The final form of the campaign seems quite simple and obvious now, but it took us a long process to settle on this idea and develop it. Initially our group researched and prepared a brief for an anti-rape campaign, and we were surprised but also excited when we had to swap briefs with another group. Initially we had no ideas for an effective anti-trafficking campaign, and had trouble formulating and adopting a positive message (‘Enjoy sex, report slavery’) instead of a negative one (‘You should be ashamed of using prostitutes’). The brief (a document prepared earlier by another group specifying the main message, target audience, and tone of the campaign) demanded a positive, non-judgmental tone of voice, and since many of our initial ideas played on negative feelings such as shame, we had to let go of our early approach. We didn’t do so easily: it took several sessions where Marek Dorobisz, Creative Director of the advertising agency Ars Thanea, consistently pointed out that we had the wrong approach before we changed course. Even after we did, we struggled to find the right tone of voice which would not criticize but would also not promote the use of prostitutes. We had to walk a thin line. We also had difficulty formulating a non-judgmental campaign because we still find it difficult not to be judgmental of men who use prostitutes, and since the issue provokes strong negative emotions it was hard for the group to look at prostitution from an objective distance.
These kinds of difficulties also gave us the most important lessons from this process. This work forced us, often reluctantly, to break out of the usual mode of human rights thinking, which, at least from what we know after our academic experiences, focuses on extensive research that tries to understand all the nuances and sides of very complex issues, and sympathizes with the victims of human rights abuses while condemning the perpetrators. As we learned, this approach is very good for understanding the issue at hand, but it has its limitations when planning a campaign of focused action. The wider public outside the human rights NGO world has little interest in understanding human rights issues in all their deep complexity. PhD dissertations do not have popular appeal and rarely make any impact outside of academic and policy circles. If we want to affect real social change, we need to communicate with the public to spark changes in social behavior. Human rights works must bridge the divide between research and popular interest. That means we have to simplify complex issues, and find simple messages that speak to the core of each problem. Doing so often goes against our usual tendencies after our training in academic human rights research. After this project we realize that a simple, consistent message transported in a targeted campaign can actually make a positive difference in a human rights issue. This isn’t to say that the campaign doesn’t require lots of careful thought, just that all the difficult thinking is hidden in the background, in all the decisions about who to target, what core message to transport, how to transport a difficult message in an engaging way, etc. Social campaigns might have a simple message, but to target them at the right people in the right way requires a lot of though and creativity.
Working on the campaign also forced us to think our way into the head of the perpetrator instead of the victim, in this case the user of prostitutes rather than the prostitute. Again, this was not easy. We had to think very carefully about why the issue of sex trafficking exists, about where the demand for prostitutes comes from and about who uses prostitutes. Human rights research on our topic focused a lot on the experiences of trafficked women, but not on the men who use prostitutes, and as a result this research suggested solutions focused on empowering and helping the victims rather than changing the behavior of the perpetrators. Of course there is nothing wrong with this, but it prevents people from seeing possible solutions from the perpetrator side of the issue. By trying to see the sex trafficking problem from the perspective of the common man who cares primarily about his own fulfillment, we were able to formulate a campaign that could target their behavior and recruit them to help in the fight against sex slavery. Simply writing human rights reports would not help us do this to the same degree. We learned to see human rights issues from a broader set of perspectives, and in doing so we learned that by thinking openly and creatively we can approach old problems with new solutions that nobody else might have seen before.
Barbara Marlewska
Iwa Kos
Roman Gautam
Olena Sharvan
