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5
Framing Violence
Prevention Communication
T
he field of global violence prevention has made some advances in the
past 35 years, but, as many speakers in the workshop noted, in some
ways the dialogue around the field has stalled. The speakers sug-
gested that technology can help frame communication regarding violence
prevention in such a way so as to advance the field.
THE ROLE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS
TECHNOLOGY IN CHANGING MESSAGING
Several speakers emphasized the observation that information and
communications technology (ICT) is changing traditional violence preven-
tion messaging, making it more accessible to wider audiences, filtering and
targeting messages, and opening lines of multidirectional conversation.
Speaker Erik Hersman of Ushahidi said that Ushahidi was born out of
the 2008 post-election violence in Kenya. He described the initial start-up
as an ad hoc group of volunteers who came together over 3 days in response
to an urgent need. Blogging and media played integral roles in accelerating
the company’s timeline. It is worth noting that Ushahidi is a broad-band
platform that has since been used in many countries all over the world. It
has been used for disaster response, such as in Haiti and Japan, for election
monitoring, and for citizen journalism.
Speaker and Forum member Jim Mercy of the Centers for Disease Con-
trol and Prevention said that information and communications technologies
disrupt hierarchies, change the flow of information, and allow failure to
occur more quickly so that progress can take place more quickly. Other
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FRAMING VIOLENCE PREVENTION COMMUNICATION
speakers added that these technologies contribute to the democratization
of information, by allowing ordinary citizens to discover solutions to their
own problems.
Speaker and planning committee member Jody Ranck of the Public
Health Institute spoke about key developments in ICT and about their ef-
fects on the future of public health. These key developments include more
pervasive computing power, the appearance of cultures of sharing and co-
operation, open health, biocitizenship and technological citizenship, and the
rise of the infosphere1 and the information organism.2 Noting that global
mobile network coverage has reached 90 percent, Dr. Ranck commented
that social media has engendered a culture of sharing, of collective selves,
and of real-time informatics. Dr. Ranck also emphasized the paradigm shift
that has occurred in rethinking health with respect to the impact of technol-
ogy: Internet and communications technologies have the power to make the
invisible visible and to increase public engagement with data. Several speak-
ers cautioned that as this paradigm changes, there will be a strong need to
evaluate these new, faster, and more streamlined approaches in rigorous
and appropriate ways that adapt to the rapidly changing technologies. Dr.
Ranck also discussed new approaches to utilizing data, include the mining
of “big data,” or datasets too large to store in a traditional manner. Big
data has the ability to provide more nuanced information regarding com-
munications trends and cultural and social norms.
NEW LITERACIES OR COMPETENCIES
Harnessing the power of ICTs could require adaptation of traditional
communications tools. Several new literacies or competencies are required
for adapting and incorporating information and communications technolo-
gies into violence prevention work.
Mr. Hersman spoke about one of the first competencies required for
Ushahidi: the understanding from organizations that they should share
their data. Large nongovernmental organizations were not sharing infor-
mation or verifying if an event occurred. This barrier led to the building
of a platform that could bypass these inefficiencies. Along the Ushahidi
development path, many lessons were learned that are important to lay the
groundwork for others developing their own ICT programs. The required
skills include the ability to discerningly examine data sources and data,
to question assumptions, to embrace innovation, and to take risks boldly
1 The infosphere is the informational environment in which entities, processes, and interac-
tions related to information exist.
2 An information organism is an entity interconnected with other information organisms
that operates through the use and sharing of information.
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34 COMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY FOR VIOLENCE PREVENTION
knowing that such risktaking allows one to fail and then subsequently
adjust more quickly.
Mr. Hersman also discussed the skill of dealing with “white space,”
where sometimes the most innovative ideas emerge. In Mr. Hersman’s
opinion, the best disruptive ideas come from the edge, and this is where
the intersection of technology and violence prevention has the potential to
push the boundaries of innovation. The last competency that Mr. Hersman
emphasized was the importance of humility with respect to approach,
implementation, and advancement technologies for preventing violence.
Dr. Mercy agreed that there is a need for literacy in these areas, and
he raised more questions: “What do we need to do to help us and help our
colleagues, help our own fields to get up to speed? And where do we need
to get up to speed? Do we need to know the intricacies of the technology,
or what are the areas that we need to learn in order that we can advance
and apply these technologies in useful ways?”
