In February 2024, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls urged the UK government to ‘do more to translate its political recognition of the scale of violence against women and girls into action’. In response, the Labour Party, now in government, declared its ‘landmark mission to halve violence against women and girls in a decade’. How the government will deliver on this promise remains unclear. In this article, Professor David Gadd, Dr Caroline Miles, and Professor Barry Godfrey explore how halving violence against women and girls is not the mission impossible it might appear.

• While rates of domestic abuse by partners and ex-partners have halved over the last two decades, more than one in four women in the UK have been sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.
• The National Police Chief Constables Council has declared violence against women and girls a ‘national emergency’ on par with terrorism, and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner has stressed they cannot solve this problem alone.
• Long-term investment in trauma-informed preventative work with boys and young men would help the new government achieve its mission to halve violence against women and girls, though this needs to be done in the context of wider public debate about men’s behaviour at home, in public spaces and in the workplace.

Recent history of gender-based violence

Although rates of gender-based violence (GBV), including violence against women and girls (VAWG), remain far too high, the proportion of women suffering domestic abuse from a partner/ex-partner, fell from 8.7% in 2005 to 4.5% in 2023. The proportion of men suffering domestic abuse from a partner/ex-partner fell similarly from 4.9% to 2.4% in the same period. While this decline provides reasons to be hopeful, it may also be reflective of the changing nature of intimacy: many more intimate relationships now begin online with ‘almost strangers’ who do not become ‘domestic’ ‘partners’ in terms used by the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW). Hence, while rates of partner/ex-partner domestic abuse have declined, many new forms of gender-based violence have emerged – some digital, like ‘revenge porn’ – some physical, like spiking – and many blending the virtual and the real – like stalking. Rates of femicide have shifted little over the last two decades. Similarly, the proportion of women sexually assaulted in the last year may have increased. It was 4.2% in 2003/4 and 4.3% in 2023/2024. The proportions of women ever sexually assaulted appears to have risen even more sharply  from  19.9% in 2013/14 to  27.0% in 2022/3, though this may, in part, reflect the inclusion of older women in more recent sweeps of the CSEW.

Limitations of the ‘go-to’ solutions to VAWG

The standard solutions to tackle VAWG – more policing, bringing perpetrators to justice, imprisoning high risk high harm predators – are unlikely to dent these troubling statistics. Only 1 in 23 domestic abuse offences and less than 3 in 100 rapes recorded by the police result in a conviction. Moreover, the vast majority of GBV is never reported to the police. Some victims and survivors will take a decade or more, before they confide in someone they trust.

Hence, while the National Police Chief Constables Council, have declared VAWG ‘a national emergency‘ and ‘a threat to national security, public safety, public order…on a par with terrorism’, senior officers stress that the problem is too vast for the police alone to solve. With some estimates suggesting that upwards of four million men in the UK are perpetrators of GBV, the police must concentrate their own limited resources on managing ‘the most dangerous and repeat’ offenders.

From policing to prevention

If we are to shift the dial on VAWG we need to start understanding who these repeat offenders are and what could be done at earlier stages in their lives to prevent them becoming so dangerous. Research, along with the findings of domestic homicide reviews, routinely reveals histories of complex trauma in the lives of the most dangerous men, deriving often from experiences in childhood, institutional care and custody, and contained precariously by the consumption of alcohol, prescription drugs and illicit substances.

Many perpetrators have also experienced seeing their mothers physically and/or sexually abused by fathers and stepfathers whom they wish to be nothing like. Some nevertheless harbour greater resentments towards mothers who appeared too vulnerable to protect them, and social workers, teachers and police officers who intervened in ways that left them and their siblings at risk of further harm. While the many abuses perpetrated by men against women and girls are certainly a product of misogyny, the roots of men’s sexism are sometimes found in adverse life events such as these. It is important to note that sometimes ‘woman-blaming’ is evoked to cover up things men and boys are themselves deeply ashamed about.

‘Losing it’, becoming ‘out of control,’ being a ‘creep’, ‘a perv’, or a bit ‘toxic’ are not things that men aspire to be. If recent data suggests anything, it is that men want loving and respectful relationships with their partners and a majority realise that patriarchal relationships, demarked by coercive control, are bad for them too. If we want to build on this momentum, we need to talk more to men about intimacy, and not only through the lenses of abuse and patriarchy. We must begin with terms that resonate directly with men’s own experiences and use of language.

Recommendations

Long-term investment in trauma-informed preventative work with boys and young men would help the government achieve its mission to halve VAWG, though this needs to be done in the context of wider public debate about men’s behaviour at home, in public spaces and in the workplace.

There is emerging evidence to suggest that the attitudes of men and boys generally, and among subgroups likely to contain higher percentages of repeat perpetrators, can be improved through well designed social media interventions. In Greater Manchester, as in some other devolved city-regions, we have been fortunate to have a leadership team who invest and support such interventions. At a national level, we need properly evaluated social media interventions that can capture unintended boomerang effects and respond to them.

But a core challenge is how to sustain those conversations long enough that resistance is worked through to the point that opposition on the grounds that ‘not all men’ rape, stalk, or coercively control is turned into a rallying cry to ensure even fewer men do. Sustainable investment is therefore needed in services and staff that work with perpetrators to develop skillsets and reduce burnout. Alongside this, ringfenced local budgets can enable swift responses to new forms of gender-based violence before they become normalised.

As the government begins to furnish its strategy to halve VAWG in a decade, it should not be forgotten that it takes political leadership to engender societal level change. Resourcing, upskilling and supporting the criminal justice, education, health and VCFSE sector will be important. But this will only work if we also have the difficult national conversation that is long overdue. We must recognise that telling men what they want to hear – that they are okay because they are nothing like the really bad guys – is not the same as exploring with them what they might need to ensure the women they work with, live with, and care about no longer have to endure the ‘national emergency’ that reflects current levels of violence against women and girls.