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Campaign Overview
- In the Partnership Agreement, A Partnership for a Better Scotland, the Scottish Executive made a pledge to reduce crime and combat anti-social behaviour that threatens our communities. In 2004 the Emergency Workers Scotland Bill was passed to ensure emergency workers had statutory protection. In tandem, the Scottish Executive launched a report into violence against public-facing workers (people who come into frequent contact with the public or who provides a service to the public in the course of their work) entitled 'When the Customer Isn't Right', which stemmed a three year communications strategy.
- The first phase of the communications campaign was launched in September 2004 and was primarily targeted at the general public in order to raise awareness of the issue of violence against workers and to build consensus around the proposition that 'violence - whether physical or verbal - against those who work for the public is unacceptable'.
- Advertising consisted of 1 x 20 second TV advert, a pan-Scotland poster campaign and third party partnership initiatives in the form of A3 posters and appeared from 14 th September until 20 th December 2004. The TV commercial appeared on Channel 4 and Channel 5 only and not on Scottish, Borders and Grampian. Please see www.infoscotland.com/violenceatwork for further information about the campaign.
- A pre- and post-campaign research exercise was set up to monitor the impact of the campaign in terms of awareness and its effects on public attitudes. This summary refers to phase one of campaign activity and wave one of research.
Highlights
- Levels of concern have remained consistently high between the pre- and post-campaign analysis, with 84% of respondents agreeing or agreeing strongly that levels of physical violence, and 87% agreeing or agreeing strongly that the levels of verbal abuse, against people working with the public have risen in Scotland in the post-campaign analysis.
- The proportion of respondents strongly agreeing that physical violence against those who work for the public is wrong increased by 13% in the post-campaign compared to the pre-campaign analysis, while the proportion of respondents strongly agreeing that verbal abuse against those who work for the public is wrong increased by 12% in the same period.
- There was a slight decrease in the proportion of respondents who felt that being aggressive, swearing at someone and name calling were punishable crimes in the post-campaign survey compared to the pre-campaign survey. The proportion of respondents who believed that making aggressive gestures at someone is a punishable crime (e.g. pointing a finger in their face) decreased slightly from 17% in the pre-campaign to 12% in the post-campaign.
- Conversely, behaviour such as physical assault, throwing or kicking an object at someone, verbally threatening someone or spitting at someone were all perceived as more serious by respondents in the post-campaign survey than in the pre-campaign survey. For example, the proportion of respondents who perceived throwing or kicking an object at someone to be a punishable crime increased marginally from 85% to 87% between the pre- and post-campaign analyses.
- Prompted awareness at the pre-campaign stage (presumably of other, related campaigns) was 16%. By the post-campaign research, this had risen to 23%.
Implications
- As this is year one of a communications strategy and campaign, the level of strengthened agreement achieved over a three month period is encouraging.
The views expressed in this report are those of the researcher and
do not necessarily represent those of the Department or Scottish Ministers.