Dr. Ranck added that the area of visual culture—which includes visual
data representation such as mapping, infographics, new media, and art—is
expanding and these tools are helping to reframe health. That is, instead
of simply displaying statistics and other numbers by themselves, people are
using pictures to demonstrate the statistics and to send messages across
populations and audiences with a wide range of background, knowledge,
and literacy levels. More and more often data are being displayed in visually
appealing ways in order to create more effective and meaningful messages.
Dr. Ranck also listed a number of other new literacies that are impor-
tant for public health, including service design and change management,
technological literacy, new methods in health informatics, and management
of public–private partnerships. Transparency is also increasingly important
because there are more participatory media and more distributed knowl-
edge. Public health, he said, should address these arenas and could be lever-
aged as a platform to offer services that catalyze change.
Speaker Devon Halley from Deloitte Research GovLab (XBC) dis-
cussed the potential of cross-boundary collaboration and creating public
value through ICT. He discussed the power of global networks in helping
to buttress the use of knowledge. Social media and social networks offer a
tremendous opportunity to develop new ways of engaging people and al-
lowing them to collaborate and innovate. Thus, he said, new competencies
are needed to manage this power.
As an example, Mr. Halley offered the story of a physician’s powerful
use of Sermo, which is a collaboration platform for medical professionals.
This physician, who was in the emergency department, had a patient who
had a serrated saw blade completely through his thumb, and the physician
was uncertain of which approach to removing the blade would result in the
least collateral damage. In the past, Mr. Halley said, the doctor would have
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FRAMING VIOLENCE PREVENTION COMMUNICATION
turned to a colleague he knew in his own hospital or perhaps in some other,
and the solution could have taken a long time to present itself. In this case,
however, he posed the question online using Sermo, and very quickly an-
other doctor who had seen this type of injury before posted a solution: use
a drinking straw split along the length as leverage. Thus the physician, who
had the knowledge, ability, and access to use Sermo, was able to effectively
tap into the knowledge base of the entire medical community accessed on
this website, not just those doctors in his immediate social sphere. As well,
the solution itself was relatively low-tech and easy to manage, but would
not have so readily manifested without this innovative tool.
Speaker Vish Viswanath of Harvard University of Public Health spoke
of teaching children “media literacy” and how to develop a curriculum to
do so. “Since we teach people how to buy clothes, how to buy cars, how
to go to the restaurant from Yelp,” he said, “how do we do this for the use
of media? We should develop an evidence-based curriculum around these
new kinds of media and literacy and how we teach our kids to consume it
in a more informed way.”
Breakout leader Kim Scott from the Child Resiliency Programme in
Jamaica brought up another important competency related to the breaking
down of the silos within the violence prevention field. In Jamaica, she said,
the violence prevention field is splintered into sectors as well as within silos
of types of violence. As had many other speakers in this workshop, she
emphasized the importance of learning to perform multidisciplinary col-
laborations because so much effort and time is spent by researchers in one
silo going over ground that has already been covered by others in similar
fields. Being able to work across sectors and share information would allow
researchers to work from existing knowledge and would thus require fewer
resources. Speaker and Forum member Mark Rosenberg of the Task Force
for Global Health responded to Dr. Scott, saying that collaboration is not
easy. “It is not easy to get the people who work in HIV to go over and talk
to the people who work in violence prevention or go talk to the people who
work in polio eradication to share the lessons that they have learned. It is
not easy, but it is possible. If we work only in silos, we lose that ability to
get the bigger picture. If we are going to make progress, it is going to be
because we see the details and the bigger picture at the same time, but that
is going to take getting us together in ways that are hard but possible.” Be-
cause social and new media encourage sharing and collaboration, this goal
might be easier to achieve through the lens of communications technology.
Speaker Judith Carta of the University of Kansas also noted the chal-
lenge in designing, evaluating, and scaling programs in an environment
that changes rapidly, sometimes to the point that a particular innovation
is no longer needed by the time the evaluation is finished. Dr. Rosenberg
responded that the program design and evaluation cycle is going to undergo
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36 COMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY FOR VIOLENCE PREVENTION
changes because of our ability to use communications technology. Some ap-
plications will be put forth that become widespread before we understand
why they work and before they are tested on the small scale. An important
competency in building, Dr. Rosenberg said, is learning how to embrace
this rapid change and incorporate what is learned from research to modify
the process successfully.
