APCC Joint Victims Lead: Maintaining momentum in tackling violence against women and girls
By Clare Moody, APCC Joint Lead on Victims and VAWG
One of the great societal issues of our time is how we deal with the epidemic of violence against women and girls (VAWG), particularly in a digital era with social media and the online world fuelling so much misogyny and male violence towards women. It has reached such levels that in 2023 the Home Office designated VAWG as a national threat, akin to that of terrorism. The statistics that back up this decision are staggering: In their National Policing Statement on violence against women and girls published a year ago, the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) identified 20% of all recorded crime in England and Wales in 2022-23 as VAWG-related. It said that at least one in 12 women will be a victim of VAWG every year, with one in 20 adults in England and Wales being a perpetrator of VAWG each year.
Between 2009-10 and 2023-24, the number of rape and sexual assault offences against women and girls recorded by the police has increased by an astonishing 264%, according to the National Audit Office. Of course, this could be because more victims are coming forward which is to be very much welcomed, but we know a lot of these offences happen behind closed doors and do not get reported to police so these figures, whilst shocking, should be seen as conservative estimates.
Sexual violence takes many forms both on- and offline and, whilst victims include boys and men, the vast majority are women and girls and the perpetrators are overwhelmingly male. The Government’s definition of VAWG covers crimes including rape and other sexual offences, stalking, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and ‘honour’ killings, as well as so-called revenge porn, and ‘upskirting’.
In recent years, we’ve also seen the growth of what has become known as the ‘manosphere’ and, at the extreme, terrible acts of violence committed by ‘incels’, an online sub-culture of involuntarily celibate young men. Jake Davison, a young man from Plymouth displayed a fascination with mass shootings and ‘incel’ ideologies that turned out to be a deadly combination – in August 2021 he fatally shot five people, including his mother and a three-year-old girl, before killing himself. When looking at terrorism from Islamist to far right terrorism, the common ground they share and all too frequent starting point, is misogyny.
Supporting the pledge to halve VAWG
The magnitude of the problem is abundantly clear, which is why Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) and their equivalents, Police, Fire and Crime Commissioners (PFCCs) and Deputy Mayors in combined authority areas, wholeheartedly welcomed the Government’s pledge to halve violence against women and girls within a decade as part of its Safer Streets mission. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, has promised a transformative cross-government approach underpinned by a VAWG Strategy, publication of which is expected in the next few months. Police and Crime Commissioners drive the VAWG agenda and are central to delivering locally on national strategies to combat all forms of violence and abuse. We prioritise VAWG prevention in our police and crime plans and we drive multi-agency working, bringing together law enforcement, community organisations, and health services to ensure comprehensive action and support.
There is established evidence that the damage and trauma of being a victim of sexual violence is long-lasting and often compounded by the further ordeal of navigating a complex and protracted criminal justice process to achieve justice. Under the Victims’ Code, PCCs have a statutory duty to ensure appropriate support services are available to victims of crime in their local area to help them recover from their experience. These might include trauma-informed care, domestic abuse response programmes and helplines. We ensure victims’ voices are heard and their needs are met.
Alleged perpetrators of sexual violence and abuse must be investigated and held to account for their crimes through the justice system, and Police and Crime Commissioners across England and Wales are scrutinising their local forces on behalf of the public to make sure VAWG is given the high priority it deserves.
Whilst, of course, victims and survivors’ needs are fundamentally important it’s crucial, too, that the root causes of abuse are addressed, so last week’s announcement of funding to roll out of the DRIVE Project across England and Wales over the next four years is welcome. DRIVE is an innovative intervention programme that targets high-risk, high-harm perpetrators of domestic abuse by challenging and changing their behaviour. PCCs will be key to delivering this locally and we look forward to working with the Home Office on its implementation.
Policing cannot solve problem of VAWG alone. Long term change will come only with sustained investment in innovative and evidence-based solutions and multi-agency coordination. This is a society-wide issue, so we need society-wide solutions.
