Measuring the government mission to halve VAWG

As part of its manifesto and mission-driven approach, the Labour government committed to a landmark goal to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade. But nearly a year later we are yet to see any detail about how delivering on this will be measured.

With 1 in 12 women experiencing VAWG every year and the rapid emergence of new and complex forms of tech-facilitated abuse, government action is urgently needed to set out how it intends to tackle this epidemic.

In light of this, the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), Women’s Aid, Imkaan, Surviving Economic Abuse and Respect have drawn up a set of principles and recommendations for how the government should approach halving VAWG, endorsed by over 80 VAWG organisations.

The recommendations highlight the importance of taking an ambitious approach that not only looks at reducing the prevalence of VAWG incidents but also recognises how women and girls’ lives are multi-faceted and likely to include myriad forms of men’s violence across their lifetimes, with far reaching impacts and harms; not solely at an individual level but rippling out to families, networks and communities and reproducing women and girls’s inequalities.

There is no more time to waste. We need a plan from the top that sets out clearly how the government intends to tackle this national crisis.

We’re calling for a further consultation process be opened so that there is transparency and a clear structure around how the VAWG sector and VAWG experts can inform and guide the development of the government’s approach to measuring VAWG and the delivery of its mission to halve it. This must include consultation with smaller specialist VAWG organisations, including those led ‘by and for’ Black, minoritised and migrant women, and others who are marginalised.