Communicating about child sexual abuse with the public: learning the lessons from public awareness campaigns

ABSTRACT

Despite numerous public awareness campaigns child sexual abuse (CSA) remains a significant global issue affecting millions of children. This suggests that such campaigns have had minimal impact, and the paucity of good quality empirical evaluation makes it difficult to establish what has worked and what has not. This article considers how different and evolving approaches to public awareness campaigning on CSA since the 1990s have influenced (or not) attitudinal and behavioural change. The article reviews a number of key initiatives from around the world and identifies common themes that can inform campaigning and prevention efforts. Recommendations for further research efforts, social problem framing, and targeting are offered. The article concludes by arguing that more recent multi-faceted campaigns which combine a range of messaging methods are more likely to turn public awareness campaigning into public action campaigning.

KEYWORDS:

• Child sexual abuse (CSA)
• child sexual abuse prevention
• public awareness campaigns

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Leverhulme Grant: “Community engagement and partnership working with sexual offenders network” 2014–2016. http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/hls/research/offenderengagement.aspx.