Ending The Harm
Department of Justice’s ‘Ending The Harm’ campaign launched to tackle illegal money lending in Northern Ireland
With around one in five Brits (19%) having less than £100 in savings, millions of families across the UK are just one unexpected bill or emergency away from crisis. This, the shrinkage of the subprime lending market and of course the current fragile state of the economy thanks to the pandemic have increased fears that illegal lenders will find it increasingly easy to prey on those facing financial hardship.
Those fears take on a particularly concerning shape in Northern Ireland, where so-called paramilitary gangs, who originated in The Troubles, are responsible for a large amount of illegal lending. How much is not known: unsurprisingly, illegal lending by such groups is an under-reported crime, a fraught topic which is difficult to research and which many are nervous to even discuss.
All of this means that the recently launched Ending The Harm campaign, aimed at ensuring people access debt advice or other support instead of illegal lending, is both high stakes and highly sensitive.
We call it ‘paramilitary’ activity but we don’t recognise it as ‘paramilitary’ activity. It is just organised crime – these are the same gangs you have in London, in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester. Being a paramilitary suggests that they have a cause; they no longer have a cause – they’re doing this for self-gain.
Even finding a way of describing the problem is a loaded issue, explains Paul Bowen, executive creative director at Ardmore, the Belfast marketing and ad firm behind the most recent Ending The Harm campaign, commissioned by the cross-government initiative, Tackling Paramilitary Activity, Criminality and Organised Crime Programme (TPCOC).
“We call it ‘paramilitary’ activity but we don’t recognise it as ‘paramilitary’ activity. It is just organised crime – these are the same gangs you have in London, in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester. Being a paramilitary suggests that they have a cause; they no longer have a cause – they’re doing this for self-gain,” says Bowen. “We discussed this long and hard – not using the word – but unfortunately if you take that word away, people don’t know what you’re talking about.”
This is the TPCOC’s third Ending The Harm campaign. The first tackled counterfeit and illegal goods, while the second focused on the so-called punishment beatings and shootings those groups carry out – but at that time, the problematic terminology that the public would nevertheless understand was not used. “We call them ‘paramilitary attacks’,” says TPCOC programme director Adele Brown, “because with the term ‘punishment beating’, people assume that there is no smoke without fire.” Bowen, who also worked on that campaign, describes user-testing the story of a young lad being subjected to this violence. “I was sat behind a one-way mirror and all the people [in the focus group] went, ‘Ah, he must have done something to deserve it’; the immediate thing was to blame.”
Among the outputs of that campaign were a series of chilling radio ads in which the victim, mother, witness and perpetrator describe a fictionalised shooting.
The issue may be different, but the question of illegal moneylending boils down to the same thing: gangs wanting to maintain a position of control over communities, bolster incomes and “maintain the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed”, in Bowen’s words.
Ardmore was commissioned in summer 2020 to run a campaign highlighting the issue. “We had already started to hear from delivery partners that this [issue] was of increasing concern, and that was exacerbated by the pandemic,” Brown comments, in relation to the timing.
An Ulster University report in 2020 states that illegal lending is “experienced as unremarkable” in low-income communities in Northern Ireland, and Bowen said that during pre-campaign research, his team “heard stories of people borrowing £20 for seemingly menial reasons, or to get a fake tan”, adding: “That’s what’s so important to the gangs, is that normalisation.”
This months-long research phase, during which the Ardmore team spoke to charities and others on the front line, was vital to getting under the skin of the issue and the tactics used by the gangs. “They’ll start by trying to lend more than you want to borrow. They don’t want to lend you just £20; they want to lend you far more than that,” Bowen says, adding that if you ask for £100, they offer £200. “They’ll appear relaxed initially about missed payments,” he says, pointing out that women gang members are often the apparently friendly face of those early interactions. “But they’re keeping a log of how much you’re missing, and that will incur interest, and eventually it will start to become aggressive and that’s where the relationship changes. They will threaten violence and they will threaten shaming.
“It’s at that point that the victim does all they can to pay back – selling their belongs, missing rent payments and all the other things, and gangs will take pension books or bank cards so that when payments are going in, they withdraw the money straight away.”
The ultimate worry is that people unable to make repayments are forced to use their home for storing drugs, guns or other criminal property, and then forced to play an active part in that organised crime. “Young males are the main target here because they can be put to work,” Bowen says.
With all that at stake, it wasn’t as simple as recruiting case studies to be the public face of Ending The Harm. In the previous ‘paramilitary attacks’ campaign, Ardmore “got really close to interviewing people who had actually been shot and people who were doing the shooting and it never came off,” Bowen describes, exasperated. He thus decided that in this campaign they would work with stories which, while fictionalised, were firmly based on the reality on the ground.
The hero film – created by Manchester production company The Gate – for the campaign shows a young mother unable to pay back a £50 loan. The lenders are heard but never seen as the situation gets worse for their victim, and ends on a cliffhanger, before the line: “Paramilitary gangs don’t want to help you. They want to exploit you.”
The multi-platform campaign launched on 14 June, with major news outlets covering the story thanks to TPCOC media relations work. Campaign films used for TV spots, as well as other assets including radio, social, digital and out-of-home ads, all point to the www.endingtheharm.com website, which was created by Ardmore. Government and police logos are conspicuously absent. According to Brown, “We spent a lot of time doing qualitative sessions and quantitative testing … in particular to ensure that it [the campaign] doesn’t look like a government advertisement, as we know that can really turn people off.”
The main aim of the campaign is to reach those at risk. As well as directions to get support from the charity Advice NI, and other sources such as Samaritans, the website includes a number of other fictionalised stories, among them a business owner deeply regretting his decision to accept a loan from a gang in order to save his struggling firm.
The decision to use individual stories and focus on the human rather than the wider social and economic impact of the problem was a straightforward choice, firstly because the former is more likely to prompt action. “When it’s behaviour change you’re looking for, we’ve got to engage emotionally and try to tell a story that people can engage with and hopefully act on in some way,” says Bowen, adding that big-picture numbers and statistics, alarming though they might be, “have very little impact on individuals.”
On the subject of understanding the audience, Bowen gives a warning to the marketing sector. “One of the things that we are constantly having to remind ourselves is that we are not advertising to advertisers; we are advertising to very different people, and I think sometimes advertising itself is very guilty of that,” he says carefully, stopping short of mentioning Cannes or the awards-hungry tendencies of many agencies. “It often misses the point of how the customer engages with an issue.”
Bowen says that working on this campaign reiterated to him the importance of getting close to the issue when working on any new campaign. “I look back on this and I’m so grateful that we spoke to people close to the issue – we would never have arrived at the solution we’ve got to now, and the campaign would have been poorer for it as well,” he says.
A second phase of the campaign launched at the end of November. The success of the work will be judged on website visits and metrics around people taking up support, as well as market research.
“This campaign on its own is very much about making people know they can seek support,” says Brown. “But the broader work of the programme is to challenge what is known as a ‘societal shrug’, which is a very well-known practice in Northern Ireland.” That shrug describes people ignoring the issues because they don’t want to have to deal with or process them, and it “does create a real environment that allows paramilitaries to flourish,” she adds.
The campaign and broader programme goals are no small ambitions. Given the harms it seeks to prevent in the most severe cases of illegal lending, this new campaign could prove a worthy investment if even a few individuals are able to avoid exploitation – and play a part in another vital step away from Northern Ireland’s painful past.
