15 tactics for making change

Prevention tactics involve trying to prevent abuses from happening in specific situations. For communities and civil society organisations, this often involves having a visible, physical presence to deter abusers. This could involve accompanying people who are at risk of being attacked, to provide safety in numbers, or accompanying people to police stations to ensure that officials know they are being watched and reported on.

For authorities, it involves putting internal systems of monitoring and reporting in place to ensure that abuses or failures by officials come to light and are suitably dealt with.

Stop and save tactics involve intervening directly to stop abuses that are in progress and taking people who are in danger to safety.

Challenging or distracting people who are engaging in hate speech or harassment is one way to stop abuses that are happening in public places and online. Other examples include creating physical barriers to stop abuses, for example forming human chains around vulnerable places of worship or abandoning vehicles in the road to slow down the progress of violent mobs, militias or the military. These tactics often involve risks.

Often, we lack the power to prevent or stop a violation ourselves.
We may need to call for help from people who have the influence necessary and to warn people who are in danger, so they can find safety.

We might ask for help from community leaders, including local and national faith leaders – for example to help calm tensions or violence in the community. If a public official is committing violations or failing to intervene to stop a violation, then calling for help might involve asking political leaders or more senior officials at the regional or national level to intervene. We can also use the media to call for help and create pressure on officials to intervene.

Campaigning is about ordinary people taking mass actions to create pressure for change. It involves making public opposition to human rights abuses as visible as possible and highlighting public support for the solutions we propose. Getting media attention is an important part of campaign strategies. Social media can be a key tool to highlight public opinion and mobilise public involvement in campaigns.

Campaigning includes all kinds of protest: from petitions and letter writing, to street protests, to protest through singing or street art, to symbolic actions like wearing clothes of a particular colour or using particular hand gestures, to coordinated actions taken from the safety of the home – like switching the lights off or banging saucepans at a particular time of day.

Advocacy is about persuasion and usually takes place quietly, through dialogue behind closed doors. It focuses on getting decision makers to support specific proposals for change or take specific actions. Successful advocacy tends to build on relationships of trust that are built over time. The greater the legitimacy and influence of the ‘persuader’, the more likely success is.

Arguments that can help to persuade decision makers include:
– Evidence of the negative effects of the problem and information about how the proposed solution has worked elsewhere.
– Highlighting risks to the decision-maker or their institution if problems are allowed to continue – for example loss of face.
– Highlighting political or reputational advantages to the decision maker of taking initiatives to support change.
– Highlighting the decision maker’s worth as a moral or legal duty bearer, entrusted with protecting the welfare of society.

Incentive tactics make it easier for individuals and organisations — for example schools, business owners or public officials — to choose to do the right thing by providing them with an incentive. Incentives can be financial or related to prestige and recognition.

For example, awards recognising the contribution of a teacher, school board, business or faith leader to stopping bullying or countering discrimination and hate, can encourage commitment to these goals.

Sometimes governments and religious or other powerholders stop people from exercising their human rights peacefully. Defiance involves openly exercising our human rights despite norms, informal or legal limitations or bans. Illegal protests are perhaps the most common example of this. Other examples of defiance are faith communities that continue to meet for worship despite illegitimate bans, interfaith couples who marry despite bans and the open expression of peaceful but banned views (for example atheist beliefs in some contexts). These tactics are often very dangerous.

Making everyone in a community aware of human rights is the first step towards building a community that cherishes those rights. Often people don’t know what rights they have – either according to international standards or according to national legislation. This lack of awareness leads people to accept, tolerate or ignore abusive actions by the government, ruling class or other powers in the community.

This tactic involves building awareness of:
– human rights as a concept
– the international and national level protections people have
– the many community level human rights issues that affect ordinary people’s lives.

Building awareness is one of the most common tactics used to promote human rights. The biggest challenge lies in helping people realise the importance of human rights for their own lives and how human rights can be a tool to help them overcome abuses.

This tactic is about helping people to move from simply being aware to becoming active. It involves expanding the base of people who are willing to speak up and act to promote human rights, using any of the tactics. This might mean creating ways for people to get involved in reacting to or reporting violations they see, connecting people up to campaigning activities or encouraging people to volunteer in community awareness raising programmes or programmes providing psychosocial and material support to victims.

Often, people of goodwill lack the skills or the confidence to promote human rights. This applies to ordinary people who need skills and confidence to engage in the promotion of rights in the community. But it also applies to public officials and employees, and to business, community and faith leaders, who have responsibility for the well-functioning of different aspects of community life, and for contexts in which people can be vulnerable to rights abuses.

Sometimes human rights abuses keep happening because community leaders and officials do things ‘the way they have always been done’ and don’t know how to do things differently – in ways that help protect rights. Helping people to gain skills and to find new, practical and realistic ways of working that better protect people from harm, is a very important tactic for change.

Research shows that change is most effectively achieved by networks of people and organisations who take coordinated, joint and

complementary actions to achieve a common goal. Networks can be built between people and organisations within communities, but networks can also connect organisations at the local level to the national level, and the national level to the international level.

Building alliances across communities or between sectors – for example alliances with the business community or between faith communities – can create new types of influence. The broader the network, the wider the range of actions it can take and the greater its influence and legitimacy. Networks also help to break the isolation felt by individuals and organisations working for human rights, and help reduce the risks they face.

People who experience human rights violations can need immediate and more long-term support. The kind of support needed, varies depending on what has happened. For example, an individual might need someone to sit with them while they are in shock, access to medical care or a safe place to stay; people displaced by violence may need temporary housing and food; and people suffering from trauma need long-term psychological support.

Many of the resources needed to care for people can be found through informal networks of support within communities. Strengthening these informal support systems can contribute to building community resilience. At the same time, it is important to demand that the state fulfills its responsibilities to look after citizens whose rights have been violated.

Documenting violations involves creating a permanent, public record of human rights violations and their consequences. This could mean documenting the facts of what happened in a specific situation or documenting the negative effects of laws, policies and ways of working that discriminate, limit or violate rights more broadly.

Documentation is vital to ensure human rights violations can’t be covered up and forms an important foundation for several other tactics. Stories and evidence gathered can be used:
– to seek justice and compensation for victims in legal processes
– to help victims commemorate what happened
– as a basis for advocacy work to persuade decision-makers to tackle the causes of violations
– and to raise public awareness of the problems and mobilise people to take part in campaigns.

The state has a duty to ensure that people have access to justice if their rights have been violated. Compensation for victims and their families and the punishment or shaming of abusers cannot undue the wrong that was done, but they do fulfil an important function. Compensation can help victims get back on their feet, while punishments send a clear message that rights violations will not be tolerated, helping to combat the culture of impunity which is all too often present in society.

This tactic focuses in part on helping victims to use the legal system to access justice and compensation – for example by accompanying them in the process of reporting crimes or providing legal advice and assistance. But action against injustices can also take place outside legal structures. There are lots of creative ways to bring abuses to light and hold perpetrators accountable – for example using the media or social media.

Sometimes human rights abuses are followed by a collective silence. Authorities may try to hush up abuses to protect influential perpetrators, or to save face; community leaders may think that it is better to talk about harmony than to speak openly about violations experienced; and victims of sexual violence may be silenced by a culture of shame.

Wounds that are not treated fester. Resilient, just and reconciled communities are only possible when we acknowledge injustices, give victims a voice and give perpetrators the chance to acknowledge their wrongs and commit to change. In situations of conflict, there are usually victims and perpetrators on all sides.

Commemoration can take lots of forms, for example annual commemoration events; public hearings in which those involved tell their stories; exhibitions of photographs, stories and records or street art and music.