Hatch and Station Film combine for Granite State Children's Alliance PSA

This month is National Child Abuse Prevention Month, an annual observance dedicated to raising awareness and preventing child abuse. 

To mark the initiative, Boston-based HATCH The Agency partnered with Station Film and award-winning director Brendan Gibbons to create It’s Always There, a powerful anti-child abuse PSA for the Know+Tell initiative of the Granite State Children’s Alliance. The PSA is a quiet and profound reflection on the impact sexual, physical or mental child abuse can have on a person for their entire life, and a reminder intervention is the first step for getting a young life back on track. 

“The intention behind It’s Always There was always to communicate a truth about abuse,” said Rick McHugh, Executive Creative Officer of HATCH The Agency. “And it’s a truth that other spots addressing the issue don’t always examine, that the pain of abuse, the effects of abuse, stay with the person long into adulthood. Those effects can be profound. But with intervention, support and counselling, kids can learn to deal with what’s happened to them and go on to live happy and fulfilling lives.”

The PSA portrays a quiet walk through a house empty of people as a child’s voice narrates his first instance of abuse at a party in the bathroom. The walk ends in a sitting room, where we find an old man sitting in his chair by the window, he speaks and finishes the story. It was his story all along.

Knowandtell.org was born from Granite State Children’s Alliance as a division set up to educate, inform and protect. Since 2018, the program has been there to advocate for children and their loved ones confronting child abuse.

“The script Rick wrote was powerfully simple,” said director Brendon Gibbons. “Everything always starts and ends with the writing. It made me think about child abuse in a way I never had before.”