Solace Women’s Aid and Stack Reveals Hidden Side of Domestic Abuse

Solace Women’s Aid and Stack have teamed up with Twitter to raise awareness of hidden abuse through an innovative new social media campaign.

Solace has revealed that it takes, on average, six and a half years for a woman to leave an abusive relationship.

Controlling and coercive behaviour; cutting people off from their friends and family; and making them feel afraid and belittled are all forms of domestic abuse.

But because the violence isn’t obvious or ‘seen’, it can often be ignored and even normalised.

So, working with Solace and Twitter themselves, Stack has produced an innovative new campaign that uses Twitter’s ‘hidden replies’ control, a feature that provides people with the option to hide replies to their Tweets and manage their own conversations.

To demonstrate the hidden story behind domestic abuse, Twitter users see a Tweet from @SolaceWomensAid that will show a photo of a seemingly happy couple accompanied by the contrasting phrase: “This is what domestic abuse looks like.” Intrigued users will then be challenged to find the hidden story, discovering the true reality behind the picture by clicking into the Tweet and on the ‘hidden replies’ button.

The feature then reveals a video that plays out the controlling and abusive conversation between the couple – revealing a very different story to the happy selfie. Anyone who views the film is then encouraged to share the revealing journey with their followers.