Our coaliton partner End Violence Against Women‘s latest Snapshot report contains key recommendations to end and prevent violence against women and girls – from public attitude campaigns to holding accountable the tech companies that promote and profit from misogynistic content. It highlights the need for investment in prevention and support services, particularly for specialist support services, including those led by and for Black and minoritised women and marginalised survivors of abuse, which continue to face chronic underfunding amid rising costs of running their services.
This snapshot report highlights the different contexts which contribute to the prevalence of violence against women and girls in the UK each year, as well as the different ways the state has tried to respond though law and policy-making.
Analysing the latest data and trends over the past year, the report finds:
- The cost of living crisis is leaving women facing an impossible choice of staying with a perpetrator or facing destitution
- Government plans to take away our Human Rights Act are a major threat to survivors’ ability to hold the police and other public authorities to account when they are failed by them. In a year which has blown the lid off the scale of police-perpetrated violence against women and girls, and in which survivors continue to be routinely failed by police and the criminal justice system, these plans would have catastrophic impacts on women
- Evidence of the scale of police abusing their power and escaping accountability for violence against women has left the institution in crisis. At the same time, the government is pushing to give police more power through the widely denounced Public Order Bill, and continues its raid on our rights via the so-called Bill of Rights
- In the year that saw the Online Safety Bill enter Parliament, we have also seen tech companies take inadequate action to prevent boys and young men from being radicalised by misogynistic influencers online. There has been a groundswell of public and parliamentary support for the introduction of a VAWG Code of Practice to improve tech companies’ response to this in the Bill
- Amid record levels of recorded sexual offences and domestic abuse, the criminal justice system continues to fail women
- Specialist support services, including those led by and for Black and minoritised women and marginalised survivors of abuse, continue to face chronic underfunding amid rising costs of running their services – making it an increasing struggle to meet demand
In a year that saw violence against women and girls remain firmly on the national and political agenda, we continued to see government solutions that often missed the mark and failed to get to the root of the problem: the gender inequality that shapes men’s attitudes and behaviours.
Instead, we need a holistic, comprehensive approach that understands VAWG as a women’s rights issue and has prevention at its heart – so women and girls don’t become victims in the first place and future generations can live their lives free from the threat of male violence.
