual/Overlapping Relationships: The ethical situation in which a care provider and client share a pre-existing or concurrent social relationship. This can create complex power and care dynamics that require active, relational navigation rather than one-size-fits-all prohibitions.

Justice-Doing Ethics: Vikki Reynolds's framework for ethical practice in community work and therapy that centres accountability, solidarity with clients, and attention to structural power. Justice-doing ethics frames ethics as active commitments rather than rule-compliance.

Community-Accountable Care: A model of therapeutic and social service practice that holds practitioners accountable not just to professional bodies but to the communities they work within. This method of care requires transparency, ongoing relational negotiation, and collective sustainability.

Reynolds, V., Justice-doing framework and publications on burnout and ethical practice. 

Collective Healing Counselling and Consulting, Vancouver

Collective Healing, Ethics in anti-oppressive counselling: Promising practices.