Facilitator and planning committee member Lisa Witter of Fenton
spoke about competencies that are needed in the workplace. She said that
social media are changing people and changing what hierarchies look like.
For instance, those who would be traditionally considered “experts” are
changing as younger people often mentor their more experienced (and
often older) counterparts in technology. In turn, this is affecting organiza-
tions with traditional workplace structures and offering a democratization
of empowerment in workers. “There is power leverage along what was a
ladder,” she said, “and is now a lattice.”
Speaker William Riley from the National Institutes of Health spoke
about the need to improve evaluation competencies given the burdensome
length of time required for a full randomized controlled trial to be carried
out. A typical randomized trial, even one that does not require any revi-
sions or other things that might extend the process, lasts at least 7 years.
During this time the researcher could be left behind by evolving technology
and end up with an intervention that is no longer relevant. On the other
hand, speeding up the timeline could result in inadequate development,
use, or evaluation of the technology. Although RCTs are considered to be
the gold standard for evaluation, he said, there are a number of types of
uncontrolled trials that could be useful as well, particularly because mobile
technology can assist in the real-time capture of data, and so it is possible
to embed evaluation into the intervention itself.
In the research world, a new measure must be both reliable and valid,
but sensitivity to change should also be taken into account. “We have to
actually be able to look at how we can truncate these things and have mea-
sures that are more responsive to these short periods of time we’re trying
to assess,” Dr. Riley said. “We have to get to the point in the behavioral
sciences and the epidemiologic world where our scales stay standard. Our
instrumentation can improve, our processes and methods can improve, we
can become more precise as we go along, but everything stays standard in
terms of the scale, so that we can always talk to each other: clinicians to
researchers, researchers to researchers, and we’re talking about the same
scale.” Speaker Joe McCannon of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services (CMS) noted that new evaluation methodologies are being de-
veloped, such as methodologies that integrate formative and summative
evaluation.
Speaker Michael Feigelson of the Bernard van Leer Foundation offered
a final important competency that the violence prevention community
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FRAMING VIOLENCE PREVENTION COMMUNICATION
needs to keep in mind when educating its donors and its potential donors:
while reasonable attempt at prediction should be made, it should be made
clear that exploring new fields requires accepting some level of uncertainty.
“The problem that I came up against, which is a similar one that you will
come up against, is, I could not prove anything. I could not even tell that
reasonable a story because when you are in ‘white space,’ where it’s a little
uncomfortable because the rules aren’t clear, you don’t know what’s going
on, you don’t know what’s going to happen. The white space should be
made attractive and not a scary phenomenon.”
APPROPRIATE MESSAGING AROUND VIOLENCE PREVENTION
Several speakers said that it is essential to ensure that violence preven-
tion messages delivered with new communications tools are still appropri-
ate and relevant. Breakout session leader Scott Goodstein of Revolution
Messaging illustrated the importance of understanding who the target
audience is and how usable the tools will be to that audience. Speaker and
Forum member Kristin Schubert of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
commented on the power of going beyond the individual level and amplify-
ing the experience so it can be shared by everyone, while still ensuring that
the experience is relevant.
Breakout leader Daniel Reidenberg from SAVE said that it is impor-
tant to talk about and better understand the differences between the risk
of something occurring, and predicting that something will occur. He also
noted that deciding where to intervene on the continuum (that is, low-
to-high) of risk requires careful examination of expected consequences.
Speaker John Gordon of Fenton said that it is important to meet individu-
als where they are currently, so they are most receptive to messages, and
both he and Dr. Reidenberg agreed that it will be important to move the
messages past traditional public health gatekeepers directly to the target
audience.
Breakout leaders Dahna Goldstein of Philantech and Harriet MacMillan
of McMaster University both commented about the need first to clearly
define the problem and then to identify important tools versus the other
way around. Dr. MacMillan also noted that it would be useful for violence
prevention practitioners to learn to create short messages, especially as
people are growing increasingly more accustomed to receiving news and
information in a short-message format.
