FiLiA’s Thoughts on the New VAWG Strategy: Welcome Words, Hard Questions and the Work Ahead
By Sally Jackson Trustee and Lead for male violence against Women
We welcome the publication of Freedom from Violence and Abuse: A Cross-Government Strategy to Build a Safer Society for Women and Girls; it has been long awaited. Feminists have spent decades naming male violence against women and girls (MVAWG) not as random harm or individual tragedy but as a systemic manifestation of misogyny, male power and women’s structural inequality. In that context, it matters that this Strategy explicitly names misogyny, recognises male violence and sets an ambition to halve VAWG within a decade.
What Will the Strategy Do?
Preventing abuse before it starts
There will be a stronger focus on prevention, including teaching children and young people about healthy relationships and challenging misogyny, particularly among boys. The Strategy also aims to tackle online abuse and the radicalisation of young men in digital spaces.Improving justice and accountability
Every police force will have specialist officers trained to investigate rape and sexual offences. New domestic abuse orders will better protect victims by covering coercive control, economic abuse and stalking, with no time limits. The justice system will also work to better support victims so that cases are less likely to collapse.Better support for survivors
More funding will go towards safe accommodation, helping survivors access secure housing. The NHS will provide improved specialist support, and government departments will work more closely together to ensure survivors receive joined-up care.Funding and global action
Significant investment has been committed across the justice system, local government and housing. Internationally, the UK is co-leading a new global coalition to tackle violence against women and girls worldwide.Making sure it happens
A dedicated team in Number 10 and a group of government ministers will oversee delivery of the Strategy to ensure action is coordinated and progress is monitored.
However, strategies alone do not end male violence. Women’s lives are changed by material action, political courage and sustained investment in the expertise of the women’s sector. From a FiLiA perspective, this Strategy contains important signals of progress, and familiar warning signs that demand scrutiny.
Naming Misogyny is Necessary – But Not Sufficient
It is significant that the Strategy acknowledges misogyny as a root cause of violence and recognises that VAWG is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women and girls. The women’s movement has fought hard against gender-neutral framings that erase power, responsibility and patterns of harm. This language matters.
Yet naming misogyny without confronting male entitlement risks becoming symbolic rather than transformative. Challenging misogyny means challenging institutions, cultures and economies that continue to centre men’s needs and minimise women’s safety. It requires moving beyond awareness-raising towards redistribution of power and resources, including sustained funding for women-only services, legal reform grounded in women’s reality and an end to policy approaches that manage violence rather than end it.
As FiLiA Volunteer and Yes Matters Founder Gemma Aitchison noted in her excellent blog:
There has been criticism and purposeful misrepresentation of ‘targeting’ boys and men. Similar to the Himpathy we saw during the #MeToo movement prioritising the feelings of men over the victims’ voices of actual harm. But the uncomfortable truth is this: This is a male problem.
The consistent majority of perpetrators towards men and women and boys and girls – are men. In every year since records began. In every single country in the world. It’s not an accident, it’s a choice men keep making… For this [Strategy] to work the first things that need to go are defensiveness, tokenism and prioritising men’s feelings over women’s safety. If that can be done by police, social workers, the CPS, ministers, teachers, probation and local authorities – things could change.
Prevention: We Cannot Educate Our Way Out of Structural Inequality
The Strategy’s emphasis on prevention and early intervention is welcome. Commitments to challenge misogyny in schools, address online harms and intervene early in harmful attitudes reflect long-standing feminist evidence: male violence is learned, normalised and therefore preventable.
But prevention cannot rest on individual behaviour change alone. Teaching consent will not protect women if pornography remains widely accessible, if online platforms continue to profit from misogyny or if economic inequality traps women in abusive relationships. Schools cannot compensate for a society that continues to sexualise, commodify and dehumanise women. We are pleased to see several measures included that address the availability and harms of pornography.
Prevention works best when it is delivered by specialist women’s organisations (especially by and for) with deep roots in communities and lived experience of male violence. Without explicit, long-term funding for this work, prevention risks becoming diluted, inconsistent and ultimately ineffective. We are concerned that not enough funding is being allocated to enable this work to be completed effectively.
Women Will Fall Through the Gaps if They Are Not Named – Racism, Classism and State Harm
A VAWG Strategy that fails to confront racism and classism is incomplete. For many marginalised women, male violence is compounded by the violence of the state itself. Black and minoritised women, migrant women, working-class women, disabled women and women living in poverty routinely report that when they seek help they are disbelieved, criminalised or blamed.
