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Beyond Prevalence: An Explanatory Approach to Reframing Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom
Child Abuse & Neglect 38 (2014) 810–821
Beyond Prevalence: An Explanatory Approach to Reframing Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor, ∗ Eric Lindland, and Moira O’Neil The FrameWorks Institute
Kate Stanley The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
The most prevalent form of maltreatment, child neglect, gets the least attention from the public and policymakers
M
embers of the British public have come to recognize that child maltreatment is both highly prevalent and morally reprehensible. This recognition is no doubt due, in part, to effective advocacy and campaigns that have used statistics and a vivid imagery to communicate the prevalence
and reprehensibility of acts of child maltreatment. The question is whether the success of these efforts has resulted in public mobilization around policies that have the potential to prevent and address child maltreatment in the United Kingdom, or if they have left the public stuck in an overwhelming and debilitating
∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor, The Frameworks Institute, 1776 Eye Street, 9th Floor, Washington, DC 20006. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.04.019 0145-2134/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Child Abuse & Neglect 38 (2014) 810–821
sense of the problem at hand. Our research suggests the latter. In 2012, the FrameWorks Institute, in a partnership with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), began a long-term communications project. We began this research with the purpose of designing and empirically testing strategies that could be used to communicate more effectively about issues of child maltreatment. The goal was for the communication strategies developed to have the demonstrated ability to generate a broader public understanding of the issue of child maltreatment and, in turn, increase public support for the policies and programs necessary to improve the lives of children. Our research has found that several key assumptions that have driven communications practices around child maltreatment in the past are no longer valid. The British public has been convinced that child maltreatment is prevalent, reprehensible, and that it is a major social problem. These positions evidence the success of past communications efforts while simultaneously suggest that future gains in public understanding and issue support will require a new communications agenda and a different set of strategies. Importantly, our research shows that aspects of public understanding — including conceptions of the causes of abusive and neglectful behaviors, the effects that these behaviors have on children and society, and the solutions to effectively address child maltreatment — continue to impede the efforts of organizations working to decrease rates of maltreatment, assist those children who have experienced these actions, and improve outcomes. In this article, we demonstrate how explaining critical aspects of the issue constitutes the next frontier of efforts to use communications to address issues of child maltreatment in the United Kingdom.
It should come as no surprise that the public draws on a powerful set of beliefs and assumptions to reason about the issue of child maltreatment. Through in-depth interviews and experimental survey research, we find that members of the British public draw on a complicated set of cultural models — implicit, but shared, understandings, assumptions and patterns of reasoning — to think about what maltreatment is, why it happens, what effects it has, and what can, and should, be done about it. It should also come as no surprise that those working on the science, policy, and practice of child maltreatment have their own ways of understanding these issues. By reviewing relevant literature and conducting a series of interviews with child maltreatment experts, we distilled a high-level consensus account of the expert perspective on child maltreatment. This account constitutes what we call “the untranslated core story of child maltreatment,” and represents the core of what experts and advocates wish to communicate about the issue. Those familiar with this issue will also not find it surprising that there are substantial gaps in understanding between public and expert perspectives. We focus here on these gaps, as they point to the main challenges that communicators must address in effectively framing this issue. One of our most important findings is that members of the public lack a way of connecting acts and effects of maltreatment. This is largely because of a thin understanding of the ways in which maltreatment undermines children’s neurological, psychological and cognitive development. This gap in understanding hampers the public’s ability to think about how to most effectively address child maltreatment and improve outcomes for children. 811
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Our research suggests the importance of telling new stories to address these gaps and fill in perspectives currently missing from public thinking. Delivered in an appropriate dose, these stories can expose the British public to new information that can be used in reasoning about the most effective and appropriate ways to address child maltreatment. In addition to laying out a map of the challenges communicators face on this issue, we suggest an explanatory strategy that communicators can use to build public support for solutions that have the greatest potential to improve the lives of children in the United Kingdom.
Gaps Between Expert and Public Thinking Our research revealed the following gaps between public and expert thinking about child maltreatment in the United Kingdom.
Gap No. 1: Defining the Problem — Sensational Stories or an Enduring Challenge? Members of the public have a deep understanding that children are to be cared for, nurtured, and protected. Maltreatment is understood as a violation of this fundamental understanding of children. This conception of child maltreatment, in theory, encompasses all of its forms. However, members of the public simultaneously hold definitive ideas about what kinds of abuse are most damaging to children. Sexual and physical abuse dominate people’s thinking about child maltreatment. Neglect is less top-of-mind, is typically associated with nutritional and hygienic issues, and is not perceived to be “as damaging” to children. 812
The foregrounding of physical and sexual abuse in people’s thinking occurs for several reasons. First, public perception of maltreatment is driven in part by episodic media sensationalism of worst-case scenarios that focus primarily on physical and sexual abuse. Second, people define child maltreatment based on whether or not harm is done to the child and whether or not this harm is intentional. They use intentionality as a key criterion in attempts to draw a clear line between what is and is not maltreatment. Because the public defines neglect as unintentional, it is outside of the archetypal classification of maltreatment. The public also recognizes that acts of maltreatment vary in the extent to which they are abusive or neglectful and use intensity, frequency, and duration to place acts of maltreatment on a mild-to-severe continuum. Based on this recognition, neglect tends to fall on the mild end of the continuum. At the most basic level, experts define maltreatment in similar ways as the public — interactions between a child and an adult that result in significant harm to the child. However, unlike the general public, experts are attuned to the enduring prevalence of a full range of types of maltreatment, including neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. Experts emphasize that all of these forms of maltreatment are common, but that what is perhaps the most prevalent form of maltreatment, child neglect, gets the least attention from the public and policymakers. Experts also acknowledge that maltreatment can be difficult to define and measure because the same individual frequently experiences multiple forms of maltreatment and because legal and social definitions of these acts vary across time and space. The public, on the other hand, seeks to clearly demarcate what does and does not constitute abusive behavior.
