The government has followed its ambition to halve violence against women and girls within a decade by publishing a new VAWG strategy, entitled Freedom from violence and abuse, at the end of last year.
The strategy organises around three pillars: prevention, pursuing perpetrators, and support for victims.
However, responses from the statutory and voluntary services expected to deliver this ambition have been muted. Confidence in the system is low, reflecting low confidence in the system’s ability to deliver change. Despite more than 50 years of policy development, outcomes remain poor. Domestic abuse homicide rates have not fallen; rape conviction rates are extremely low, leading some to describe the offence as effectively decriminalised. In this context the strategy brings almost no new investment. As the continuing Epstein scandal shows, power and money are still not on the side of victims.
So, with the strategy on the table, where do we go from here?
Modernising the system
With no new resources, we need a rethink about the ones we currently have. The current system of service responses – stretching across frontline public services, from police to education to social services – is bureaucratic, expensive and defensive. Worse yet, it achieves poor outcomes, frequently depleting the capacity of those seeking help. Over the past quarter-century, complex and costly layers of assessment, referral and compliance have developed that end in very little actual service.
“Confidence in the system is low, reflecting low confidence in the system’s ability to deliver change”
The result is a system that isn’t working for victims. Sarah’s story illustrates this. Married with two young children, over time she found herself isolated from friends and family by her husband. His control and coercion grew, culminating in a frightening assault late one Saturday night. Suddenly feeling unable to protect herself or her children, Sarah called the police.
But the response wasn’t the help Sarah needed. She found herself within a tsunami of agency activity. Despite having sought help because she felt overwhelmed, services wanted more from her. The criminal investigation required statements about her relationship and partner; social services launched an investigation to assess her ability to parent and keep her children safe; and a string of phone calls began from domestic abuse and other services asking her to attend assessment interviews.
At no point did anyone ask her what she wanted. She returned home – now to a situation made less safe by the ongoing criminal investigation and threat of social services intervention. So Sarah – like so many women – withdrew the charge and downplayed the allegation. Contacting services hadn’t brought her anywhere nearer the help she had sought.
Sarah’s story shows how hard the system tries to give victims choices; but also how unrealisable these choices are when victims don’t have the space and capacity for action. All the services Sarah encountered just created more noise when what she needed was space and support to answer questions in her head about the future, her children, and how she can be safe.
The new VAWG strategy aims to better support victims and, through that, gain the buy-in and evidence to pursue perpetrators. Achieving this will mean shifting the system’s design to focus on meeting victims’ needs as they present – building, not depleting, victims’ capacity. The strategy can do this by giving permission to simplify processes, reward outcomes over activity and compliance, and reinstate trust in professional judgement.
The question of prevention
This redesign can also insert a culture of preventing further harm into every contact. The strategy already puts a strong and welcome focus on prevention; however, it doesn’t explain what this means. Efforts at prevention have been crowded out of resources by the demands of crisis provision, while a lack of investment in research and development and innovation pipelines has stifled an understanding of what works.
The strategy repeats a common oversight in that it targets prevention at attitudes, not at the gender power inequities that drive and make those attitudes profitable. In this continuing era of Epstein, we see starkly how power created by financial inequality lies at the root of abuse, and how far current prevention strategies stop short of confronting this.
What has existed in prevention in VAWG has taken the form of awareness-raising: occasional Home Office campaigns; fundraising and messaging by large charities like Women’s Aid, Refuge and Rape Crisis. The greatest impact has been in the media: storylines in The Archers and EastEnders have brought the reality of abuse into people’s living rooms. The influence of the Netflix series Adolescence can be seen in the strategy’s own emphasis.
Beyond the role of messaging and education, however, is the valuable potential of the role of families and communities in prevention. They are the environments in which relational behaviours develop and abuse most often takes shape. It’s in families and communities where protections are available and early patterns are visible. They’re the place where norms are set – for good or bad – and power disparities are forged. Unlike statutory and commissioned services, there are no thresholds of entry to communities: this is where preventative and earliest intervention can happen.
Yet the strategy does not fully draw out this potential. Prevention models have looked too readily to services rather than communities for solutions. Yet behaviour change comes through trusted relationships, and it’s those closest to situations who notice warning signs first. If the state were to invest in civil society as experts by experience and create clear, accessible routes into early intervention, it may find many communities ready to act – as its first and most effective line of defence.
One answer on investment
Clearly, with such a huge goal set by the government, new investment is needed – even if the strategy stops short of naming it. So where can this come from?
One under-explored option – long trailed but rarely applied in VAWG – is social investment. This is the use of third-party investment to fund social outcomes and assets, from which investors are only repaid when agreed outcomes or revenue are achieved. The UK market is worth an estimated £10bn. New government-led initiatives like the £500m Better Futures Fund show renewed policy appetite for applying social investment.
In Hull, specialist domestic abuse provider Preston Road Women’s Centre has shown the potential impact of social investment in VAWG. The centre supports 1,000 victims a year plus their children, and houses over 160 women-led households fleeing abuse. The centre has now built sufficient revenue from social investment-funded housing that it’s on the cusp of becoming entirely independent of commissioned funding: a shift almost unheard of in voluntary sector services. This makes the services sustainable and able to be built around victims’ presenting needs and capital – no longer tied down to the costly strictures of commissioning frameworks.
Crucially, this investment has led to a genuine community service remaining sustainable, with a front door in the community that victims can access at any point – including preventative support well before crisis. This shows just one way in which social investment can support the transition of activity upstream in a way current commissioning models struggle to do. The new strategy can help unpick these barriers, supporting long planning horizons and building skills and confidence in commissioners to draw on forms of third-party resource.
Conclusion
Government has set itself a huge challenge to halve VAWG within a decade. Achieving this requires brave decision makers who can see latent opportunity in communities, social investment and, most crucially, in the capacity of victims themselves.
Becky Rogerson MBE has over 20 years’ experience as a chief executive in the third sector designing and delivering services for victims and perpetrators, and 10 years as a magistrate in the criminal courts.
Fiona Sheil is a researcher, strategist and former commissioner. They are both part of a cross-sector alliance of practitioners setting up the UK’s first think tank dedicated to ending violence against women and girls.
For more information, contact fiona@heard-consulting.co.uk