Racism shapes who is seen as a ‘credible’ victim. Migrant women face the weaponisation of their immigration status by perpetrators and the hostile environment of the state, deterring disclosure and trapping them in danger. This Strategy is a missed opportunity to provide a robust firewall for migrant survivors. Working-class women are often judged through lenses of moral failure rather than structural inequality, with poverty treated as a personal flaw instead of a context that limits choice and safety.
Classism also operates through service thresholds and commissioning models that reward compliance, stability and articulate disclosure. Women experiencing multiple disadvantage – homelessness, substance use, mental ill-health, poverty – are frequently deemed ‘too complex’ for support, bounced between services or excluded altogether. We welcome the investment in the new multiple disadvantage programme providing dedicated support to address this.
Prostitution: Included, Then Ignored
FiLiA is deeply concerned by who remains marginal or absent. Prostitution is included in the definition of VAWG with a single word, and then it effectively disappears. There is no clear commitment to specialist exit support, trauma-informed services or protection for women harmed through the sex trade. Feminist organisations know from experience that if women in prostitution are not explicitly prioritised, they are sidelined, misunderstood or erased altogether. FiLiA’s Women First project provides Real Solutions to Prostitution. This year we completed an FOI report and found that less than 20% of Local Authorities currently commission a specialist service to support women in the sex trade and less that 10% include this work in their VAWG Strategy. We are pleased to see prostitution included in the definition, and a commitment to developing and legislating a statutory definition of ‘adult sexual exploitation’ with accompanying multi-agency statutory guidance, to establish a shared understanding of the sexual exploitation of adults. We remain cautious about how this will be defined and look forward to working with government to ensure it includes all those affected.
We note the commitment to consider current SEV licensing and what appears to be a reference to the ‘frequency exemption’. We are sure women in affected areas, with whom we have met, will want to share their experiences with the government. FiLiA’s research hub is currently completing research into how living and working in the vicinity of SEVs impacts on women, and we continue to advocate for local councils to adopt a nil-cap policy. We hope that the strategy will consider SEV licensing as a whole, and we support a ban on all forms of the sex trade and the exploitation of women and girls.
Criminal Justice: Accountability Matters, but Justice Is More than Prosecutions
The Strategy’s focus on the pursuit of perpetrators rightly reflects a core principle: responsibility for abuse lies with those who choose to commit it. Police reform, specialist expertise and accountability are urgently needed, particularly given the repeated institutional failures that have cost women their lives, as both the Baroness Casey Review and the Angiolini Inquiry have shown us.
But criminal justice alone cannot deliver safety. Women continue to face disbelief, re-traumatisation and abandonment within the system. Justice must be survivor-led, trauma-informed and supported by strong, independent women’s services.
Enforcement without feminist infrastructure risks reproducing harm rather than ending it. We have seen this clearly displayed in the family court. We are pleased to see a promise to expand the Pathfinder project, but with so many recommendations from the Harm report Two Years, Too Long still waiting to implemented, we wait to see how this will be prioritised.
A Whole Society Approach – But It Must Be Equitable
The Strategy repeatedly references partnership, co-production and lived experience. These words are familiar to the women’s sector but sometimes a little hollow. FiLiA will be watching closely to see whether grassroots feminist organisations, particularly those that are critical, independent and politically challenging, are meaningfully involved in implementation. It is positive to see so many government departments involved as well as wider society – this is a societal problem that we all have a responsibility to address.
FiLiA believes that there is clear scope and an urgent need for women’s meaningful inclusion in co-design and decision-making structures at local, regional and national levels. Through our Women’s Assembly, we can support campaigners and community organisers to push for genuine involvement in shaping responses to VAWG within their own communities. This includes supporting women to engage with advisory roles, local engagement forums and consultation processes, so that their knowledge informs not only policy development but the structures through which decisions are made.
Crucially, women must be involved in shaping how funding is allocated. The specialist Women’s sector holds so much expertise in what really works and how it should be delivered. FiLiA can support women to influence commissioning and investment decisions to ensure resources are directed towards community-led prevention, survivor-centred services and locally accessible interventions that reflect women’s lived experience. Without this, funding risks reinforcing existing power imbalances, privileging large institutions over grassroots expertise and failing the women most affected by violence.
From Strategy to Struggle
This Strategy contains language and intentions that feminists have demanded for years. That matters. Ending male violence against women is a profound political struggle that requires sustained funding, as well as honesty about power, inequality and whose interests are being protected.
FiLiA welcomes the many opportunities within this ambitious Strategy and stands ready to work towards effective delivery informed by feminist principles, co-produced practice and the knowledge of grassroots women with lived experience.
But we will not confuse promises with progress. We will take the time needed to scrutinise the detail, challenge omissions and hold decision-makers to account. Women’s lives depend on it.