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Gap No. 2: Control and Causality — A Personal/ Rational or Population/System Problem? Public thinking about maltreatment revolves tightly around notions of personal control. In this sense, the public holds highly individualistic models of why maltreatment occurs. One common assumption is that some people just have “sick” and distorted minds. This model is particularly dominant in people’s thinking about the causes of sexual abuse. Relatedly, people make a strong connection between the lack of an adult’s ability to control drug and alcohol use and child abuse. They tend to view these substances as triggers for physical abusive, but they see individuals as responsible for controlling their use. Not surprisingly, members of the public train their attention on parents when thinking about the causes of maltreatment. They often draw on an understanding that many parents, but especially young parents, are unprepared for the responsibilities and challenges of parenting. From this perspective, abuse results not only from a general lack of preparation and willingness to be a parent, but also from a lack of parenting skills. People also reason that neglect is the result of some parents being more concerned about their own wants and needs than those of their children. Finally, there is an assumption that abuse happens because of the existence of a set of features that characterize humans in general — anger, violence, frustration, and impatience. These are all highly individual-level explanations. Although the vast majority of public thinking about the causes of maltreatment focuses at the individual level, members of the public also think about causes of abuse and neglect through
an understanding that communities have decayed, broken down, and no longer play the roles that they once did in the lives of children and families. Drawing on this model, people reason nostalgically that the current prevalence of maltreatment is the result of features that stem from the breakdown of community. Unlike the public, experts consistently focus on factors that create the conditions for maltreatment across a population. Contextual or circumstantial factors such as economic stress, mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, and social isolation are integral factors for experts in understanding why child maltreatment occurs. Notably, both the public and experts focus on issues related to mental illness and drug addiction. However, Although the public focuses on these issues as individual problems, experts focus on the social factors and the lack of supports that precipitate and perpetuate these issues. In short, the public’s patterns of thinking lead them to identify child maltreatment as primarily an individual-level problem, not a social one. These patterns mute attention to the kinds of broader systemic factors that concern experts — economic, social, policy-level, and otherwise. Likewise grounded in their dominant individualist perspective, the public hold a rational actor model that assumes people will change their behavior and decide not mistreat children if given good reasons in the form of better information. According to this logic, if more people were aware of the issue of child maltreatment, they could better protect their children. Likewise, greater awareness might even help adults “catch” themselves before they commit an act of maltreatment. Interestingly, even though people like the idea of awareness, they are largely unable to explain how increasing awareness would lead to less child maltreatment. Indeed, many people explicitly recognize 813
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the paradox inherent in the fact that the field has been increasing awareness for a long time and rates of maltreatment have not gone down. From this same line of thinking, people believe that harsher punishments would lead to better decision-making among abusers and potential abusers. According to this logic, adults would “think twice” before abusing a child if they knew their punishment would be extreme and severe. Expert attention is directed more to interventions that work to address underlying factors: economic stability, family support, substance abuse, stress management, and access to mental health programs. They underscore the importance of evidence-based interventions and explain that not all programs are of equal effectiveness in addressing these issues. They assert that intervention and developmental science can be used to help identify the most promising programs. In general, experts are critical of the ways in which current services are designed and implemented and express particular concern about a lack of theoretical orientation and systematic data collection. Finally, experts share a focus on both prevention and intervention — that is, they place considerable importance on the idea that programs can be put in place which prevent many cases of maltreatment from occurring and agree that services, in cases where maltreatment has occurred, could be effective in secondary prevention and in improving life outcomes for abused children through treatment.
Gap No. 3: Modeling Maltreatment and Class — Upper, Lower or Across Society? Experts are well attuned to the complex set of factors that result in mistreatment across social 814
classes. The public, on the other hand, links child maltreatment to deeply shared, implicit stereotypes about the behaviors and values of social classes. Importantly, this understanding focuses less on the economic pressures associated with class structures and situations than on what are perceived as innate traits of people who comprise these classes. People reason that lower- and working-class parents are most likely to abuse and neglect their children because of a host of characteristics attributed to parents of this class. Meanwhile, upper-class parents are understood as being caught up in money, work, and material pursuits, thus devoting more time to themselves and their careers than to their children. Informants recognized this pattern of behavior as neglect. Reasoning in this way, the most commonly cited examples of neglect are the young lower-class parent who continues to party late at night and leaves her child unattended, and the upper-class mother who shops while leaving her child unattended in the car or who travels and leaves her child with an inattentive nanny. Although more recessive, there are other models about class and maltreatment that, at times, approximate expert understandings. People understand that abuse happens in some cases because adults are “stressed out” (i.e., overworked or frustrated with aspects of their lives) and that they take out these frustrations on children in the form of abuse. Poverty is the most frequent source of stress identified and is particularly dominant in how people think about neglect. Thinking through a focus on poverty, neglect is seen as an unintentional byproduct of the stresses and realities of living with severely limited resources. Importantly, the public lacks a meaningful model for middle-class maltreatment. When pushed to think about this situation, people fall back on their models of prevalence and human
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nature and conclude thinly that “anyone could be an abuser.” Importantly, these models do not direct people to examine the contexts or situations that could drive abuse among middle-class families.
Gap No. 4: Understanding Effects — Emotional or Brain-Based? Both experts and the public recognize that maltreatment results in serious mental and emotional challenges for children. Yet, there are important differences in the way these groups understand the mechanisms by which maltreatment produces these challenges. Members of the public share a clear assumption that children who have been abused often lack the ability to trust in others. People also assume that children who have been mistreated end up lacking confidence and self-worth. Stemming from this lack of trust and selfconfidence, abused children are understood to have poorly developed social skills. As such, people expect them to be less outgoing and sociable, characteristics that negatively affect their chances of success in life. In contrast, experts view the process of maltreatment through a developmental lens and recognize that mistreatment damages the underlying architecture of the developing brain. In this view, maltreatment — especially that which occurs early in a child’s life — disrupts developmental processes and can lead to a wide range of negative social, emotional, cognitive, psychological and physical outcomes. In addition, our research shows that members of the public are unaccustomed to thinking about the effects of neglect more specifically, and lack a meaningful model for thinking about how inattention leads to negative outcomes.
Experts are highly attuned to the damaging effects of neglect across an array of domains — psychological, developmental, medical, educational, financial, and beyond.
Gap No. 5: Explaining Perpetuation — Normalized or Developmental? Both experts and members of the public recognize that abusive and neglectful behavior can become perpetuated and that mistreated children are at increased risk of becoming abusers themselves. The public uses a normalization model to explain this pattern. They reason that exposure to abuse in formative periods of their lives causes abused children to think of abuse as normal. Acting within these parameters of normal, they then commit acts of abuse themselves. Experts explain this trend by recognizing that maltreatment disrupts development and impairs a host of outcomes that can make an abused child more likely to abuse as an adult. In addition to context, experts identify past experience with child abuse and neglect as an important cause of child maltreatment. They explain that individuals who experience severe adversity in their own childhoods are often poorly equipped to regulate their emotions and behaviors when faced with challenging situations with their own children and are thus more likely to commit acts of maltreatment.
