Tackling male violence against women and girls has, for many years, amounted to applying “nicer plasters” on “ever growing scars”, safeguarding minister Jess Phillips admitted as she launched the long-awaited violence against women and girls (VAWG) strategy. Previous efforts, she said, focused too heavily on responding to harm and too little on preventing it.
This medical imagery aptly frames an approach that treats VAWG not only as a criminal justice issue, but as a public health emergency requiring a whole-society response. Rather than another sticking plaster, Freedom from Violence and Abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls, seeks to address root causes, identifying misogyny and dangerous attitudes and behaviours – online and offline – that drive men and boys to offend.
This is the fourth VAWG strategy since 2010 and far from the first to promise long-term cultural and societal change. And yet while awareness of VAWG has increased, the change has not followed – with half of people thinking violence and sexual abuse are also increasing. Crime survey for England and Wales data shows sexual assault rates significantly higher than a decade ago, while domestic abuse has fallen only slightly. Police-recorded rape has risen by 350 per cent over 15 years – largely reflecting improved recording and increased reporting.
Previous strategies are widely judged to have failed due to unclear problem definitions, weak evidence, insufficient use of expertise, and a lack of genuine whole-of-government ownership. At first glance, many of these criticisms do not apply here. The strategy is grounded in an extensive evidence review, offers an updated definition of VAWG (including online and technology-facilitated abuse), and is accompanied by concrete cross-government commitments spanning public services, civil society, academia, business and the VAWG sector.
The strategy rests on three pillars: prevention and early intervention; support for those affected; and the relentless pursuit of perpetrators. These pillars are not too dissimilar to the “prioritising prevention, supporting victims, and pursuing perpetrators” of the previous VAWG strategy. But the emphasis on “relentless” pursuit – echoed in the NPCC strategy – signals renewed intent after years of lengthy investigations,[1] low charge rates and high attrition, particularly in rape cases, which have prompted accusations of institutional “defeatism”.
Its most significant departure is placing children at the core of prevention. Although critics argue that school-age boys are not the main perpetrators, evidence shows harmful attitudes often form in childhood and abusive behaviours begun in adolescence can persist into adulthood if unchallenged. Evidence also shows that education on healthy relationships works. If successful, this approach could prevent a future surge in VAWG and counter the influence of figures such as Andrew Tate. However, with education reforms focused on secondary schools by 2029, this may come too late for many, given evidence of entrenched sexism in primary schools.
The strategy is strongest in the dual role it assigns to policing: pursuing perpetrators while safeguarding victims through a “victim-centred, suspect-focused and context-led” approach, championed by Operation Soteria. This includes stronger accountability through performance frameworks and vetting, alongside improved training, technology and tools. Measures such as Live Facial Recognition vans and Rapid Video Response aim to identify high-harm offenders and speed up responses. The strategy also reasserts national leadership while supporting local innovation through the National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection. Importantly, it recognises that not all victims want a criminal justice outcome. Domestic Abuse Protection Orders and the rollout of a national perpetrator programme could significantly improve safety if properly implemented.
Yet much of the strategy involves reclaiming ground lost after years of policy failure. Specialist rape teams, promised nationwide by 2029, are not new. Instead they replace teams disbanded due to austerity, and a well-intentioned desire to make rape “everyone’s business” by transferring ownership of investigations to local policing divisions. These divisions did not always have the confidence, skills and support to deal with them effectively, leading to poor and often re-traumatising experiences. The challenge will be restoring national standards while ensuring swift local delivery, so victims are not left waiting yet again.
The approach to online VAWG is weaker. While measures such as banning porn depicting strangulation and criminalising nudification apps are welcome, the strategy relies heavily on education and criminalisation, without addressing the systemic drivers of online misogyny. As the Centre for Protecting Women Online argues, it depends too much on tech companies’ goodwill and fails to regulate platforms that amplify and profit from abuse.
Our recent Cumberland Lodge Police Conference report, drawing on insights from police leaders, practitioners, academics, technologists and the private and voluntary sectors, calls for a genuinely whole-system response which is multi-faceted as the problem it seeks to address.
While the strategy’s rhetoric gestures in this direction, it falters in one crucial respect: measurement. It relies on Crime Survey data showing 11.3 per cent of people aged 16 and over experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault or stalking in 2023–24 – setting it up as the figure it wishes to halve. This figure is both too broad and too narrow: it includes men, who form a minority of victims and who face very different patterns of abuse, and excludes under-16s, despite evidence that girls are particularly vulnerable to offences such as domestic abuse. Without a baseline that captures the true scale of offending, how will success be judged in 2029?
Finally, funding threatens to undermine ambition. While the strategy has been widely welcomed, many third-sector organisations warn that resources falls seriously short of what is needed, with little clarity on how much funding is genuinely new. There is every chance it will succeed, and the list of women killed by men that Ms Phillips reads every year in parliament may well grow shorter. But without sustainable investment and clear delivery mechanisms, even this most evidence-based strategy risks becoming, once again, little more than “nicer plasters”.
[1] A recent supercomplaint by Cambridge Rape Crisis Centre (CRCC), Centre for Women’s Justice (CWJ), Rape Crisis England & Wales (RCEW) and Bindmans LLP said the number of cases which took more than three years to investigate has increased sevenfold over the last ten years