ABOUT EVAW:
The End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW) is a leading coalition of more than 150 specialist women’s support services, researchers, NGOs, and other experts working to end violence against women and girls in all its forms.
Snapshot report looks in detail at the current contexts and developments impacting VAWG in the UK; analysing the government’s response through legislation, policy-making, and practice.
The report highlights a further deterioration of the foundations needed to tackle VAWG, and a concerning lack of public trust in politicians and public institutions to tackle VAWG, as illustrated by new YouGov polling.
The report illustrates politicians’ narrow focus on criminal offences as a solution to VAWG, and little consideration of how they can be effectively enforced by a collapsing justice system that is failing to prosecute rape and domestic abuse, and re-traumatising survivors who seek justice. In addition, the reports sets out a lack of ambition in this approach, failing to deliver a clear vision of how to prevent VAWG from happening.
The report sets out key recommendations to the government, including:
- Put prevention front and centre in work to tackle VAWG
- Protect our human rights frameworks – the bedrock of tackling VAWG
- Create a safe online world free from VAWG through legislation and other mechanisms
- Ensure access to support for all survivors by sustainably funding the specialist VAWG sector – particularly services run ‘by and for’ Black and minoritised women, Deaf and disabled women, and LGBT+ people
- Dismantle ‘hostile environment’ policies, including scrapping the No Recourse to Public Funds condition, introducing a ‘firewall’ to block data-sharing between statutory agencies and Immigration Enforcement, widening access to protection and removing reservations on the Istanbul Convention.
- Take a whole-society approach to VAWG by resourcing and reforming public institutions so they are better able to respond to this abuse.