Gap No. 6: Scope — Limited or Broad? Members of the public and experts agree that child maltreatment has social implications. The primary difference between these two perspectives is the range of implications iden815
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tified. The public often draws on assumptions that maltreated (but particularly, abused) children are wounded and “damaged” in ways that compromise their functionality in broader society and that they are therefore more likely to strike out through anti-social behaviors. Reasoning in this way, people believe that abused and neglected children are more likely than other children to engage in criminal behavior later in life. In addition, in line with the normalization model, people assume that abused children often become abusers. Maltreatment affects not only the individuals currently being abused, but the individuals with whom they have subsequent contact. In this way, the public model is very much focused on repercussions of maltreatment for children themselves and for others with whom they will have later contact, but they have a very limited sense of its broader social impacts. Experts, on the other hand, identify a broad set of social-level consequences, including impacts on disease prevalence, employment, community development, and educational attainment. Experts explain that child maltreatment not only has negative impacts on the individual, but also has massive social costs. Compared to expert perspectives on social effects, the public underestimates the magnitude and distribution of the cost of child maltreatment.
Gap No. 7: Prevention — Feasible or Not? One of the strongest and most important findings from this research is that people have very limited ability to think that abuse and neglect can be prevented. These acts are perceived to happen “behind closed doors” and be caused by deeply individual and inevitable forces. Outside of stricter punishments and 816
greater parental vigilance, members of the public are unable to think of prevention strategies. They realize that child maltreatment is a pervasive issue in the United Kingdom., but the overwhelming scope of the problem dissuades them from engaging meaningfully in discussions of prevention. Experts speak to a series of systemic and structural approaches across the spectrum of British society and governance that can work to prevent child maltreatment. In line with their focus on context as a causal element, they point to social systems, supports, and structures as vital aspects of successful approaches to addressing child maltreatment issues. The need to improve a number of social services and systems — such as health care, education, and social welfare — is viewed as key in preventing and addressing child maltreatment. More directly, experts emphasize the importance of supporting families at risk for child maltreatment through social support services and direct interventions for cases in which maltreatment is known to have occurred.
Implications and Recommendations These gaps can help us understand why people are “stuck” on prevalence and reprehensibility and are largely unable to engage meaningfully in discussions of policy and programmatic solutions that address child maltreatment. More specifically, the gaps impede the translation of expert knowledge — knowledge that has the power to push the public discourse forward and help members of the public reach a deeper understanding of the causes, effects, and solutions to this issue. As such, we argue that these gaps represent priorities for reframing work.
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Perhaps the most critical gaps concern cause, mechanisms, and effects. Our research shows that members of the British public tend to focus their causal thinking at the individual-level — reasoning that child maltreatment happens because individuals make bad or immoral decisions and choose to maltreat children. This individual focus shifts attention away from the core of the expert’s causal story — that systems-level, contextual factors shape behaviors and underpin the occurrence of child maltreatment. In addition to cause, the public does not immediately understand the mechanisms by which maltreatment translates into negative outcomes. This is especially acute on the issue of neglect, where the idea that not doing something can be as bad, or worse, as doing something is particularly difficult to grasp at a deep level. In addition, although members of the public have a vague connection between maltreatment and negative emotional states, there is little understanding of the ways in which maltreatment disrupts development and of the long-term impacts of such disruptions. Finally, although people readily recognize that maltreatment is wrong, they struggle to appreciate the widespread social impacts that result from maltreatment. These gaps have implications for the public’s engagement with policy-level solutions and explain a more general difficulty in generating or evaluating solutions on this issue. If the public does not understand the role of context in causing maltreatment or how maltreatment translates into negative outcomes, their ability to evaluate potential programs or policies designed to prevent maltreatment or remediate its effects will continue to be limited. Furthermore, if the public continues to see the effects of maltreatment at the individual level, they will be less inclined to support the use of public funds for social policies.
For members of the public and their policymakers to come along with experts and advocates, communications strategies must focus on creating understandings of the causes of and processes through which acts of maltreatment result in large-scale, social effects. With a deeper sense of how issues of maltreatment work — that is, why they occur and how they produce effects — members of the public can more productively engage in discussions of what can, and should, be done to address these issues. This is the key communications challenge on this issue. In short, our research points to the fact that addressing child maltreatment requires an explanatory strategy that focuses squarely on clarifying the ways in which context underpins child maltreatment and how maltreatment disrupts development with wide-ranging and long-term consequences. Explanation will be particularly key to getting more robust discussions and thinking about neglect and prevention into the public discourse. Based on 10 years of research on translating the science of early childhood development in the United States and Canada, FrameWorks, in partnership with the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, has developed an explanatory strategy that moves in this direction by addressing, specifically, the mechanism and effect gaps — explaining how maltreatment disrupts development and leads to social level effects. It is important to note that addressing the cause gaps is essential and will require additional communications research. Because of our existing work on translating the science of childhood development, we focus here on strategies that can be used to explain how maltreatment leads to social level effects. We recently tested the mechanism and effect explanatory strategies in the United Kingdom and found its ability to address these gaps 817
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to be robust — particularly in relation to the process and effects gaps. On the issue of child maltreatment, this strategy employs explanatory metaphors and values to help communicators: (a) explain the processes of early childhood development, (b) explain how abuse and neglect disrupt these processes and lead to negative outcomes, and (c) describe how addressing this issue has collective impacts that extend beyond those immediately and directly affected.
