Violence against women and girls is not inevitable. With political will, police reform, and genuine collaboration, we can build a society in which no one faces abuse because of their gender. That is the central message of the report from this years’ Cumberland Lodge Police Conference, launched today to mark the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The UN’s theme for this year’s 16 Days of Activism, UNiTE to End Digital Violence against Women and Girls, highlights the growing threats women encounter online. Perpetrators increasingly use digital tools to stalk, harass, and abuse women and girls. Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) exists on a ‘continuum’; as a spectrum of violence that seamlessly spans both the online and offline realms, and online threats often escalate into real-world harm. Gender-based misinformation and disinformation is fuelling misogyny, undermining democracies, and affecting the lives of young men and women across the world.

In response, the UN is urging the citizens across the globe to call for stronger laws and better enforcement to hold perpetrators to account; for investment in prevention and culture change; for improved support for victims, and for technology companies to do more to ensure safety on their platforms.

This is why the Police Foundation has chosen today to publish Thinking ahead: Future directions in tackling violence against women and girls, which illustrates how UK society, and policing in particular, is already taking steps to address these issues, and how far we have still to go.

In June this year The Police Foundation had the privilege of bringing together senior police officers, practitioners, academics, technologists and representatives from non-profit and private sector organisations, to discuss and consider the current demands on the police and ask what the future challenge of tackling gender-based violence will look like. 

As the Chair of the Police Foundation, Dame Sara Thornton explained, the importance of the Cumberland Lodge conference lies in its ability to convene changemakers, in this case from across the VAWG space, and provide them with space to rise above the daily demands and consider these new threats and how we might tackle them together.

Dame Sara said: “Cumberland Lodge is a special place to convene experts from the widest diversity of perspectives to make new connections and to develop new ideas.

“This June’s conference focussed on tackling violence against women and girls and was an important opportunity to reflect on how policing prevents and investigates abuse. Having been away from the issue for the last four years I was struck by the diversification and escalation of risk but also the encouraging best practice which is emerging. And of course this cannot be a matter of law enforcement alone – society as a whole has a key role to play in ending violence against women and girls.”

Over three days, delegates examined the current policing response and the direction it should take, how global and online threats are evolving, what must be done to address sexism and misogyny within policing, and how to counter the rising tide of misogynistic attacks targeting women in public life. This report aims to capture the key content and spirit of those discussions and bring them, alongside the pre-event briefing paper, to a wider audience.

The conference acknowledged that policing had failed victims in the past, citing inadequate investigations, low charge rates, poor attitudes among officers and lack of confidence among victims that the police would take online crimes (especially) seriously. But it also showed that, given the right technology, skills and training, the police can respond to VAWG more effectively. For example, by adopting a victim-centred, suspect-focused and context-led approach in rape and sexual assault cases, Operation Soteria has improved charge rates, changed cultures, and improved victim satisfaction and, as one speaker commented: “put soul back into policing.”Project Bright Light in Avon and Somerset is doing the same for domestic abuse.

Last year, police chiefs declared VAWG a national emergency and in April 2025, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) and the College of Policing launched the National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection (NCVPP). Delegates heard from the new centre about its vision for a ‘whole system’ approach that seeks to prevent harm, give confidence to victims, survivors, and witnesses to come forward, and bring more offenders to justice.

Deputy Assistant Commissioner, Helen Millichap, the Director of the NCVPP, explains what the centre has achieved in the subsequent months, stressing that progress is happening nationwide.

DAC Millichap explained: “I attended Cumberland Lodge in very first few days of my new role, which was an incredible opportunity to hear the broad-ranging and frank conversation about both the extent of our collective challenges, and also the potential for the whole system to point attention and resource things that we know work.

“I can’t emphasise enough how tackling the range of harms (that for many victims and survivors do not fit neatly into categories of offline or online, or into a single offence type) need cross government collective and meaningful effort. Creating the right culture in policing is about each victim and each perpetrator being seen in context – we must look beyond what’s in front of us and use technology both to enable officers and to free up their time. Our work is long-term, but we are moving fast on practical and tactical things we want to scale up across policing; whether that’s better training and guidance for officers on things like online harm, or readying policing for rapid video response and Raneem’s Law.

“Next year we’ll publish a new threat and risk assessment, and we will develop a clear performance framework to help us better describe and demonstrate national progress. We hope the government VAWG strategy will support us to play our part, and critically those around us across the wider criminal justice system and beyond.

“Prevention, education and wider societal change will be the cornerstone of the change we need to see. Policing is a crucial aspect of this whole system approach, and we are ready to work.”

But although policing has a role to play, and it is up for the challenge, the answers do not lie with the police service alone. Instead, they are to be found in a whole society approach that focuses on challenging gender norms and misogynistic systems, on improving education, and in better online regulation and platform accountability.

The report calls on the government to adopt an approach to confronting VAWG that is as multifaced as the problem it aims to tackle. This should centre on properly defining the problem, promoting evidence-based interventions, and creating an overarching national policy framework that highlights how all parts of government and society need to work together to end gender-based violence.

Since VAWG is everybody’s problem, every sector, individual, and leader must own a piece of the solution. It is up to each one of us to do our bit to challenge the misogynistic views that drive these crimes and rally for a world where technology is a force for equality – not harm.