Each and every child in Scotland should have what they need to thrive, now and in future. However, we know that there are really common ways in which the public think about care and care experience already, before we even start to share our message, our campaign, our stories, our solutions. These assumptions often aren’t accurate but are shaped by the way stories across media and culture present care experience. These misconceptions can be reinforced by the way we communicate about care experience and the care system – even if we don’t mean to.
We can use framing to tell our stories to combat this. Framing is the choices we make about how we tell our stories: what we share, and how we share them. It’s these choices that change how people think, feel and act. This is all about choosing to tell our stories, and share our ideas, in a different way. How we explain an issue, and what we leave unsaid.
There are some ways of thinking that can make it harder for our messages to land in the way we want them to, when we are looking to create change. These include:
Individualism: thinking that children are taken into care when ‘selfish parents make bad choices’, and that problems within the care system are caused by ‘individuals failing in their responsibilities’. This belief obscures the wider picture – such as the external factors facing families across Scotland, the different reasons why families come into contact with the care system, and how the system itself can be redesigned and improved for children and young people. This is also reflected in the public thinking that ‘young people are responsible for what happens to them’.
Fatalism: the idea that nothing can be done to improve care experience, that the system is broken and can’t be fixed. This is also reflected in an assumption that ‘damage done is damage done’ for people with experience of the care system – that trauma experienced in childhood will impact on them throughout their lives with little possibility of recovery, limiting life chances and access to opportunities. Additionally, people think that the ‘care system’ is ‘standardised and cold’ and therefore fundamentally unable to provide the care that children and young people need. This is also reflected in criticisms of older children and teenagers, who are believed to be responsible for their own actions – and what happens to them.
Together, these mindsets lead people to think about care experience in narrow and stigmatising ways. They encourage us to overlook the potential of wider, systemic change and dismiss people with experience of care as ‘broken products’ of a ‘broken system’. This means that when we are talking about care experience and the care system, if we aren’t careful with how we share information and ideas, we could be inadvertently strengthening ways of thinking that lead to stigma and discrimination.
So, to frame an issue effectively in order to counter stigma and discrimination, and help build understanding within our audience, we need to do the following:
- 1. Understand how people think and feel about this issue before we share information – what are the pre-existing beliefs in play?
- 2. Make deliberate choices when presenting information and telling stories.
- 3. Activate helpful ways of thinking and avoid unhelpful ways of thinking – it’s very hard to argue against a feeling or belief once it’s activated.
- 4. Give your audience ways to think differently about an issue, in ways which make sense to them – tap into common understanding, and shared values.
- 5. Show why taking action matters by aligning solutions with people’s understanding of what the world should be like.
- 6. Show that change is possible as well as necessary, not that problems are huge and overcome by crisis.
Each and Every Child’s framing recommendations have been robustly tested to do all of this. To find out how, please visit our recently refreshed website and framing toolkit – full of information as to how to use the framing recommendations to counter individualistic and fatalist ways of thinking. We have also created new short animations to remind you of each recommendation. And we continue to offer our free framing sessions. These can be booked here or get in touch if you would like to discuss how we can deliver a session for your team or organisation.