First national Strategic Risk Assessment of VAWG finds young people at sharp edge of abuse

On 20th October 2026, the National Centre for Violence Against Women and Girls and Public Protection (NCVPP) published the first national Strategic Threat Risk Assessment (STRA) of violence against women and girls and wider public protection threats, finding that young people are at the sharp edge of abuse, online and offline, and that technology now runs through virtually every form of violent offending against women and girls.

Providing a comprehensive picture of the threats facing women and girls across England and Wales, the STRA reaffirms violence against women and girls (VAWG) as a national emergency and finds:

• Domestic abuse remains the most significant threat, accounting for 65% of all VAWG-related offences
• More than half of recorded rape and serious sexual assault offences are committed by a current or former partner
• Repeat perpetrators are linked to at least a quarter of VAWG offences
• The most common age groups identified as suspects for repeat abuse are 15-19 years and 30-49 years
• Technology now runs through virtually every form of VAWG offending
• Deepening social fragmentation heightens migrant and asylum-seeking women’s vulnerability to VAWG

Online misogyny shaping attitudes and behaviours

The STRA reports that harmful behaviour perpetrated by 15-19 year olds is linked to factors including misogynistic online influencers and AI including AI chatbots, which simulate and provide guidance on how to abuse women and children. These findings mirror concerns raised by experts for years and underline the need for regulation, early intervention and prevention. 

The End Violence Against Women Coalition has long called for stronger regulation of the tech companies that promote and profit from online misogyny and violence against women. This content, which is often served to young people who aren’t actively looking for it, is shaping attitudes to sex, relationships and gender equality – with girls and young women shouldering the fall out.

Along with our partner organisations spanning the rights and equalities sector, we are calling for mandatory safety-by-design so that all social media platforms are built to be safe for all users. 

We are also calling for current guidance for tech companies on VAWG to be made a mandatory code of practice, with strong consequences for non-compliance. Currently, the guidance is a set of best practice regulations tech companies can voluntarily implement.

The STRA also highlights that technology is rapidly reshaping the threats to women and girls, with online abuse, sexual extortion, image-based abuse, and emerging AI-enabled harms increasingly intertwined with offending offline. We have long raised the alarm about online abuse and the harm it causes to victims as well as to women and girls’ rights and freedoms more broadly, having successfully campaigned for this year’s new law criminalising the creation of non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes. But the law must go much further than criminal justice alone, including by ensuring that survivors have civil routes to justice. This includes orders to require perpetrators and tech companies to delete and take down abuse imagery, and routes to apply for damages.

Sex and relationships education vital to preventing VAWG

Beyond regulation of Big Tech, preventing violence against women and girls requires coordinated action across the whole of society, including in education settings. With the STRA finding that child-to-child abuse is a critical threat in terms of online abuse and sexual offending, this education is more critical than ever.

Quality relationships and sex education is one of the best ways to tackle harmful attitudes and give young people the tools to have healthy romantic and sexual relationships rooted in consent and equality. But provision is inconsistent and underfunded.

16-18 year olds in some forms of further education are excluded from this vital learning, despite this age group being most likely to be affected by domestic abuse in intimate relationships. In addition, girls and women aged 15 to 19 are most likely to be victims of sexual offences than any other age group. 

With our partners Make It Mandatory, Sex Education Forum and Brook, we have been campaigning for Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) to be made mandatory for all 16-18 year olds in education settings. A Private Members’ Bill that would make RSE a mandatory requirement for all young people up to the age of 18 is having its second reading in the House of Commons on the 4th December 2026. 

The government has already committed to implementing mandatory RSE to 18 in its landmark VAWG Strategy of December 2025, but the timeline for delivering on this commitment remains unclear. With 600,000 students in further education each year, this legislation cannot wait. We urge Parliamentarians to back the Bill so that those in further education no longer face a postcode lottery in provision. 

Beyond RSE – how schools and communities can prevent VAWG

While RSE is critical to preventing VAWG, we also need to look beyond these lessons toward the whole school environment if we are to truly tackle VAWG. This means taking a ‘whole-school approach’ in which the culture of the school, its policies and processes, and connections with parents, the community and specialist VAWG support services are creating a context in which what young people learn in the classroom matches their experiences outside of it. 

A whole-school approach ensures that young people don’t just learn about abuse and relationships in the classroom, but shifts the culture across the whole school environment, and ensures that if young people need support or safeguarding, the school robustly responds to these needs and takes appropriate action.

Last month, over 80 expert organisations wrote to the Prime Minister and Education Secretary, calling for urgent action to prevent VAWG in schools, including the national implementation of a whole-school approach. This follows shocking FOI data on the scale of sexual violence in schools, with police recording more than 8,060 sexual offences involving victims under 13 in England and Wales between 2021 and 2025 – equivalent to 4.4 offences every day. A further 2,300 sexual offences against children aged 13–16 were recorded over the same period.

Janaya Walker, Interim Director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), said:

“This first Strategic Risk Assessment underlines the urgent need for investment in prevention and a whole-society response to violence against women and girls. We call on the government to provide the funding needed to deliver quality RSE to all young people and to ensure that life-saving frontline services are able to support everyone who needs them. With almost all VAWG offending now having a technological component, we urge the government to be bold and ambitious with regulating AI and the tech companies that facilitate and profit from abuse of women and children.”

ENDS