Changing the conversation around domestic violence

Domestic violence impacts more than 50% of adults. But, because it often happens in private spaces, domestic violence is treated as an outlier issue that is poorly understood. In the face of danger and stigma, survivors often stay silent, and many people don’t recognize or speak up about domestic violence in their relationships and communities until it escalates. The general public continues to understand the issue in a sensationalized and oversimplified way. We continue to over-rely on solutions like separation and criminal punishment that don’t address the roots of domestic violence.

In light of these realities, the Communications team of Blue Shield of California Foundation, connected with Daylight to use Systems Thinking to help understand and shift the conversation around domestic violence. The Foundation is an independent non-profit with the goal of increasing health equity and ending domestic violence in California; it is the largest private funder of domestic violence healing and prevention programs in the state. The Communications team recognized that rather than solely focusing on uplifting the strategies and programs of the Foundation, they could help fulfill the core mission by targeting our flawed societal conversation directly.

In collaboration with 20+ diverse experts, we created a systems map that describes the factors shaping our collective conversation, and the possible opportunities for change. When our society more accurately perceives domestic violence to be a pervasive, cyclical and preventable health equity issue, we will be better able to address and ultimately end it. The systems map has led to several prototypes aimed at creating this shift—with more on the horizon.

The Daylight team has deep expertise in Systems Thinking, but it is typically our clients and their networks who hold the deep content and landscape knowledge that is vital to mapping a system accurately and comprehensively. The magic lies in marrying these two kinds of expertise. Our process utilized the Systems Thinking Toolkit that Daylight helped The Omidyar Group create. It pairs Systems Thinking with Participatory Design to facilitate a truly collaborative creation of knowledge.

We started this project by interviewing 20+ diverse internal and external stakeholders. Those conversations provided us with both immersion into the topic, and enough familiarity with each individual expert to elevate our ongoing collaboration. The synthesis of those conversations underscored how our cultural norms, media, societal narratives, and structural elements help maintain an unacceptable status quo, and gave us the initial insights that would ultimately be woven together into the Systems Map.

We brought a team of domestic violence experts together for three Systems Thinking Workshops. These workshops were designed to identify the key systemic forces impacting the conversation around domestic violence, and provided a forum to unpack the cause and effect loops of these forces. The result was a collaboratively created systems map showing the interrelationship between the perceptions and realities of domestic violence in our state. The map enabled alignment and created a shared understanding between the participating experts within and outside the Foundation.

Explore our interactive systems map here.

We then collaboratively identified the most promising opportunities for leverage to shift the system toward greater health. Through an impact evaluation with the Foundation, we refined our hypotheses into a clearly articulated societal perception shift to work towards.

The first strategic output from the systems thinking work was a campaign for the 2022 Domestic Violence Awareness Month (DVAM 2022). In addition to creating awareness, a primary goal of the campaign was to learn which aspects of the perception shift and messaging were more or less engaging to certain audiences.

The 2022 DVAM campaign website persists as an enduring resource to educate the general public about what domestic violence really is, why it happens, and what we can do about it as a society.

Explore the DVAM 2022 campaign.

Multiple audience testing cycles reiterated the importance of a hopeful tone, inclusive content, and tight pairings of information and related actions to take. For the site design itself, we indexed on the fact that domestic violence is dynamic and exists in many different forms. Shapes are amorphous, layered, and soft— highlighting the message that the complex problem of domestic requires compassion, and many lenses to fully understand.

Building on the highly successful Domestic Violence Awareness Month campaign for 2022, we conceptualized the campaign for DVAM 2023 in the form of a 4-episode podcast pilot; we worked collaboratively to design and launch the podcast with the Foundation and Rally, a digital marketing and advocacy agency. The podcast conveys the power of healing and prevention approaches through tangible examples, and prioritizes the policy ecosystem as its target audience. Listen to the podcasts here.

In parallel, we are also supporting the Foundation in creating a survivor-centered and trauma-informed resource for journalists and editors to use when reporting on domestic violence.

Our Systems Thinking work has provided the seed for each of these interventions, and it continues to help us shape and prioritize the content they include. While we continue to draw inspiration and guidance from the Systems Map, both Daylight and the Foundation aim to stay open-minded, so that our understanding and our approaches can continually adapt and stay impactful as we learn.