Use Explanatory Metaphors The first element of this strategy is the use of explanatory metaphors. An explanatory metaphor can be thought of as a bridge between expert and non-expert understandings. It presents a concept in a way that members of the public can readily deploy to make sense of new information and renders a complex problem more understandable through a concretizing, simpler, or more familiar analogy or metaphor. By pulling out salient features of a complex or unfamiliar concept and mapping them onto more concrete, immediate, everyday objects, events, or processes, the explanatory metaphor helps people organize information. In so doing, explanatory metaphors can open up new ways of thinking and talking about issues and give people the ability to access and use new information. Our research points to the three powerful explanatory metaphors that tell the story of early childhood development and the impacts of child maltreatment on these processes. These metaphors address different aspects of the process and effects gaps by explaining how actions lead to outcomes. The first of these explanatory metaphors is brain architecture. This explanatory metaphor likens brain development to the construction 818
of a building or house. The basic architecture of the human brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Brain architecture can be used to explain the way in which exposure to severe adversity in a child’s environment has lasting biological effects and thus, why interventions in the lives of children who are experiencing maltreatment should not be delayed. In addition, the metaphor is useful in pointing out the importance of quality materials in getting the foundation right from the start and therefore foregrounding preventative strategies. The second explanatory metaphor, serveand-return, focuses people’s attention on the back-and-forth, reciprocal interaction that is essential for brain development by comparing these interactions to the back-and-forth dynamics of tennis or ping pong. Healthy development occurs when young children serve through babbling, gestures, or facial expressions. Adults return by getting in sync with the child and reciprocating these cues to maintain the interaction and build a relationship. Clarifying this feature of successful development is especially helpful in addressing some of the challenges of communicating about neglect. When contextual factors compromise an adult’s ability to return a child’s serves in interaction, brain development is disrupted, which can have longterm outcomes. Toxic stress, the third explanatory variable, clarifies how experiencing chronic, severe adversity, without access to supportive relationships, can cause a toxic biological stress response that alters the developing brain and has long-term effects on health and wellness. This metaphor is a way to describe the damaging and long-term effects of exposure to stress and of the importance of consistent and appropriate support from adults.
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These tools can be put together into a story that is particularly powerful in addressing the gaps in understanding around neglect. This story might go as follows: Serve-and-return interactions happen when young children and parents or other carers have back-and-forth interactions, responding and reacting to one another. These interactions help build the developing brain’s architecture and create a strong foundation for life. When a child grows up without serve-and-return interactions, their developing brain architecture goes without a vital building material. The absence of these interactions can cause toxic stress and disrupt brain development, which affects things like learning, health, and the ability to cope with stress later on in life. This is why child neglect is such a problem — children do not get the serve-and-return interactions that are such an important material for building solid brain architecture. We need to support parents so that they are able to engage in serve-and-return interactions with their children. If members of the public can understand the mechanism by which maltreatment impacts the developing brain, they will be better able to engage with this issue on a number of levels — from recognizing why abuse and neglect are problematic, to reasoning productively about effective solutions to this issue.
Employ Values In addition to explanatory metaphors, values are an important part of addressing the challenges of communicating about child maltreatment. Values are enduring beliefs that orient individuals’ attitudes and behavior. Incorporating values in communications gives
audiences a clear sense of what is at stake, which helps motivate issue support and engagement. On the issue of child maltreatment in the United Kingdom, values can be used to overcome the strong sense of fatalism that characterizes public thinking and to focus attention on collective responsibility and impacts. We have not yet conducted a full set of experimental studies exploring the effects of values on public understanding of this issue in the United Kingdom. Preliminary testing, however, points to the potential of appealing to the value of social responsibility as a way to lift public support for the kinds of policies that child maltreatment advocates wish to advance — including increasing resources for community programs designed to prevent child maltreatment and for research and program evaluation to improve the efficacy of existing programs. Social responsibility is the idea that, as members of a society, we have a responsibility to address child abuse and neglect. Our collective welfare depends on us taking this responsibility to children seriously and meeting our social obligations. Our research suggests that those communicating about child maltreatment in the United Kingdom would be well advised to shift their attention from the current focus on communicating prevalence and immorality and focus their resources on explanation to improve public understanding. In addition to the explanatory framing recommendations, our research, and that of other social scientists studying framing, points to a set of current strategies that may be impeding the ultimate goals of child maltreatment experts and advocates. The following are practices that our research suggests communicators should avoid. The first practice that our research suggests communicators should avoid is appealing to improving health. Child advocates, specifically 819
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those working toward greater implementation of preventative policies, often argue that addressing child maltreatment is an important investment in a healthy society. Our research shows, however, that such public policies and solutions are not advanced by the health value. This finding results primarily from the value’s strong effect in focusing attention on individual choices and behaviors and distracting people from systems, policies, and prevention. Another practice that should be avoided is appealing to fairness for vulnerable children. The trope of the vulnerable child, or the idea that children living in poverty are at greater risk for maltreatment, is typically combined with a fairness value, or an appeal to level the playing field for these vulnerable children. The image is typically one of leveling the playing field for vulnerable children by providing them with access to the same high-quality childhood programs that wealthier families can afford. In our experimental work, this framing strategy showed no effects in increasing support for child abuse and neglect policies and, in some cases, depressed support for target policies and programs.
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Finally, there is substantial evidence in our work to suggest that simply providing facts (i.e., just the facts) about the prevalence of acts of maltreatment and comments about the reprehensibility of those acts is unlikely to move public support. Instead, this strategy furthers the public’s sense that little can be done about the issue rendering it difficult for communicators to convince the public that there are meaningful actions that can be taken to address this issue. The research strongly suggests that communicators working to address child maltreatment refocus their attention and resources on specific aspects of public understanding that impede those efforts. The explanatory strategy we lay out here provides cognitive tools that people can use to understand key aspects of this issue. Using this strategy, communicators can begin to bridge gaps in understanding and take the next step in improving child outcomes. Keywords: strategic communications; child advocacy; public perceptions of child maltreatment; violence against children
