Children-404
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| Founded | March 4, 2013 |
|---|---|
| Founders | Lena Klimova |
| Type | non-profit |
| Location | |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Slogan | Children-404. LGBT teens. We exist! |
| Website | Deti-404 |
Children-404 is Russian LGBTI online community on Facebook and on the social networking site VK.
The establisher of the community is Lena Klimova, a journalist based in the city of Nizhny Tagil. She is the author of a series of articles on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) teenagers and she published in 2014 a book on the topic. In 2013, she set up an online community on Facebook and on the social networking site VK named Children-404, which provides a space for teenagers to discuss LGBTI issues and support each other.
The Project’s Facebook and VK pages (entitled “Children-404”) publish letters from Russian LGBT teenagers in which they talk about the problems they face in their lives due to homophobic people around them - friends, relatives, classmates, teachers, and others. The Project’s pages also publishes letters from adults with words of support for the Russian LGBT adolescents.
The number "404" in the project title refers to the internet error message "Error 404 - Page not found". The project authors draw attention to the fact that in Russian society not many people consider the existence of gay and transgender children and the challenges that they face in an LGBT-intolerant environment. The Project description states:
Our society believes that gay teenagers do not exist in nature, as if gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people arrive from Mars as adults. Meanwhile, one family in twenty has an LGBT-child in it, and those children are society’s invisible "Children-404".
Lena Klimova, a young journalist from Ekaterinburg, published a series of articles critical of the parliamentary bills against “propaganda of homosexuality”. Afterwards she received an e-mail from a 15-year-old girl who said that she was being bullied by her classmates and her parents because of her homosexuality. The girl wrote that had been on the verge of suicide, but Klimova’s article had made her change her mind.
After that Klimova started to research the lives of LGBT adolescents in Russia, and created an online survey. Within under two weeks Klimova had received over a hundred e-mail responses, and that is what made her resolve to create an online support project for LGBT teens.
The project consists of two parts: a private "closed" group on the Russian social network VK, whose purpose is to offer psychological assistance to LGBT teens, and in which they can share their problems and get help from adult participants; and open projects on Facebook and VK which publish letters from teens.
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