Every Christmas, domestic abuse rates soar as women find themselves on the receiving end of batterings, abuse and controlling behaviour from a partner, son or former spouse demonstrating anything but festive peace and goodwill. It’s a year-round problem with a seasonal peak.
Only one in 60 cases of physical, sexual, emotional and economic abuse will result in a conviction – and the majority of offences aren’t reported to the police. Will more women come forward now that Gisèle Pelicot has bravely made her stand? Perhaps – but more has to be done.
Keir Starmer is committed to halving violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade. Several initiatives have been announced. They include embedding domestic abuse specialists in 999 control rooms; new domestic abuse protection orders that mean perpetrators could face tougher sanctions; and powers given to six police forces to charge a domestic abuse suspect without first going to the Crown Prosecution Service.
These are early days but so far, like random jigsaw pieces that have ended up in the same box, the initiatives don’t cohere. What’s more, it might have been better to establish what already works well: to implement existing legislation, for instance, on stalking and coercive control; and to introduce an oversight mechanism that monitors whether police, probation, health, housing and all the services are collaborating to address a constant (and repetitive) stream of recommendations from domestic homicide reviews, inquiries and inquests that could save the lives of women and children. But that’s not happening.
On the plus side, female ministers are committed to improving the situation. And yet. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, has promised “a cross-government approach” but plenty of other issues occupy her time. The women’s minister, Bridget Phillipson, also deals with education, which is not short of crises, while Jess Phillips, minister for safeguarding and VAWG, is a campaigner but she is at a junior rank with no big budget. So who’s really in charge of what?
The National Police Chiefs’ Council has called the rising levels of VAWG a “national emergency” affecting one in 12 women and girls – yet the sector with specialised knowledge that offers refuges, advocacy, counselling and safety is still desperately underfunded.
Starmer has made tackling VAWG part of his fifth mission, “Safer streets”. While this work is important, says Caroline Grant, CEO of the First Step, the independent specialised domestic abuse service in Knowsley, Merseyside, which has a waiting list of nine months, “It can reinforce the notion that the risk to women is primarily on the streets and from strangers, not where the greatest danger lies, in the home.”
Pat McFadden, the most senior Cabinet Office minister, recently called on “innovators and disrupters” to come forward to create a “test and learn culture”. “Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again,” he said. “If we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve.”
‘Governing as usual” precisely describes the current fragmented, uncoordinated response to VAWG. What else might work? “Femicide in Merseyside: 15 years of failing women” is a shocking report written by Clarrie O’Callaghan from the Femicide Census. Run by Karen Ingala Smith and O’Callaghan, the census has documented the annual tally of women killed by men since 2009. In 2022-23, Merseyside became the worst region for femicide in the whole of the UK, with eight killings. Three of those were in Knowsley, the second most deprived borough in the country and the worst constituency for femicide. (For context, 588 constituencies had no femicides.) This horrendous tally should come as no surprise to those who could have addressed the issue of VAWG in the area much earlier.
In March 2021, an emergency meeting had been held with Merseyside’s then MPs after three women were murdered over a single weekend in “an explosion” of domestic abuse.
“We told them the writing was on the wall,” Grant says. “Without meaningful change, the situation could only get worse. Since then, 12 women and five girls have been killed and, as a sector, we are on our knees because of the huge demand for help.”
Femicide in Mersey details how, over 15 years, the same fatal errors have been made again and again. It’s a pattern of neglect repeated all over the country. This includes mothers with mentally ill sons having little help; women leaving violent partners unable to secure timely police protection; agencies working in silos; police officers failing to understand coercive control and not holding a domestic homicide review after a killing so that lessons can be learned (and not ignored).
“It should not be the case, as in Merseyside, that failures identified in 2012 are being repeated in 2022,” O’Callaghan says. “That leads to the conclusion that the failures are systemic and ongoing. Patching a broken system, as is happening now, will not achieve what the government intends.”
Femicide in Merseyside makes 15 strong recommendations. These include a bespoke service for mothers with violent sons, and improved funding and measures to address mental health and problematic substance abuse. Grant and O’Callaghan also want the government to use Merseyside as a pilot for a “whole system” approach that includes schools, youth services, the NHS, probation, housing, health and every statutory and independent agency that touches on a woman’s life and that of her potential perpetrator from the cradle on.
A whole system needs to be constantly independently monitored and evaluated to ensure that support is knitted together, professionals are truly accountable for what they fail to do, errors are corrected, and knowledge of what works and why is shared. McFadden’s “test and learn” culture. A roadmap for a realistic route to halving VAWG.
“We hear about a whole system,” Grant says. “But currently what that means for our women and girls is that they are being wholly failed. How can that change?”
• Yvonne Roberts is an Observer columnist
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