Working together to find solutions
Children are growing up in an ever-more complex world increasingly lived online; it is incumbent upon us all to help guide them in understanding right from wrong, to understand respect and healthy attitudes to relationships. Young people should feel empowered to call out behaviour or actions they know to be inappropriate or wrong. Of course, parents and guardians are central to ensuring that boys and young men – and for that matter, girls and young women – know what respectful behaviour and relationships look like. Schools are key to building upon that. Just last week, the Department for Education issued new statutory guidance on teaching pupils about relationships, sex and health education. The revised guidance requires secondary schools in England to address, for instance, how AI-manipulated images online can lead to distorted attitudes and behaviours to women and sex. And to counter the ease with which pornography can be accessed online, the communications regulator Ofcom now requires all porn sites and apps to have age verification checks in place.
The scale of the challenge can sometimes appear daunting but policing, for its part, has recognised the urgent need to put in place new structures and data-driven solutions to transform its approach to the issue. Change is happening.
A new national operating model, Operation Soteria, was implemented in 2023. The was initiated in my area of Avon and Somerset and improves how the police and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) deal with rape and other serious sexual offences. Systemic change doesn’t happen overnight, and these new ways of working are taking time to bed in, as demonstrated by last week’s report from the CPS inspectorate which set out eight recommendations for the Service to urgently improve its response to early advice and pre-charge decision-making.
In April the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection (NCVPP) started work, a dedicated hub to support police forces with specialist knowledge and training. The Violence Against Women and Girls Taskforce, now sitting within the NCVPP, was established in 2021 to provide a framework for forces to use to identify and manage the most dangerous offenders, ensuring a consistent national approach.
The Home Office is piloting ‘Raneem’s Law’, with an initial five police forces embedding domestic abuse specialists in their 999 control rooms to help call handlers and officers with risk assessments, and provide victims with advice and signposting to support services. Other forces have Independent Domestic Violence Advocates working with police officers on domestic abuse cases.
To help address the proliferation of explicit online content, the Online Safety Act is now fully in force. It will help protect women and girls by holding technology companies responsible for harmful content that appears on their platforms, for example, extreme pornography and sex abuse material. And the creation of sexually explicit deepfake images and the taking of intimate images without consent have recently been made criminal offences, as has the installation of equipment with intent to commit these crimes.
The funding imperative
There is one further important challenge to highlight if we are to succeed: funding. Whilst we acknowledge the commitment across government and policing to revolutionise the approach to violence against women and girls, it will require sustained and consistent financing. Funding for core victims’ services for 2025-26 saw a 4.2% cut, and while the settlement PCCs received from the government to deliver services for victims of VAWG was not cut in the same way, the material impact of the rise in inflation and the increase in National Insurance Employer contributions for our service providers has meant an overall material drop in funding.
When demand is rising it means that PCCs, as commissioners of victim support services, will need to work harder than ever to make sure appropriate and timely support is available. Significant funding is promised to deliver reform to areas of the wider criminal justice system following independent reviews of the prisons system and the criminal courts. Victims must be front and centre of these reforms and Police and Crime Commissioners will continue to deliver quality support services for them, but I must reiterate the need for longer-term, stable funding for victims.
Police and Crime Commissioners are long-established drivers of the multi-agency partnership approach to crime prevention – many of us chair our Local Criminal Justice Boards. We want to see momentum maintained across the sector to achieve effective and lasting change, to support the Government’s ambition to halve VAWG, and to provide better outcomes for victims. We are looking forward to the publication of the cross-government VAWG Strategy and are committed to playing a central role in its implementation and delivery.
For too long, victims and survivors of all forms of gender-based violence and misogynistic abuse have said they feel let down by policing, the CPS, the courts and the probation sector. This must change, and PCCs are determined to do all we can to ensure it does.
- This article first appeared in Policing Insight