Social marketing for the prevention of physical abuse, emotional abuse and neglect in children: a protocol for a scoping review on applications and strategies

Introduction

Child maltreatment (CM) can have significant and long-lasting consequences over the life course. These include long-term physical injuries and an increased risk for mental illness. Preventive applications are critical to reduce maltreatment, promote early detection and initiate early interventions, and prevent further harm. Social marketing (SM) strategies offer a promising approach for the prevention of CM. They use commercial marketing principles to raise awareness and/or influence behaviour of populations for social welfare purposes. To date, there is no comprehensive overview of SM strategies and applications used for prevention, early detection and reduction of harms of physical and emotional child abuse and neglect. This study aims to address this gap by means of a scoping review mapping the national and international literature and to provide an understanding of how SM strategies have been conceptualised and implemented in CM prevention. We chose a scoping review to catalogue and organise the literature, define key constructs and identify gaps, instead of pooling effects.

Methods and analysis

PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC and PsycINFO will be searched for relevant existing literature published between 2010 and 2025 using a search string based on the Population, Concept and Context scheme. Empirical studies examining SM strategies for the prevention of physical and emotional abuse and neglect of all designs will be included.

The results will be presented in both narrative and tabular formats. These tables will report on general study characteristics (eg, country, year of publication, study design), key characteristics of SM applications (eg, prevention aims, setting, components, target audiences) and strategies used (eg, media channels, communication formats and theories used). Where reported, we will also summarise evaluations of SM strategies used (eg, study design and outcome measures, main findings).

The reporting of the review follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) Extension for Scoping Reviews: Checklist and Explanation and PRISMA Statement for Reporting Literature Searches in Systematic Reviews.

Ethics and dissemination

Literature is used as the only data source, therefore, no ethical approval is required. The findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. They will identify research gaps and will inform a research agenda on integrating SM strategies in the design of preventive applications regarding child physical/emotional abuse and neglect and future evaluations. Our findings can also inform the design of population-level prevention policies and strategies that use SM strategies to raise public awareness of CM and to promote preventive behaviours in everyday settings.

Study registration

A protocol outlining the scoping review has been preregistered at the Open Science Framework ( osf preregistration ).