0:00:00.8 Sally Laskey: Welcome to Resource On The Go, a podcast from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center on understanding, responding to, and preventing sexual abuse and assault. I'm Sally Laskey, NSVRC's Evaluation Coordinator. And on this episode, NSVRC Communications Director, Laura Palumbo and I talk with Dr. Julie Sweetland, a socio-linguist and Senior Advisor at the FrameWorks Institute. We discuss how we can reframe our messaging about child diversity to help the public understand and support our work to improve children's health and well-being.

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0:00:55.6 SL: Welcome to the Resource On The Go podcast. I'm Sally Laskey with the NSVRC, and I have with me today, Laura Palumbo, our Communications Director, and Dr. Julie Sweetland from the FrameWorks Institute. Julie, we're so happy to have you here with us today. Could you share a little bit about yourself and your work with FrameWorks for our listeners? 

0:01:16.5 Julie Sweetland: Yeah, absolutely, Sally and Laura. Thank you so much for the opportunity to join you all today. My name is Julie. I am a Senior Advisor at the FrameWorks Institute. I'm a linguist, a socio-linguist, so my research is focused on how language and culture work together, and how small differences in language can make a big difference in social issues and in the world. And at FrameWorks, each of us on staff are social scientists of some sort, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, etcetera. We bring together our different disciplinary backgrounds and our ways of studying issues to investigate the communications aspects of different social justice and scientific issues. And we share that research with mission-driven communicators like you and your listeners, so I'm excited to be here today, and share some of that.

0:02:08.9 SL: Well, we are extremely excited and Laura, I know NSVRC has been digging into the issue of frames and framing to help us more effectively talk about sexual harassment, abuse, and assault for over two decades now. Can you share more specifically what we mean when we're talking about framing? 

0:02:33.2 Laura Palumbo: Yes. So a number of years ago NSVRC actually began our work of studying framing with the FrameWorks Institute and continued that work with the Berkeley Media Studies Group as well. Frames are like train tracks for thoughts, and frames are the ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that are kind of always operating in the background of our minds, and whether or not we know it, that is impacting how we take in information in the world around us. And so when we talk about how sexual violence is framed, it's really helping us to understand that no one is coming to the issue of sexual violence with a blank slate. Everyone has information, and in many cases, misinformation related to this issue and this topic that is really informing and shaping how they understand the issue. And so when we talk about sexual violence, when we talk about sexual harassment and assault and that these issues can be prevented, we need to be mindful of what those common frames are, those common frames and traps that people have in their understanding of this issue so that way we can be thoughtful to help them take in information that will help bridge those gaps.

0:04:08.8 SL: Awesome. Thank you for that overview.

0:04:13.4 LP: And Julie, your work has been focusing on framing adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. Can you provide an overview of ACEs and why framing ACEs matters to advocates and preventionists? 

0:04:27.1 JS: Yeah, absolutely. So in the late 1990s, a landmark study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente, that study revealed a powerful relationship between the serious and negative events in childhood that can happen to young people, and their physical and mental health in adulthood. So that's known as the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study or ACEs. So that study asked adult patients to tell the researchers about some potentially traumatic events that they could have experienced before age 18, and those researchers asked specifically about 10 experiences. Things like living with a family member with mental illness or witnessing domestic violence. One of those was, of course, sexual abuse, so that's maybe a particular interest to your listeners. So based on that survey answers, they then looked, 'cause they were asking adults, they matched it up with their health records and looked to see how the number of adverse experiences in childhood tracked with a wide variety of adult health outcomes.

0:05:39.1 JS: Some of what they found, you might expect. People who had experienced abuse or neglect as children were more likely to have had mental health problems as adults. But other findings for that time were really surprising, such as the realization that there was a real clear and graded relationship between early adversity and physical health. So if you had one of those serious events in childhood, you might not have fewer observable long-term consequences, but if you stacked them up, you had four or five of those, then that predicted you're at a greater risk for multiple health problems in adulthood. And not things necessarily with an obvious mental health connection, so people with four adverse experiences in childhood were four times as likely... Or sorry, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer than those who hadn't had childhood trauma. And the more adverse experiences people had had in childhood, the more likely they were to be diagnosed with asthma. So this was really the beginning of how science started to show us that adversity really gets under the skin and affects human biology.

0:06:49.9 JS: And so that's why it's so important that this research be translated for the public, but also for public health systems, for child welfare systems. If we can really make the case around this research, then we can prevent so much suffering for children, but really build a longer term approach to promoting health and well-being, reduce our healthcare costs, and really just have a healthier community, so that's why that research matters. Now, why the way we talk about it matters is also really important. So if we can prevent and identify and respond to early adversity, it's really impactful, but it can be really hard to talk about public... To build public understanding and talk about these issues in a way that builds political will. So people, they may care about children as a basic... Certainly care about their own children, but when it comes to thinking about children as a policy issue, it can be hard to translate that concern into enthusiastic support for good policy.

0:08:00.0 JS: There's a sense that if those things happen, maybe what kills you makes you... What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, or that kind of whole sort of sense of these events toughen us up and they're not that serious, and it's just hard to talk about prevention in general, and so that makes these issues tricky. I was really glad to have the opportunity to pull from the research that my colleagues have done on lots of these issues and really interpret that in a way that help folks advocating for kids, I think make a more powerful case.

0:08:34.6 SL: Julie, we're so happy and honored that we get to partner with researchers and linguists like yourself to help us figure this out. We know that messaging is critical, and I'm wondering if you could share what some common traps with childhood adversity frames are? 

