In the same week that CCJS and the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Crime, Justice and Policing (CCJP) held a Breakfast Briefing in Parliament, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published their twenty sixth report into tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG).
This report notes the ambition of the Government to halve violence against women and girls in the next decade, as part of its ‘Safer Streets’ mission and centres prevention as the way to do this. This mission is led by the Home Office which is developing a new strategy to underpin this work, due for publication this summer.
The PAC found that the Home Office has a limited awareness of initiatives proving effective to prevent and tackle VAWG. As such the report recommends that prior to the launch of the new VAWG Strategy, the Home Office should set out how it will capture and share evidence of successful initiatives at the local level.
However, the report also notes that the Home Office has commissioned £4.2 million of new research into what works since April 2021. In addition, the PAC inquiry received evidence regarding such interventions. The CCJP submitted evidence sharing the findings of evaluations of interventions aimed at survivors and perpetrators of VAWG (both shared at the Breakfast Briefing, the former funded by the Home Office), an evaluation of risk assessment tools for police officers for domestic abuse and stalking cases, and research to better understand the link between domestic abuse and suicide.
Colleagues from the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham also submitted evidence regarding the importance of consistent definitions of VAWG and data sharing between agencies and the need for improved guidance on data sharing to improve local level understanding of abuses and improved prevention measures.
Evidence of use to the Home Office and other government departments is therefore available from academic researchers and others and has in some cases been commissioned by the Home Office. We hope that these findings will be of use to the coming VAWG strategy and future commissioning decisions.
