ABSTRACT
In the last two chapters we considered the capacity of education to change young people’s attitudes towards domestic abuse as well as just how complex and contingent such attitudes frequently are. Social marketing is increasingly being adopted in many countries as a means of providing preventative education that can anticipate such attitudinal complexity. As we show in this chapter, the efficacy of social marketing, both in the domestic violence context and in the wider realm of social problems, remains debated, with most measures of effectiveness being somewhat crude. More subtle effects of social marketing, such as the boomerang effect (whereby the message engenders the opposite effect to that intended), have been detected, suggesting a need for modes of analysis sensitive to the multiple ways in which viewers react to disapproval and discouragement. We attempt to provide this level of sensitivity here. We begin with a short history and critique of the concept of social marketing and then proceed to explore the utility of the more complex notion that viewers often identify-sometimes only fleetingly-with the subject positions thrown open by media. Using the responses of domestic abuse perpetrators exposed to the UK Government’s This Is Abuse campaign film, we show how contradictory identifications with both antiviolence messages and victim-blaming discourses are negotiated by young men prone to perpetrating domestic abuse. The chapter concludes by exploring how effectiveness might be better conceptualised and assessed with regard to antiviolence social marketing that speaks to domestic abuse perpetrators.
