By Shaylyn White

Growing up, my mother didn’t really believe in “kids” media. Yes, we were kids, but she saw no reason why that should mean we only read or watched things branded as kid-friendly, and she saw it as her responsibility to explain rather than censure so that we’d feel safe exploring and broadening our cultural horizons on our own. 

In practice, this didn’t translate to much more than the fact that no bookshelves in our house were off-limits to us and that family movie nights were as likely to feature Hitchcock as Pixar. Still, it had the interesting side-effect of meaningI was raised feeling slightly removed from the elementary school cultural milieu. As I got older, I began to realize there were a number of points of reference my peers shared that I didn’t—films I hadn’t seen, games I hadn’t played, websites I didn’t use—and I began to view those points of reference with an anthropological sort offascination. Tell me, I’d ask my friend: what does it mean to do the cooking by the book?  

(For those of you who, like me, never watched Lazy Town, you can see the answer for yourself here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD71JeX4Vk0) 

I think about this now because I’ve come to consider it the source of my fascination with the phenomenon of trends—the phenomenon of phenomena, you might say. What is it that makes some things take off with certain demographics while others don’t? What later puts those fires out? And what makes it so hard to do that kind of thing on purpose?  

Campaigns for raising awareness about social issues like violence typically aim to be more than trends, as the word “trend” tends to connote something short-lived, but they do still aim to capture the attentions and imaginations of an audience. Yet it can be difficult to craft these bouts of collective interest intentionally, and that can lead to important work becoming stalled or siloed when it fails to spread the way we hope. And so, for the STOPS to Violence Enhancing Impact project—which has the goal of helping strengthen such initiatives—we decided to take a look at the elements of effective movements so we could take a crack at answering those questions on a greater scale.  

We found that there are certain characteristics which make messaging more likely to affect behavioural change than others, and that most of it has to do with how messaging is framed. Our report “From Moments to Movements” goes into more detail about the how and why, and with these learnings, we hope to help lay the groundwork for the development of a more coordinated and collaborative approach to violence prevention awareness and education in Saskatchewan. So if you (like me) find yourself curious about what exactly makes things “catch on”, consider giving it a look!