0:09:00.3 JS: Oh, yeah. So I think the first one that can be trickiest for folks, is the fact that this is about children, and therefore it's natural to talk primarily about children and families, but if we give the sense that this issue unfolds entirely in the home, then people zoom in on household level experiences and they don't zoom out to larger social contexts. And so we can't get that big, broad public health approach or policy level response that we might want. The other thing is, because many of the original ACEs were abuse or neglect, it's easy to fall into bad apples framing or trigger bad apples thinking, the idea that problems are caused by just a few outlier individuals. I think this is particularly true when it comes to framing sexual abuse and sexual violence. We don't like to think of that as a broadly possible experience, but it's much easier to think of it as the story of that type of abuse starts and ends with "sick people." So there that's a trap. And if we just talk about perpetrators and victims, we really close the door on prevention. People think we can't change those kinds of people, and so instead we need to leave people with the story that this story is set in society and the plot involves us all, not just those people.

0:10:41.8 JS: The other one is fatalism, I think. If we fall into the trap of fatalism, if we trigger thinking that it's impossible to do anything to improve the situation, then we leave people with the sense that it's too big to fix and people turn away. So it's really important that we thread the... Hit this delicate balance between helping people understand that early childhood experiences can have and often do have serious and long-term consequences, but also that prevention and response are available to us and we don't have to experience those consequences either as individuals or broadly as a society.

0:11:24.3 LP: Now, a lot of those traps really resonate with what we saw in similar research on issues of sexual harassment, assault and abuse. In fact, we use the same language of bad apples in talking about this frame that people have about people who commit sexual harassment and abuse. This really othering belief that sexual abuse is committed by people who we would be able to see that they weren't trustworthy, that they are in some way a monster, and that those othering people are who we need to worry about and who pose a threat to our safety and well being. It's also interesting to see how that fatalism and determinism came up as traps when it comes to talking about adverse child experiences, because we found similarly that with issues of sexual assault that many audiences did feel like these are just... It's inevitable, these are isolated terrible instances that it's going that there's nothing that can be done to change the fact that sexual assault and abuse happen.

0:12:57.3 LP: And so it seems like a lot of those same traps around thinking about the individual and/or family versus thinking about that role that society plays, as well as the difficulty that people have in believing that change is possible, that prevention is possible and that a problem, even of such a significant scope, there can be meaningful change enacted. And it was interesting to see some of the tips in the report that talk about ways to help people with that disbelief. Can you talk to us more about ways we can bring prevention to life and overcome some of those barriers? 

0:13:55.2 JS: Yeah, I think it's really critical that we bring prevention into sharper focus for people. We value the idea of prevention as a society, we've got aphorisms, like a stitch in time saves nine, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. But when it comes to social issues, people tend to think of prevention as an individual level behavior, right? You knowing what to do to protect yourself, your child, your family, and of course, we want to make that knowledge widely available to people. Absolutely, but we also need preventative systems and strategies, and it's really genuinely hard for people to understand preventions effects are abstract and absent even it's a problem that didn't happen. And the effort that it involves kinda goes against the grain of the human brain. We've got a built-in tendency, evolutionarily, to prefer rewards now over delayed benefits, and that's how prevention works, the prize is later.

0:15:07.0 JS: The good news is that we can help short circuit some of those hard-wired cognitive train tracks, as you put it earlier, that make us less likely to act on a problem before it occurs. Sometimes it's very simple things like replacing our bland process verbs that we tend to use in grant proposals or logic models with more vivid action verbs when we're talking to the public. So instead of slow and gentle and indirect processes like ensuring good outcomes or encouraging greater awareness or educating families and children on how to resist and spot inappropriate sexual contact. So those are very... Ensuring, encouraging, educating, those are kind of slow and they're not time bound. We can change those to things that are more lively and direct, and have more muscles in them as you are working. So tackling the issue or equipping families and children or launching efforts to broaden awareness. So just getting more vivid.

0:16:22.4 JS: Helping people understand the prevention, focusing on the here and now, not to say the problem is so big, therefore, we need to present it. But what can we do here and now that will have a pay-off later, but really emphasizing again, the contemporary time to help people, to help focus people's attention on the present, which where our brains like to go. And so we can signal that prevention is in progress by using win words, adverbs and adverbials like now, right now, currently, today, and then really showing the futures that we create by our choice to act or not to act. So that can either be giving, that can involve giving concrete examples of what prevention activities look like in progress, but also helping people understand that when we do this, we get this benefit later. And if we fail to do this right now, we are gonna see a different type of outcome and one that we don't want. So those are some of the linguistic things you can do to bring the concept of prevention to life, which can really help to mobilize and motivate preventative action.

0:17:33.9 SL: Julie, that was fantastic. I feel like I already have some really practical things that I could put into practice today to use, but I know there's so much more that we have to learn. So I think what we're gonna do is we're gonna hold some of that great information and we're gonna do a part two. So in our next episode, we will continue this great conversation and discuss ways that we can frame child adversity as a problem we can prevent at the community level. So I just wanna thank you, Julie, and thank you Laura for bringing your expertise into this foundational discussion and we will jump into some more specific recommendations in part two.

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0:18:33.8 SL: Thank you for listening to this episode of Resource On The Go. For more resources and information about preventing sexual assault, visit our website at www.nsvrc.org. To learn more about the reframing childhood adversity, promoting upstream approaches report, watch for our next podcast episode. Download the report in our show notes at www.nsvrc.org/podcast or visit frameworksinstitute.org. You can also get in touch with us by emailing resources@nsvrc.org.