On December 18th, as the year was waning and hopes of government action were fading too, the government finally published its Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy. Before being elected, the government committed to a frankly astonishing pledge; that it would reduce violence against women and girls by half within ten years. Eighteen months after its election, many victims, survivors and campaigners were wondering what on earth it was waiting for.

The Police Foundation’s Ruth Halkon has already published an excellent blog on the strategy and I don’t need to repeat the things she said. I do, however, want to pick up a number of other points.

First, that the government should be congratulated for aiming at relational change, not just procedural change. By that, I mean the effort to influence society, not just pull the usual government levers such as introducing more laws. Where the strategy – and its accompanying action plan – stutter, however, is in recognising what it takes for a government to achieve this ambition. If we are to engage the public at large, businesses, boys and men, and other groups identified by the strategy, it has to be through conversation. What the strategy errs on the side of is transmission and directive. Telling people to change, to care, to engage, doesn’t work. The government must show humility and bravery in facilitating unusual conversations, genuinely open ones, in which participants all hold power rather than passively receiving approved messages. If it gives a platform to people to meaningfully take part, it could do worse than think about centres of male space, of which policing is an obvious one. Likewise the military, fire service, construction, banking, and other sites where men are dominant. Hoping that the women’s sector can step into these spaces would be overly hopeful; the government needs additional brokers, too.

Within policing itself, the strategy notes that the status of VAWG as a specialism remains low, and says it will change this. But it is light on explanation of how it will do this. For many years, in particular since HMIC(FRS)’s groundbreaking 2014 report into policing domestic abuse, the College of Policing and others have wrestled with how to improve the status of policing VAWG. The National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection is now touted as the means to achieve this, but it’s unconvincing that simply transferring responsibility from one policing body to another, 12 years later, will have a different impact. In a linked point, the strategy mentions an increase for police in technical methods, including digital. This could be welcome and could improve VAWG as a ‘destination’ role within policing. But it isn’t clear that inside this strategy is a sub-strategy which joins up all the potential tech for good options across VAWG experience. The risks of digital technologies are referenced extensively, but it’s a missed opportunity not to fully explore the opportunities which accompany those risks.

As well as an action plan, the strategy is accompanied by a Men and Boys Explanatory Note. This is a welcome document, but could have gone further. The note rightly identifies that many boys and men are deeply affected by VAWG; in particular many male children experience at an early age the fear and hypervigilance of living in a house with a domestic abuse perpetrator. A number of years ago, the then Victims’ Commissioner Vera Baird published the valuable Sowing the Seeds report. This document was an important step forward in recognising how early domestic abuse experiences can lead on to risk taking behaviour and sometimes perpetration of crime itself. The government would have done well to reference this report, and to identify the responses needed for boys and adolescent men who have lived with abuse from an early age. These boys need specialism of response even beyond the response to children as a whole. Seeing a primary male role model act in this way is formative, and needs explicit responses. The police have an opportunity to address this too, but the documents say little about police responses to children when they’re called out to domestic abuse incidents. Too often as we know, strategies from the police themselves hold VAWG and children’s strategies separately, instead of seeing the deep links. And though police welfare provision is improving in many respects, the recognition of previous experiences on the part of police officers, including childhood abuse, isn’t yet part of the conversation.

Finally, while the strategy and action plan make brief reference to multi-agency working, this is not given any substance. There is a vital realisation that previous government strategies have been too police and criminal justice heavy, with other government departments and state agencies taking minimal responsibility. The difficulty persists, though, in achieving a strategy that is meaningfully cross-government, in a way that agencies nationally and at the local level can mirror and operationalise in their day to day work. The action plan makes reference to new guidance by spring 2026, but guidance needs to be backed up by significant investment in practical tools and capability building, with under-performing areas able to learn from specialist national teams, and comparable local teams who are performing better. The worst siloes of all are often found in Whitehall, and the government is poorly equipped to improve multi-agency working when it cannot role model this itself. It would usefully invite a lot of external input and challenge to this particular work.

Though the strategy was released 18 months after Labour’s election victory, it still purports to be a ten year strategy. The clock actually started ticking on Friday 5th July 2024. That may not be convenient for the government, but if they feel under pressure to deliver I think they also recognise that’s nothing compared to the desperation of leaving things as they are any longer. The documents released on 18th December are a good step and were no doubt hard-fought behind the scenes. Now implementation planning, with a willingness to stay open to additional ideas, needs to emerge.