Cultivating Communities for Change: Promoting Collective Action to Prevent Child Sexual Abuse

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This is a community-partnered study to rigorously evaluate the Public Will Campaign (PWC), which aims to prevent child sexual abuse (CSA) through the identification and correction of misperceived social norms relative to CSA prevention. The short-term goals of the PWC are to build strong communities, reduce CSA perpetration, and to improve attitudes, social norms, and behaviors relative to CSA. PWC's long-term goals are to end CSA for future generations. The PWC employs a systems change model which mobilizes individual behaviors, social norms, and systemic structures to prevent CSA. To that end, PWC pairs grassroots outreach methods with media tools to build connection and sustained mobilization around a shared set of values. Specifically, PWC has developed a multi-phase campaign strategy to activate communities to prevent CSA. The first phase focuses on community building as a foundation for bystander intervention and broader cultural change; citizens must believe that others “have their backs” before feeling comfortable engaging in community-level prevention interventions. During this phase, the PWC will hold community mobilization events and launch a multimedia campaign, offering experiential opportunities to build social capital and gradually target CSA specifically. Next, PWC will engage communities via open space technology to assess collective efficacy and explicate county-specific misperceptions of social norms relative to CSA prevention. Finally, communities will design their own county-specific campaigns to correct misperceptions of social norms about CSA prevention and promote children's rights and safety. To evaluate the effectiveness of PWC in shifting study outcomes, we will collect multiple forms of data. We will use state-level secondary data sources to monitor county-level change over time in CSA perpetration. We will conduct a cluster randomized controlled trial in six counties in Northern Michigan with repeated intercept surveys to assess change over time in attitudes, social norms, and behaviors. We will capture real-time data from multimedia platforms documenting engagement and dosage with the PWC. Finally, using open space technology, we will conduct focus groups in participating communities to make meaning of quantitative data, explicate social norms specific to each county, and assess readiness for CSA prevention. This community- partnered study – both the program and evaluation – will yield collective efficacy to sustain the movement to end CSA. This study is innovative as it focuses on CSA prevention via shaping outer layers of the social ecology and leverages social norms as a CSA prevention strategy, which will accelerate community-level change.