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Suggestions for Further Reading Bales, S. N. (2009). Summary research memo: FrameWorks’ analysis of frame effects on PCAA policies and implications for messaging. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. Retrieved from http://frameworksinstitute.org Holland, D. C., & Quinn, N. (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kendall-Taylor, N., Erard, M., & Haydon, A. (2013). The use of metaphor as a science communication tool: Air traffic control for your brain. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 41, 412–433. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2013.836678 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Lindland, E., & Kendall-Taylor, N. (2012). Sensical translations: Three case studies in applied cognitive communications. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 36, 45–67. Lindland, E., & Kendall-Taylor, N. (2013). “No idea how that works or what you would do about it . . .”: Mapping the gaps between expert and public understandings of child maltreatment. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. Nyhan, B., Reifler, J., Richey, S., & Freed, G. L. (2014). Effective messages in vaccine promotion: A randomized trial. Pediatrics, http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-2365 (Advance online publication) Shonkoff, J., & Bales, S. (2011). Science does not speak for itself: Translating child development research for the public and its policymakers. Child Development, 82, 17–32. Shore, B. (1998). What culture means, how culture means (Heinz Werner Lecture Series). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
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Beyond Prevalence: An Explanatory Approach to Reframing Child Maltreatment in the United Kingdom Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor, ∗ Eric Lindland, and Moira O’Neil The FrameWorks Institute
Kate Stanley The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
The most prevalent form of maltreatment, child neglect, gets the least attention from the public and policymakers
M
embers of the British public have come to recognize that child maltreatment is both highly prevalent and morally reprehensible. This recognition is no doubt due, in part, to effective advocacy and campaigns that have used statistics and a vivid imagery to communicate the prevalence
and reprehensibility of acts of child maltreatment. The question is whether the success of these efforts has resulted in public mobilization around policies that have the potential to prevent and address child maltreatment in the United Kingdom, or if they have left the public stuck in an overwhelming and debilitating
∗ Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Nathaniel Kendall-Taylor, The Frameworks Institute, 1776 Eye Street, 9th Floor, Washington, DC 20006. Electronic mail may be sent to [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2014.04.019 0145-2134/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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sense of the problem at hand. Our research suggests the latter. In 2012, the FrameWorks Institute, in a partnership with the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), began a long-term communications project. We began this research with the purpose of designing and empirically testing strategies that could be used to communicate more effectively about issues of child maltreatment. The goal was for the communication strategies developed to have the demonstrated ability to generate a broader public understanding of the issue of child maltreatment and, in turn, increase public support for the policies and programs necessary to improve the lives of children. Our research has found that several key assumptions that have driven communications practices around child maltreatment in the past are no longer valid. The British public has been convinced that child maltreatment is prevalent, reprehensible, and that it is a major social problem. These positions evidence the success of past communications efforts while simultaneously suggest that future gains in public understanding and issue support will require a new communications agenda and a different set of strategies. Importantly, our research shows that aspects of public understanding — including conceptions of the causes of abusive and neglectful behaviors, the effects that these behaviors have on children and society, and the solutions to effectively address child maltreatment — continue to impede the efforts of organizations working to decrease rates of maltreatment, assist those children who have experienced these actions, and improve outcomes. In this article, we demonstrate how explaining critical aspects of the issue constitutes the next frontier of efforts to use communications to address issues of child maltreatment in the United Kingdom.
It should come as no surprise that the public draws on a powerful set of beliefs and assumptions to reason about the issue of child maltreatment. Through in-depth interviews and experimental survey research, we find that members of the British public draw on a complicated set of cultural models — implicit, but shared, understandings, assumptions and patterns of reasoning — to think about what maltreatment is, why it happens, what effects it has, and what can, and should, be done about it. It should also come as no surprise that those working on the science, policy, and practice of child maltreatment have their own ways of understanding these issues. By reviewing relevant literature and conducting a series of interviews with child maltreatment experts, we distilled a high-level consensus account of the expert perspective on child maltreatment. This account constitutes what we call “the untranslated core story of child maltreatment,” and represents the core of what experts and advocates wish to communicate about the issue. Those familiar with this issue will also not find it surprising that there are substantial gaps in understanding between public and expert perspectives. We focus here on these gaps, as they point to the main challenges that communicators must address in effectively framing this issue. One of our most important findings is that members of the public lack a way of connecting acts and effects of maltreatment. This is largely because of a thin understanding of the ways in which maltreatment undermines children’s neurological, psychological and cognitive development. This gap in understanding hampers the public’s ability to think about how to most effectively address child maltreatment and improve outcomes for children. 811
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Our research suggests the importance of telling new stories to address these gaps and fill in perspectives currently missing from public thinking. Delivered in an appropriate dose, these stories can expose the British public to new information that can be used in reasoning about the most effective and appropriate ways to address child maltreatment. In addition to laying out a map of the challenges communicators face on this issue, we suggest an explanatory strategy that communicators can use to build public support for solutions that have the greatest potential to improve the lives of children in the United Kingdom.
Gaps Between Expert and Public Thinking Our research revealed the following gaps between public and expert thinking about child maltreatment in the United Kingdom.
Gap No. 1: Defining the Problem — Sensational Stories or an Enduring Challenge? Members of the public have a deep understanding that children are to be cared for, nurtured, and protected. Maltreatment is understood as a violation of this fundamental understanding of children. This conception of child maltreatment, in theory, encompasses all of its forms. However, members of the public simultaneously hold definitive ideas about what kinds of abuse are most damaging to children. Sexual and physical abuse dominate people’s thinking about child maltreatment. Neglect is less top-of-mind, is typically associated with nutritional and hygienic issues, and is not perceived to be “as damaging” to children. 812
The foregrounding of physical and sexual abuse in people’s thinking occurs for several reasons. First, public perception of maltreatment is driven in part by episodic media sensationalism of worst-case scenarios that focus primarily on physical and sexual abuse. Second, people define child maltreatment based on whether or not harm is done to the child and whether or not this harm is intentional. They use intentionality as a key criterion in attempts to draw a clear line between what is and is not maltreatment. Because the public defines neglect as unintentional, it is outside of the archetypal classification of maltreatment. The public also recognizes that acts of maltreatment vary in the extent to which they are abusive or neglectful and use intensity, frequency, and duration to place acts of maltreatment on a mild-to-severe continuum. Based on this recognition, neglect tends to fall on the mild end of the continuum. At the most basic level, experts define maltreatment in similar ways as the public — interactions between a child and an adult that result in significant harm to the child. However, unlike the general public, experts are attuned to the enduring prevalence of a full range of types of maltreatment, including neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. Experts emphasize that all of these forms of maltreatment are common, but that what is perhaps the most prevalent form of maltreatment, child neglect, gets the least attention from the public and policymakers. Experts also acknowledge that maltreatment can be difficult to define and measure because the same individual frequently experiences multiple forms of maltreatment and because legal and social definitions of these acts vary across time and space. The public, on the other hand, seeks to clearly demarcate what does and does not constitute abusive behavior.
