In the UK a woman is killed by a man every three days. Recorded rape and sexual assault offences have surged 264% since 2009, one in 12 women are victims of violence each year, and 1.6 million women experience domestic abuse in a single year.
The statistics are appalling. What’s less widely recognised is the evidence gap sitting behind these numbers. We have very little idea of what works to reduce violence.
This puts in doubt the government’s target to halve VAWG in the next decade. Moreover, it means we are at serious risk of failing women and girls across the country.
I spent time this year on secondment at the Cabinet Office. I had dozens of calls with brilliant practitioners doing extraordinary work to support women and girls. The problem is not one of effort or commitment – it’s where that effort is concentrated, how interventions are designed, and whether we learn from them.
In the UK, the approach to tackling violence against women and girls has not put enough emphasis on the preventative measures that are necessary to achieve long–term change.
According to the National Audit Office, referring to the previous government, “departments leading prevention activities in the VAWG Strategy told us that their greatest focus was on supporting victims”. These support efforts are vital, and should absolutely continue. But we need to tackle the root causes too. Far more investment is needed into understanding the behaviours and environments that result in men and boys committing violence.
For the prevention focused activity that does exist we have a very poor understanding of the strength of the evidence.
I recently came across an evaluation of a men’s healing app designed to prevent family violence. The app is powerful, culturally grounded and is gaining momentum. The evaluation pointed towards c.£85m in economic value. However, when you dig into the details it turns out that figure is based on survey responses from 30 men extrapolated to over 1,000 users. Crucially, the evaluation did not measure whether use of the app actually resulted in a reduction in violence. To be clear, this isn’t a criticism of the practitioners. It is a demonstration of the lack of capacity and capability within the sector to robustly evaluate.
Other fields do this well. Take education, where in my role as a primary school governor, the teachers I speak to will regularly tell me they are only doing something because it has a positive evaluation from the Education Endowment Foundation. We don’t have an equivalent for VAWG. That means practitioners are left to try and continue their heroic work, often on shoestring budgets, and evaluation falls by the wayside. It also means that policymakers set strategies without understanding what works.
A serious evidence programme would test solutions across the spectrum of VAWG, looking at areas including early intervention, online spaces, improved justice, and better support for women trying to leave abusive relationships.
Across the sector there is a tendency to talk about “shifting systems” in very broad terms. Ambitions to change the system matter, but they risk hampering existing efforts. It can create the sense that the problem is too large to be addressed through specific, testable interventions.
How many more women and girls will be harmed while we wait for a wholesale systems shift? There are things we can do immediately. We can identify promising solutions, test them, learn what has worked and scale them. Changing the system is an iterative process that should be built off the back of good evidence.
We can look beyond the field and our borders for inspiration. In US schools, a grassroots programme identified the most well connected children in schools and had them co-design and deliver interventions across the school to reduce bullying. This successfully reduced bullying and harassment conflict by 30%. In France, simplified guidance and correcting assumptions about whether patients are comfortable with screening questions increased screenings for domestic abuse by 76%.
Some of this work to build the evidence base is already happening. At BIT, our Ending Youth Violence Lab is running two feasibility studies to reduce domestic abuse and relationship-violence. Foundations, the What Works Centre for Children & Families, has announced its REACH plan which aims to find out what works to prevent domestic abuse and support child victims. The Cabinet Office Test, Learn and Grow team will run accelerators to concretely test approaches to reduce VAWG.
This parliament is a unique window to lay the foundations for lasting progress on VAWG. Experience from other areas shows that building an evidence base early allows time for solutions to be tested, refined and scaled to achieve measurable impact. Delay risks another decade of trial-and-error policymaking where we miss opportunities to make real progress and continue to fail women and girls.
Deelan Maru is a senior policy advisor at the Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the “Nudge Unit”. Set up in 2010 as a unit within the Cabinet Office, it was spun out into a limited company in 2014 and is now fully owned by innovation charity Nesta