Title | SCHOOL FOR JUSTICE |
Brand | FREE A GIRL MOVEMENT INDIA |
Product / Service | A SCHOOL AND EDUCATION PROGRAMME |
Category | E01. Integrated Campaign led by PR |
Entrant | FLEISHMANHILLARD INDIA Mumbai, INDIA |
Idea Creation | J. WALTER THOMPSON AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS |
PR | FLEISHMANHILLARD INDIA Mumbai, INDIA |
Production | J. WALTER THOMPSON AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS |
Additional Company | FREE A GIRL MOVEMENT Haarlem, THE NETHERLANDS |
Additional Company 2 | NEW AMSTERDAM FILM COMPANY, THE NETHERLANDS |
Additional Company 3 | MASSIVE MUSIC Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS |
Additional Company 4 | HECTIC CONTENT Mumbai, INDIA |
Additional Company 5 | MRTN EDITING Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS |
Name | Company | Position |
---|---|---|
Yusuf Hatia | FleishmanHillard | Senior Vice President & Senior Partner, Managing Director, India |
Bas Korsten | JWT | Creative Partner |
Marcel Hartog | JWT | Executive Creative Director |
Friso Ludenhoff | JWT | Creative Director |
Maarten Vrouwes | JWT | Creative Director |
Guney Soykan | JWT | Art Director |
Erik-Jan Koense | JWT | Business Director |
Jessica Hartley | JWT | PR Director |
Catherine van Acker | JWT | Senior Concept Producer |
Linda Jansen | JWT | Concept Producer |
Sanne Kragten | JWT | Concept Producer |
Lotte de Rooij | JWT | Screen Producer |
Reiner Slothouber | JWT | Digital Producer |
Angelique Schreuders | JWT | Connection Strategist |
Lex Noteboom | JWT | Strategist |
Lisse Mastenbroek | JWT | Strategist |
Tim Arnold | JWT | Video Editor |
Robert Harrison | JWT | Visual Designer |
Ronald Mica | JWT | Visual Designer |
Juliette Stevens | New Amsterdam Film Company | Director |
Evelien Hölsken | Free A Girl | Co-founder |
Nicole Franken | Free A Girl | International Campaign Manager |
Tripta Biekram | Free A Girl | International Campaign and Program Coordinator |
Vaibhavi Parekh | FleishmanHIllard | Account Director |
Kaveri Roy | FleishmanHIllard | PR Counsellor |
Kaizin Sadri | FleishmanHIllard | PR Counsellor |
Esha Jolly | FleishmanHIllard | PR Counsellor |
The School for Justice takes the victims of sex trafficking out of prostitution and into prosecution. A school and an education programme, the world’s first School for Justice was launched on April 6, 2017 in Mumbai. The School for Justice is working with some of India’s most respected law universities to train girls to become public prosecutors with the power and determination to challenge India’s legal system from within – and ultimately prosecute the criminals who once owned them. A tangible solution to a deeply rooted problem, the school itself is the campaign. The School for Justice is not only starting a conversation around child prostitution on an epic scale, without the use of traditional media spend – but is also fundamentally shifting opinion. The School for Justice is built to last. And the class of 2018 is already on its way. Not just changing the conversation, but changing lives.
The campaign aimed to get India’s hidden child prostitution out into the public and into the newspapers by combining two things: hard data on the statistics of child prostitution in India with the emotional, human stories of the girls. The school was brought to life in the digital and social space by communicating its key messages with very shareable content, highlighting the injustice around child prostitution in a clear and rational way, but also empowering the victims and turning them into heroes. The story was told on different levels and in different channels throughout the campaign, building the audience with each piece of content, always leading them to the website to actively participate, and ‘Support the School for Justice’, through donations, collaborations and sharing. Content included a press conference in Mumbai, a photographic exhibition of the class of 2017, a website, several campaign films, a PR and social media campaign.
The School for Justice has only just opened, so it’s too early to give concrete results. The campaign is on-going and will span many years. The School has universal appeal with interest from all corners of the world and the (social) media landscape. From the Guardian to Upworthy, from the man in the street to Malala Yousafzai’s foundation, response to the School for Justice is significant. The primary challenge was to get very taboo topics around child prostitution and the impact of gender imbalance and caste, openly discussed in Indian media and amongst the public. This topic is notoriously ignored by the press and public alike. However, first responses have been extremely favourable with an incredible response from the national press in India and international press and endorsements from the UK’s Law Society, the Geena Davis foundation and the world’s youngest ever Nobel Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai’s foundation . Public reaction across social media has been strong. For a topic that’s previously been left unspoken, India got vocal. Very vocal. The levels of engagement from the target audience are incredibly high. The School for Justice will be a real success when the first girls are public prosecutors and the first of the criminals who once owned them behind bars. But the first class of many has started and with this the School for Justice is already rebuilding lives and empowering the girls to be a new kind of role model as the next generation of leaders in their field.
Lending a credible, authentic voice to the campaign was critical and came from the girls and their life experiences; PR was critical to convey the power of their stories and through the media we told their stories with the greatest impact. The School for Justice was first launched through the media and the campaign hinges on PR to continue to drive the message across India as well as global news outlets. The strategy is built on ongoing media relations to communicate each milestone achieved and to fuel the next conversation as the girls story continues to unfold.
Our task was to raise awareness around child prostitution. The strategy was to employ a controversial and taboo-breaking communication tool to get the topic talked about: School for Justice. The School for Justice has universal appeal, but the campaign perhaps surprisingly targets men aged between 18 and 45; because they’re on the demand side of the sex industry, and are still more ‘influential’ in (Indian) society. We activated traditional media to serve a broad demographic including stakeholders who could make a significant difference to the cause; and we used social media to reach a younger group, appealing to influencers such as Bollywood star Mallika Sherawat. The campaign developed tactics to change opinions from seeing the girls as complicit in the crime - to victims of exploitation. The PR strategy employed the media to push messages across India but also showed the solution to the problem lay in supporting the cause.