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Gap No. 2: Control and Causality — A Personal/ Rational or Population/System Problem? Public thinking about maltreatment revolves tightly around notions of personal control. In this sense, the public holds highly individualistic models of why maltreatment occurs. One common assumption is that some people just have “sick” and distorted minds. This model is particularly dominant in people’s thinking about the causes of sexual abuse. Relatedly, people make a strong connection between the lack of an adult’s ability to control drug and alcohol use and child abuse. They tend to view these substances as triggers for physical abusive, but they see individuals as responsible for controlling their use. Not surprisingly, members of the public train their attention on parents when thinking about the causes of maltreatment. They often draw on an understanding that many parents, but especially young parents, are unprepared for the responsibilities and challenges of parenting. From this perspective, abuse results not only from a general lack of preparation and willingness to be a parent, but also from a lack of parenting skills. People also reason that neglect is the result of some parents being more concerned about their own wants and needs than those of their children. Finally, there is an assumption that abuse happens because of the existence of a set of features that characterize humans in general — anger, violence, frustration, and impatience. These are all highly individual-level explanations. Although the vast majority of public thinking about the causes of maltreatment focuses at the individual level, members of the public also think about causes of abuse and neglect through
an understanding that communities have decayed, broken down, and no longer play the roles that they once did in the lives of children and families. Drawing on this model, people reason nostalgically that the current prevalence of maltreatment is the result of features that stem from the breakdown of community. Unlike the public, experts consistently focus on factors that create the conditions for maltreatment across a population. Contextual or circumstantial factors such as economic stress, mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, and social isolation are integral factors for experts in understanding why child maltreatment occurs. Notably, both the public and experts focus on issues related to mental illness and drug addiction. However, Although the public focuses on these issues as individual problems, experts focus on the social factors and the lack of supports that precipitate and perpetuate these issues. In short, the public’s patterns of thinking lead them to identify child maltreatment as primarily an individual-level problem, not a social one. These patterns mute attention to the kinds of broader systemic factors that concern experts — economic, social, policy-level, and otherwise. Likewise grounded in their dominant individualist perspective, the public hold a rational actor model that assumes people will change their behavior and decide not mistreat children if given good reasons in the form of better information. According to this logic, if more people were aware of the issue of child maltreatment, they could better protect their children. Likewise, greater awareness might even help adults “catch” themselves before they commit an act of maltreatment. Interestingly, even though people like the idea of awareness, they are largely unable to explain how increasing awareness would lead to less child maltreatment. Indeed, many people explicitly recognize 813
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the paradox inherent in the fact that the field has been increasing awareness for a long time and rates of maltreatment have not gone down. From this same line of thinking, people believe that harsher punishments would lead to better decision-making among abusers and potential abusers. According to this logic, adults would “think twice” before abusing a child if they knew their punishment would be extreme and severe. Expert attention is directed more to interventions that work to address underlying factors: economic stability, family support, substance abuse, stress management, and access to mental health programs. They underscore the importance of evidence-based interventions and explain that not all programs are of equal effectiveness in addressing these issues. They assert that intervention and developmental science can be used to help identify the most promising programs. In general, experts are critical of the ways in which current services are designed and implemented and express particular concern about a lack of theoretical orientation and systematic data collection. Finally, experts share a focus on both prevention and intervention — that is, they place considerable importance on the idea that programs can be put in place which prevent many cases of maltreatment from occurring and agree that services, in cases where maltreatment has occurred, could be effective in secondary prevention and in improving life outcomes for abused children through treatment.
Gap No. 3: Modeling Maltreatment and Class — Upper, Lower or Across Society? Experts are well attuned to the complex set of factors that result in mistreatment across social 814
classes. The public, on the other hand, links child maltreatment to deeply shared, implicit stereotypes about the behaviors and values of social classes. Importantly, this understanding focuses less on the economic pressures associated with class structures and situations than on what are perceived as innate traits of people who comprise these classes. People reason that lower- and working-class parents are most likely to abuse and neglect their children because of a host of characteristics attributed to parents of this class. Meanwhile, upper-class parents are understood as being caught up in money, work, and material pursuits, thus devoting more time to themselves and their careers than to their children. Informants recognized this pattern of behavior as neglect. Reasoning in this way, the most commonly cited examples of neglect are the young lower-class parent who continues to party late at night and leaves her child unattended, and the upper-class mother who shops while leaving her child unattended in the car or who travels and leaves her child with an inattentive nanny. Although more recessive, there are other models about class and maltreatment that, at times, approximate expert understandings. People understand that abuse happens in some cases because adults are “stressed out” (i.e., overworked or frustrated with aspects of their lives) and that they take out these frustrations on children in the form of abuse. Poverty is the most frequent source of stress identified and is particularly dominant in how people think about neglect. Thinking through a focus on poverty, neglect is seen as an unintentional byproduct of the stresses and realities of living with severely limited resources. Importantly, the public lacks a meaningful model for middle-class maltreatment. When pushed to think about this situation, people fall back on their models of prevalence and human
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nature and conclude thinly that “anyone could be an abuser.” Importantly, these models do not direct people to examine the contexts or situations that could drive abuse among middle-class families.
Gap No. 4: Understanding Effects — Emotional or Brain-Based? Both experts and the public recognize that maltreatment results in serious mental and emotional challenges for children. Yet, there are important differences in the way these groups understand the mechanisms by which maltreatment produces these challenges. Members of the public share a clear assumption that children who have been abused often lack the ability to trust in others. People also assume that children who have been mistreated end up lacking confidence and self-worth. Stemming from this lack of trust and selfconfidence, abused children are understood to have poorly developed social skills. As such, people expect them to be less outgoing and sociable, characteristics that negatively affect their chances of success in life. In contrast, experts view the process of maltreatment through a developmental lens and recognize that mistreatment damages the underlying architecture of the developing brain. In this view, maltreatment — especially that which occurs early in a child’s life — disrupts developmental processes and can lead to a wide range of negative social, emotional, cognitive, psychological and physical outcomes. In addition, our research shows that members of the public are unaccustomed to thinking about the effects of neglect more specifically, and lack a meaningful model for thinking about how inattention leads to negative outcomes.
Experts are highly attuned to the damaging effects of neglect across an array of domains — psychological, developmental, medical, educational, financial, and beyond.
Gap No. 5: Explaining Perpetuation — Normalized or Developmental? Both experts and members of the public recognize that abusive and neglectful behavior can become perpetuated and that mistreated children are at increased risk of becoming abusers themselves. The public uses a normalization model to explain this pattern. They reason that exposure to abuse in formative periods of their lives causes abused children to think of abuse as normal. Acting within these parameters of normal, they then commit acts of abuse themselves. Experts explain this trend by recognizing that maltreatment disrupts development and impairs a host of outcomes that can make an abused child more likely to abuse as an adult. In addition to context, experts identify past experience with child abuse and neglect as an important cause of child maltreatment. They explain that individuals who experience severe adversity in their own childhoods are often poorly equipped to regulate their emotions and behaviors when faced with challenging situations with their own children and are thus more likely to commit acts of maltreatment.
