Most of us want the women and girls in our communities to follow their dreams and live fulfilling lives free from fear. And now they have more choices than ever. Whether they want to study and have a career, start their own business, have a family and build meaningful relationships, every woman and girl should be able to choose what kind of life they want to lead.

But today, one in three women and girls has already experienced violence like being stalked, groped, harassed, humiliated by sexual remarks, or worse. This can leave them with long-term physical and mental scars that take away their freedom and lust for life, destroying their relationships and careers as a result.

As activists, we know there are structural causes at the root of gender-based violence. Women and men continue to feel trapped in outdated stereotypes that make this kind of violence more likely, our police and judges don’t get the training they need to keep victims safe, and our leaders won’t fund the services women and girls need to escape, recover and build a normal life.

Although most people favour stamping out violence against women, they don’t really understand its causes. People tend to think that societal problems are rooted in individual behaviour and are less aware of structural causes. It’s highly likely that our audiences think that tackling violence against women requires supporting victims to seek help, intervening if violence is witnessed and condemning perpetrators. And the way existing campaigns on the topic talk about the issue - focusing on individual victims, witnesses, and perpetrators - is likely to reinforce this thinking.

While it’s important to encourage changes in individuals’ behaviour, it’s not enough by itself. We need to build public understanding of and support for tackling structural causes and improving measures to protect victims and repair the damage done in the long term.

As well as placing too little emphasis on the structural causes and solutions to gender-based violence, campaigners message in a way that is unlikely to motivate audiences outside our existing supporters. We focus most of our communications efforts on talking about the harms, without explaining why they’re happening and giving our vision of the future to motivate our audience to support the changes we need and believe they are possible. And when we talk about the harms, we do so in a way that makes people outside our supporters turn away, or overwhelms them, for example by using shocking imagery and scary statistics. This makes our audience feel uncomfortable and demotivates them by creating the impression that violence against women is a problem that is too big and complicated to solve.

This is why Liberties has created a new messaging guide that campaigners can use to grow support among public audiences for measures to prevent, intervene in and repair the damage caused by gender-based violence - Safe and Free: A Messaging Guide for Communicators Fighting Violence Against Women

The guide:

• Highlights the most common messaging mistakes you might be making when talking to a public audience,
• Explains why these bad habits don't work or even backfire
• Tells you how to build a narrative that builds public support for a violence-free life for women, including how to respond to gendered disinformation and improve their understanding of target audiences
• Provides sample messaging that you can adapt to your own campaigns.

The messaging guide complements our free course, Foundations of Persuasive Messaging, available on Liberties’ e-learning platform, Knowledge Hub.

This guide has been written in consultation with the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE) in the context of EIGE’s Communications Lab project. This project explores, through workshops with experts, techniques to improve communication on gender equality and, more specifically, gender based violence.