Good morning everyone, pleasure to be here. This isn’t usually how I like to start my Thursdays, but I’m going to ask you a question. That is, how do you feel when you look at these pictures? So if I had to guess, I would speculate kind of a combination of anger and anxiety and disgust and fear. Because no matter what our experience is with sexual violence, whether we’ve experienced it ourselves, know someone who has, or just follow the stories in the news, rape, sexual harassment and sexual abuse, they frighten us. Now fear would seem like it’s a pretty big barrier to communicating effectively and strategically about prevention and getting people involved in preventing and reducing violence. But in fact, it’s a tool. It helps us actually change hearts and minds and illustrate to people that sexual violence is not some intractable, inevitable horror, but instead is a deeply entrenched social problem that can be prevented and that we all have a stake in. But let me back up. My name is Pamela Mejia, as you heard, and I’m head of research at Berkeley Media Studies Group. And these questions are not hypothetical for me. This has been my whole life for about now the last seven years. Since the National Sexual Violence Resource Center approached my organization and asked, can you help us get better at talking about prevention and why it matters? Now at the time, I was a brand new mom to… Does it work for me? Oh, hello. Hi there. I don’t want to look at Jeffrey Epstein. Uh-oh. Now back. Hold on. What a gift. What a dream. Okay. There we go. So at the time, I was a brand new mom to a little girl. So those fears and anxieties weren’t hypothetical for me either. They were personal. I was afraid. But I’m a researcher, so I started researching. The first part of that research involved a lot of listening. Interviews and focus groups, talking with the experts, the people whose job it is to talk about preventing and reducing violence every day, where they stumbled, where they shown what questions they still had, what made their jobs harder or easier. And as I talked to these folks, I heard again and again the same anxieties and fears that I myself felt, but I also heard passion and commitment and hope. These folks wanted to change the way that we talk about sexual violence to ensure that when we do, we’re not only talking about punishing perpetrators or supporting victims, but that we’re also talking about what it takes to stop violence before it happens, before anyone gets hurt. Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of them spoke also about the importance of aspirational language, of painting a picture of the world we want to see, a world without sexual violence, without harm where everyone is safe, what I call the golden horizon. But what was a lot less clear was how to get there. So with what felt like a lot more questions than answers, I’m sure many in this room can understand, we started a message testing process where we worked with people from all around the country, hundreds of them, lots of all different backgrounds, all different levels of experience with sexual violence. A lot of what we learned about effective prevention communication is not going to be all that novel to experience communicators like those in this room, right? Lead with values, avoid jargon. But one of the things that I want to focus on right now is this second bullet point, this piece that felt a little less intuitive for me, this piece about acknowledging fear, acknowledging negative emotions. Because what we quickly learned in the process of message testing was that because we all have such deeply felt and entrenched beliefs and emotions about sexual violence, broad aspirational statements just didn’t cut it. They didn’t feel real for people. In fact, when they heard these messages, they dismissed them out of hand as irrelevant, as out of touch, and they dismissed messengers as condescending, as disconnected from real life. It felt like we weren’t getting anywhere. It felt like we weren’t getting anywhere, as I’m not with my slides. But then we started realizing that as we dug in deeper, we were able to change people’s perspectives on prevention and their role in it. But only when we first acknowledged, named those ugly, dark emotions of doubt and fear and rage and pain that were so quickly lost when we talked only about the aspirational, only about the golden horizon. When people heard those fears reflected back to them, they saw them as real and grounded in reality and valid. They were able to confront and face them better, and they saw the speakers as people who were in the struggle with them. And that helps them keep their minds more open to talking then about solutions and what role they could play in reducing or preventing violence. Of course, it’s not just enough to acknowledge fear, say it out loud. As that previous slide I had indicated, we also have to have a place that people can go to. We’re not just helping them navigate those negative emotions. We have to have a destination. So some kind of concrete, tangible illustration of what prevention can look like in that audience’s sphere of influence, whether it’s advocating for funding or training teachers or any number of other things. But again, once people heard their fears and doubts reflected back to them and validated and confirmed, they were more likely to stay open to talking about what they could do to be part of that act, whatever it was. Because they saw that their fears and their doubts did not have to, while real, did not have to be the end of the story. I do a lot of training on sexual violence prevention communication. And usually right around this time I see some extremely skeptical looks. I’m just supposed to validate every crazy thing, every fear everybody’s ever had about rape and sexual assault. Not quite. So I said, it’s really only about confirming for people that you hear, acknowledge, and respect the fears that they hold that they’re bringing to the conversation with you. And that can be done very simply. Even with just a few words or phrases, like the ones on the screen. Now, most of my work is centered on sexual violence prevention. But I also want to flag that anecdotally, I’ve seen that this kind of validation and acknowledgment can be really powerful in helping people navigate their emotions about a lot of complex issues. Even just acknowledging that, hey, there’s a lot of confusing and scary information in the news, can help people work through their feelings about issues from gun control to cancer. But like any skill, acknowledging and validating fears can be a challenge, and it is indeed a skill. And it’s not always easy, even for me after seven years. But what helps me is to remember that we all want to get to that golden horizon, that safe world, that world where I never have to evoke another Bill Cosby or Jeffrey Epstein because they never hurt anybody to start with. And if we want to get there, if we want to all get there, we have to meet people where they are and help them on their journey. So I encourage all of you here to think about the issues that you’re working on and the negative emotions people might hold. And think about how you can reflect and acknowledge those emotions back to people and help them work through them in a way that feels right for you. Because when we do that, we do that we can help show people that even a goal as big as reducing violence isn’t some impossible dream that only belongs to a few people. That social change is happening every single day and everywhere, and that we all have a right and a responsibility to act, whoever and wherever we are, no matter how afraid.