Gap No. 6: Scope — Limited or Broad? Members of the public and experts agree that child maltreatment has social implications. The primary difference between these two perspectives is the range of implications iden815
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tified. The public often draws on assumptions that maltreated (but particularly, abused) children are wounded and “damaged” in ways that compromise their functionality in broader society and that they are therefore more likely to strike out through anti-social behaviors. Reasoning in this way, people believe that abused and neglected children are more likely than other children to engage in criminal behavior later in life. In addition, in line with the normalization model, people assume that abused children often become abusers. Maltreatment affects not only the individuals currently being abused, but the individuals with whom they have subsequent contact. In this way, the public model is very much focused on repercussions of maltreatment for children themselves and for others with whom they will have later contact, but they have a very limited sense of its broader social impacts. Experts, on the other hand, identify a broad set of social-level consequences, including impacts on disease prevalence, employment, community development, and educational attainment. Experts explain that child maltreatment not only has negative impacts on the individual, but also has massive social costs. Compared to expert perspectives on social effects, the public underestimates the magnitude and distribution of the cost of child maltreatment.
Gap No. 7: Prevention — Feasible or Not? One of the strongest and most important findings from this research is that people have very limited ability to think that abuse and neglect can be prevented. These acts are perceived to happen “behind closed doors” and be caused by deeply individual and inevitable forces. Outside of stricter punishments and 816
greater parental vigilance, members of the public are unable to think of prevention strategies. They realize that child maltreatment is a pervasive issue in the United Kingdom., but the overwhelming scope of the problem dissuades them from engaging meaningfully in discussions of prevention. Experts speak to a series of systemic and structural approaches across the spectrum of British society and governance that can work to prevent child maltreatment. In line with their focus on context as a causal element, they point to social systems, supports, and structures as vital aspects of successful approaches to addressing child maltreatment issues. The need to improve a number of social services and systems — such as health care, education, and social welfare — is viewed as key in preventing and addressing child maltreatment. More directly, experts emphasize the importance of supporting families at risk for child maltreatment through social support services and direct interventions for cases in which maltreatment is known to have occurred.
Implications and Recommendations These gaps can help us understand why people are “stuck” on prevalence and reprehensibility and are largely unable to engage meaningfully in discussions of policy and programmatic solutions that address child maltreatment. More specifically, the gaps impede the translation of expert knowledge — knowledge that has the power to push the public discourse forward and help members of the public reach a deeper understanding of the causes, effects, and solutions to this issue. As such, we argue that these gaps represent priorities for reframing work.
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Perhaps the most critical gaps concern cause, mechanisms, and effects. Our research shows that members of the British public tend to focus their causal thinking at the individual-level — reasoning that child maltreatment happens because individuals make bad or immoral decisions and choose to maltreat children. This individual focus shifts attention away from the core of the expert’s causal story — that systems-level, contextual factors shape behaviors and underpin the occurrence of child maltreatment. In addition to cause, the public does not immediately understand the mechanisms by which maltreatment translates into negative outcomes. This is especially acute on the issue of neglect, where the idea that not doing something can be as bad, or worse, as doing something is particularly difficult to grasp at a deep level. In addition, although members of the public have a vague connection between maltreatment and negative emotional states, there is little understanding of the ways in which maltreatment disrupts development and of the long-term impacts of such disruptions. Finally, although people readily recognize that maltreatment is wrong, they struggle to appreciate the widespread social impacts that result from maltreatment. These gaps have implications for the public’s engagement with policy-level solutions and explain a more general difficulty in generating or evaluating solutions on this issue. If the public does not understand the role of context in causing maltreatment or how maltreatment translates into negative outcomes, their ability to evaluate potential programs or policies designed to prevent maltreatment or remediate its effects will continue to be limited. Furthermore, if the public continues to see the effects of maltreatment at the individual level, they will be less inclined to support the use of public funds for social policies.
For members of the public and their policymakers to come along with experts and advocates, communications strategies must focus on creating understandings of the causes of and processes through which acts of maltreatment result in large-scale, social effects. With a deeper sense of how issues of maltreatment work — that is, why they occur and how they produce effects — members of the public can more productively engage in discussions of what can, and should, be done to address these issues. This is the key communications challenge on this issue. In short, our research points to the fact that addressing child maltreatment requires an explanatory strategy that focuses squarely on clarifying the ways in which context underpins child maltreatment and how maltreatment disrupts development with wide-ranging and long-term consequences. Explanation will be particularly key to getting more robust discussions and thinking about neglect and prevention into the public discourse. Based on 10 years of research on translating the science of early childhood development in the United States and Canada, FrameWorks, in partnership with the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, has developed an explanatory strategy that moves in this direction by addressing, specifically, the mechanism and effect gaps — explaining how maltreatment disrupts development and leads to social level effects. It is important to note that addressing the cause gaps is essential and will require additional communications research. Because of our existing work on translating the science of childhood development, we focus here on strategies that can be used to explain how maltreatment leads to social level effects. We recently tested the mechanism and effect explanatory strategies in the United Kingdom and found its ability to address these gaps 817
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to be robust — particularly in relation to the process and effects gaps. On the issue of child maltreatment, this strategy employs explanatory metaphors and values to help communicators: (a) explain the processes of early childhood development, (b) explain how abuse and neglect disrupt these processes and lead to negative outcomes, and (c) describe how addressing this issue has collective impacts that extend beyond those immediately and directly affected.