Breakout leader Constance DeCherney of iCrossing noted that the
best approach is not to try to solve a problem with one technology or one
person but rather to involve all of the audiences affected by the issue in
a variety of platforms, including mass media. Breakout leader and Forum
member XinQi Dong of Rush Institute for Healthy Aging said that there
is great ignorance concerning how to frame research-advocacy messages in
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38 COMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY FOR VIOLENCE PREVENTION
order to reach decision makers, while Dr. Viswanath noted that some of the
evaluation research offers insight into this framing. Dr. MacMillan added
to this by saying that it is important to bring the decision makers into the
process from the beginning rather than planning to disseminate informa-
tion to them after the process is done. Mr. Gordon posed one possibility
of creating an ICT prototype, to brand something quickly and disseminate
the message, before scaling up into a full program.
FRAMING ISSUES
Framing the issue is an essential part of building a message for violence
prevention. Dr. Rosenberg spoke about challenges that come up in framing
violence prevention issues. The challenges he listed included
• Fatalistic beliefs about violence
• The separation of different types of violence into silos
• D
isproportionate effects on the most vulnerable with the least
influence
• Issues of privacy
• Stigma and a fear of reporting
Speaker Eesha Pandit of Breakthrough spoke about the Bell Bajao!
campaign. The message in this campaign is carefully framed to push the
audience to make a conceptual shift from placing the responsibility for
violence prevention on the government to putting that responsibility on
individuals, because it allows people to engage with these issues from where
they are.
She noted that another key component of the campaign is its effort to
use culture to change culture. She said that media, arts, and technology can
be used for more than just to improve productivity and disseminate infor-
mation; they can also be vessels for communicating cultural values, such
as human rights. She emphasized that their program “transforms the way
people think about domestic violence by pervading the culture in that way.”
Third, she stated, “We really believe that everyone needs to be a part of
the solution. . . . Having an intersectional approach to identity is really the
core of this work. Asking men and boys to participate in ending violence
against women is not only about stopping violence against women and em-
powering women but also about changing the way we think about commu-
nity and accountability and identity. It moves us from this us-versus-them
model of rights and rights violations.” Thus, this type of framing shifts the
paradigm away from a victims-and-perpetrators model into a paradigm
about collective and shared responsibility and reimagining a community.
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FRAMING VIOLENCE PREVENTION COMMUNICATION
Dr. Carta discussed the paradox that the highest-risk families have the
greatest need for effective parenting intervention, but those parents are
the ones who are the hardest to keep engaged in a series of home visiting
interventions. Given this situation, Dr. Carta and her colleagues created a
mobile phone component for their intervention that aimed to teach parents
positive ways of interacting with their children in the hopes that the mobile
component would increase the participation rate.
Ms. DeCherney discussed the need to frame the conversation around
healthy relationships rather than only reacting to a victim or someone who
is being victimized in a relationship. Breakout leader Eric Brown of Impact-
Games discussed the importance of knowing the audience in order to help
frame the conversation.
Mr. McCannon commented that it is important to understand that
people are inundated with information, and that the creation of new infor-
mation is incentivized. However, less effort is put toward translating the
information into action or taking something to scale. This is changing, and
technology can be part of creating new incentives because of the ability
to use more existing information. Mr. McCannon also noted that when
framing messages, people need to consider how assumptions can change.
For example, assumptions about how long something can take to develop
can be challenged in situations where an urgent need drives the creation of
a disruptive innovation, so assuming that everything takes time can limit
possibilities. On the other hand, rushing to push new products or interven-
tions can backfire when quality improvement, monitoring and evaluation,
and adaptation are not included in the design.
BOX 5-1
Key Messages Raised by Individual Speakers
• t is important first to have a deep understanding of the audience and the
I
desired outcome and then to approach the solution technologically, if there is
a technological solution.
• xisting self-organized and self-identified communities of people can be used
E
to address gaps or challenges in translating experiences or messaging in order
to improve service provision.
• etworks maximize value and power and increase reach; they might also as-
N
sist in breaking down boundaries and silos. Information and communications
technology has the potential to amplify this effect.
• iteracy in the use of information and communications technologies is critical
L
in an information-based society.
• romoting new media and technological literacy and building human capital
P
could help make accomplishments in violence prevention real, while address-
ing or diminishing harmful unintended consequences.
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