Don’t Choose to Abuse campaign relaunched during the festive period.

Staffordshire Police worked together with other forces in the West Midlands region to raise awareness of violence, abuse and intimidation against women and girls (VAIWG) by relaunching the ‘Don’t Choose to Abuse’ campaign in Staffordshire.

The campaign ran from Monday 11 December until the end of that month. The main element was the creation of two Christmas-themed videos aimed at men, the first video showed a domestic abuse (DA) scenario and the second one focused on the night-time economy and was set in a licensed premise. The videos intended to highlight common unacceptable behaviours with the aim of deterring these and encouraging those who might be affected to reach out for support.

The social media activity involved sharing the videos, the promotion of support services and other supplementary content. A total of 25 posts went out on Facebook and Twitter during the campaign. These posts resulted in a quarter of a million impressions. The DA video received 13,488 views and the night-time economy video gained 11,038 views. We also posted a video of Inspector Vik Ison talking about the help and support for victims of DA. 

Our main focus in Staffordshire was DA and we invested in targeted paid advertising on YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok using that particular video. This resulted in more than 377,000 impressions and nearly 3,000 website clicks for further information. The video was also played at half time on the stadium screens at the Stoke City FC match against Millwall FC on 23 December to 21,409 attendees.

Signal Radio featured an interview with Detective Superintendent Victoria Downing to help emphasise to listeners that abusive behaviour will not be tolerated.

The Don’t Choose to Abuse campaign first ran in March 2023 and this second instalment has helped to reinforce to the local community that we are committed to tackling violence, abuse and intimidation of women and girls.