Use Explanatory Metaphors The first element of this strategy is the use of explanatory metaphors. An explanatory metaphor can be thought of as a bridge between expert and non-expert understandings. It presents a concept in a way that members of the public can readily deploy to make sense of new information and renders a complex problem more understandable through a concretizing, simpler, or more familiar analogy or metaphor. By pulling out salient features of a complex or unfamiliar concept and mapping them onto more concrete, immediate, everyday objects, events, or processes, the explanatory metaphor helps people organize information. In so doing, explanatory metaphors can open up new ways of thinking and talking about issues and give people the ability to access and use new information. Our research points to the three powerful explanatory metaphors that tell the story of early childhood development and the impacts of child maltreatment on these processes. These metaphors address different aspects of the process and effects gaps by explaining how actions lead to outcomes. The first of these explanatory metaphors is brain architecture. This explanatory metaphor likens brain development to the construction 818
of a building or house. The basic architecture of the human brain is constructed through an ongoing process that begins before birth and continues into adulthood. Brain architecture can be used to explain the way in which exposure to severe adversity in a child’s environment has lasting biological effects and thus, why interventions in the lives of children who are experiencing maltreatment should not be delayed. In addition, the metaphor is useful in pointing out the importance of quality materials in getting the foundation right from the start and therefore foregrounding preventative strategies. The second explanatory metaphor, serveand-return, focuses people’s attention on the back-and-forth, reciprocal interaction that is essential for brain development by comparing these interactions to the back-and-forth dynamics of tennis or ping pong. Healthy development occurs when young children serve through babbling, gestures, or facial expressions. Adults return by getting in sync with the child and reciprocating these cues to maintain the interaction and build a relationship. Clarifying this feature of successful development is especially helpful in addressing some of the challenges of communicating about neglect. When contextual factors compromise an adult’s ability to return a child’s serves in interaction, brain development is disrupted, which can have longterm outcomes. Toxic stress, the third explanatory variable, clarifies how experiencing chronic, severe adversity, without access to supportive relationships, can cause a toxic biological stress response that alters the developing brain and has long-term effects on health and wellness. This metaphor is a way to describe the damaging and long-term effects of exposure to stress and of the importance of consistent and appropriate support from adults.
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These tools can be put together into a story that is particularly powerful in addressing the gaps in understanding around neglect. This story might go as follows: Serve-and-return interactions happen when young children and parents or other carers have back-and-forth interactions, responding and reacting to one another. These interactions help build the developing brain’s architecture and create a strong foundation for life. When a child grows up without serve-and-return interactions, their developing brain architecture goes without a vital building material. The absence of these interactions can cause toxic stress and disrupt brain development, which affects things like learning, health, and the ability to cope with stress later on in life. This is why child neglect is such a problem — children do not get the serve-and-return interactions that are such an important material for building solid brain architecture. We need to support parents so that they are able to engage in serve-and-return interactions with their children. If members of the public can understand the mechanism by which maltreatment impacts the developing brain, they will be better able to engage with this issue on a number of levels — from recognizing why abuse and neglect are problematic, to reasoning productively about effective solutions to this issue.
Employ Values In addition to explanatory metaphors, values are an important part of addressing the challenges of communicating about child maltreatment. Values are enduring beliefs that orient individuals’ attitudes and behavior. Incorporating values in communications gives
audiences a clear sense of what is at stake, which helps motivate issue support and engagement. On the issue of child maltreatment in the United Kingdom, values can be used to overcome the strong sense of fatalism that characterizes public thinking and to focus attention on collective responsibility and impacts. We have not yet conducted a full set of experimental studies exploring the effects of values on public understanding of this issue in the United Kingdom. Preliminary testing, however, points to the potential of appealing to the value of social responsibility as a way to lift public support for the kinds of policies that child maltreatment advocates wish to advance — including increasing resources for community programs designed to prevent child maltreatment and for research and program evaluation to improve the efficacy of existing programs. Social responsibility is the idea that, as members of a society, we have a responsibility to address child abuse and neglect. Our collective welfare depends on us taking this responsibility to children seriously and meeting our social obligations. Our research suggests that those communicating about child maltreatment in the United Kingdom would be well advised to shift their attention from the current focus on communicating prevalence and immorality and focus their resources on explanation to improve public understanding. In addition to the explanatory framing recommendations, our research, and that of other social scientists studying framing, points to a set of current strategies that may be impeding the ultimate goals of child maltreatment experts and advocates. The following are practices that our research suggests communicators should avoid. The first practice that our research suggests communicators should avoid is appealing to improving health. Child advocates, specifically 819
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those working toward greater implementation of preventative policies, often argue that addressing child maltreatment is an important investment in a healthy society. Our research shows, however, that such public policies and solutions are not advanced by the health value. This finding results primarily from the value’s strong effect in focusing attention on individual choices and behaviors and distracting people from systems, policies, and prevention. Another practice that should be avoided is appealing to fairness for vulnerable children. The trope of the vulnerable child, or the idea that children living in poverty are at greater risk for maltreatment, is typically combined with a fairness value, or an appeal to level the playing field for these vulnerable children. The image is typically one of leveling the playing field for vulnerable children by providing them with access to the same high-quality childhood programs that wealthier families can afford. In our experimental work, this framing strategy showed no effects in increasing support for child abuse and neglect policies and, in some cases, depressed support for target policies and programs.
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Finally, there is substantial evidence in our work to suggest that simply providing facts (i.e., just the facts) about the prevalence of acts of maltreatment and comments about the reprehensibility of those acts is unlikely to move public support. Instead, this strategy furthers the public’s sense that little can be done about the issue rendering it difficult for communicators to convince the public that there are meaningful actions that can be taken to address this issue. The research strongly suggests that communicators working to address child maltreatment refocus their attention and resources on specific aspects of public understanding that impede those efforts. The explanatory strategy we lay out here provides cognitive tools that people can use to understand key aspects of this issue. Using this strategy, communicators can begin to bridge gaps in understanding and take the next step in improving child outcomes. Keywords: strategic communications; child advocacy; public perceptions of child maltreatment; violence against children
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Suggestions for Further Reading Bales, S. N. (2009). Summary research memo: FrameWorks’ analysis of frame effects on PCAA policies and implications for messaging. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. Retrieved from http://frameworksinstitute.org Holland, D. C., & Quinn, N. (1987). Cultural models in language and thought. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Kendall-Taylor, N., Erard, M., & Haydon, A. (2013). The use of metaphor as a science communication tool: Air traffic control for your brain. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 41, 412–433. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2013.836678 Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Lindland, E., & Kendall-Taylor, N. (2012). Sensical translations: Three case studies in applied cognitive communications. Annals of Anthropological Practice, 36, 45–67. Lindland, E., & Kendall-Taylor, N. (2013). “No idea how that works or what you would do about it . . .”: Mapping the gaps between expert and public understandings of child maltreatment. Washington, DC: FrameWorks Institute. Nyhan, B., Reifler, J., Richey, S., & Freed, G. L. (2014). Effective messages in vaccine promotion: A randomized trial. Pediatrics, http://dx.doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-2365 (Advance online publication) Shonkoff, J., & Bales, S. (2011). Science does not speak for itself: Translating child development research for the public and its policymakers. Child Development, 82, 17–32. Shore, B. (1998). What culture means, how culture means (Heinz Werner Lecture Series). Worcester, MA: Clark University Press.
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