Labour is considering plans to roll out education for young boys on violence against women and girls (VAWG) in an effort to tackle the epidemic.
Keir Starmer believes “prevention” is extremely important and will play a crucial role in ensuring his party achieves its mission to halve VAWG within a decade.
The Labour party leader acknowledged it would be a “a tough road” in order to achieve his crime mission, but said we should begin a discussion enabling boys and young men to feel more comfortable “calling [VAWG] out when they see it”.
He spoke to more than a dozen experts including Ruth Davison, the chief executive of Refuge; Selma Taha, the executive director of Southall Black Sisters; and Harriet Wistrich, the director of the Centre for Women’s Justice, who urged the Labour leader to focus on prevention, education of young men and focus on rebuilding a victims-led justice system.
The actor Emily Atack and the Love Island star Georgia Harrison, who also spoke at the event, praised Starmer for his mission and urged the party to ensure more professionals are able to educate young men in schools on different forms of abuse.
“We must look at toxic masculinity, which is a huge issue, take the blame off the victim, stop the victim blaming and actually focus on the perpetrators,” Atack said, adding that she believed the best way to tackle this was to introduce more experts into the education system.
“Teachers need to be very prepared to have these conversations but I think sometimes people – teachers – find it very awkward to talk about these kinds of things with pupils because they may feel a bit out of their depth, so we need professionals to come in to talk about these specific things.”
Daniel Guinness, managing director of the charity Beyond Equality, which works with men and boys to tackle VAWG, agreed that transformative work needs to be undertaken, but signalled leaving too much to teachers could risk burdening the system.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, said: “Labour’s mission to halve the level of [VAWG] means we need much stronger work on prevention – including stronger education among boys and young men.
“That means teaching respect in relationships in schools and tackling the appalling social media algorithms that are currently pushing violence and abuse against women at young men online.”
Throughout the roundtable session, experts also urged Starmer to commit to ensuring migrant women have access to legal services and public funds so they can escape domestic abuse. One expert said the government could prevent future incidents of VAWG among such women if they felt comfortable reporting abusive incidents, meaning officials would gain data on perpetrators and avoid migrant women being criminalised.
