Over 1.2 million women in England and Wales experience domestic abuse (Crime Survey for England and Wales). But it’s commonly a hidden crime that goes unreported. Police have estimated that there are up to 800,000 victims each year in the UK who decline to come forward (Office of National Statistics). Brief: to ‘drag this taboo out of the shadows’ in the week of International Women’s Day. Objectives: (1) reach out to women and offer direct access to the range of life-changing services at Refuge; (2) represent abuse in many forms, eg. financial abuse.

We created the ‘Turn To Us’ campaign based on powerfully written ‘reverse’ poems. Read top-to-bottom, the poems present seemingly happy relationships. But when the same lines of copy are read in reverse order, the tone turns brutal, revealing the hidden horrors of domestic abuse. The writing is carefully crafted to capture this duplicity and the polarity of opposing emotions as you read downwards and back up again. The ‘reverse poem’ structure was chosen as, just like in life, the abuse can be concealed in plain sight. The structure also acts as a powerful pivot, dramatising the point where abusers turn on their partners. The writing literally turns, making the call-to-action a potent one: ‘If your partner turns on you, turn to us.’