For as long as I have worked in this field, the same sentence has been repeated at conference after conference: violence against women and girls is everybody’s business. The difference now is that a government has written it down and attached a delivery plan to it.
In December 2025 the government published Freedom from violence and abuse, a cross-government strategy to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. It runs to more than ninety pages, arrives with a separate action plan, and carries over £1 billion of investment. It is, by some distance, the most genuinely cross-departmental approach we have seen.
I want to give it credit where credit is due, because the sector is often accused of being impossible to please. But I also want to be honest about the gap I can already see opening up, and it is the same gap I have spent twenty years working in. A strategy that halves violence on average can still leave the women I work with exactly where they were.
What the strategy gets right
It finally breaks out of the Home Office. The single most important thing about this strategy is who is in the room. Health is at the table. So are education, transport and the departments responsible for online safety. For years we have treated this as a policing problem with a policing solution, which is a bit like treating a flood as a plumbing problem. Most of the women I have supported met a nurse, a teacher, a housing officer or a benefits assessor long before they ever met a police officer. Every one of those encounters was a chance to intervene. A strategy that recognises this is a strategy that has understood the actual shape of the problem.
It takes prevention seriously. There is a real commitment here to early intervention and to work with men and boys, framed around long-term societal change rather than a single campaign. That framing matters. You cannot arrest your way out of a problem this size, and the numbers have never suggested otherwise.
It names online abuse as abuse. Coercive control does not stop at the front door any more. It travels through phones, through location sharing, through accounts a woman cannot close because she does not have the password. Recognising the harm of online abuse within the main strategy, rather than parking it in a separate digital policy, reflects how control actually works in 2026.
It is built on three pillars rather than one. The strategy organises itself around prevention and early intervention, the relentless pursuit of perpetrators, and support for victims and survivors. Holding those three together is harder than it sounds, because in practice they compete for the same money. The perpetrator pillar in particular has a habit of absorbing resource, since enforcement produces visible numbers and prevention does not. I would rather see the three named and balanced openly than see two of them quietly starve.
It has been built with an accountability structure. There is governance, there is monitoring, and there is an acknowledgement that the evidence base has holes in it. I have sat through enough strategy launches to know that the ones without a monitoring framework are the ones quietly forgotten in year three. The presence of one here is not a guarantee, but it is a precondition.
Where it falls short for minoritised survivors
Here is my concern, stated plainly. A ten year target to halve violence against women and girls creates an incentive to pursue the gains that are easiest to count. The survivors who are hardest to reach are, by definition, the ones who will move the national average least. If nobody guards against that, this strategy will deliver real progress and still fail the women it was hardest to help.
The funding does not reach the services that work. “By and for” services are run, led and governed by Black, minoritised and migrant women, and they are six times less likely to receive government funding than the sector as a whole. As of 2021 they were supporting almost 130,000 survivors a year while operating with a funding shortfall of 39 per cent. These are the organisations carrying the most complex, highest risk cases, on the least secure money, often on twelve month grants that make it impossible to keep an experienced practitioner for three years.
And the evidence that they work is not ambiguous. Black and minoritised survivors were more than twice as likely to say they felt safer after accessing a service run by and for their own community than survivors who had accessed no support at all: 78 per cent compared with 30 per cent. We are underfunding the intervention with the strongest signal, for the group with the greatest need.
Culturally specific is not the same as culturally competent. Mainstream services can be trained, and many are excellent. But training a service to recognise honour-based abuse is not the same as being a service that a woman trusts enough to walk into. When a survivor is weighing up whether disclosure will cost her not just her marriage but her entire family, her community and her standing within it, the question is not whether the practitioner has completed a module. It is whether that woman believes she will be understood, and whether she believes it will be kept safe.
Immigration status is still the fault line. A woman with no recourse to public funds cannot access a refuge place that is funded through public funds. This is not a subtle policy interaction. It is the reason a specific group of women remain, in practice, outside the protection the rest of this strategy describes. Organisations including Southall Black Sisters have been consistent and public that the funding settlement has not addressed this. Until it does, “halve violence against women and girls” carries an unwritten asterisk.
We cannot halve what we do not count. In the year ending March 2024 police recorded 2,755 so-called honour-based abuse offences in England and Wales. Everyone working in this area knows that figure is a fraction of the reality. That is not a criticism of the statisticians. It is the nature of an abuse that is enforced by the very network a woman would normally turn to for help. But it does mean that a target expressed as a percentage reduction is close to meaningless here, and that a genuine increase in reporting will look, on a dashboard, like failure.
The devolution question
I spent eight years as the National Adviser on violence against women, domestic abuse and sexual violence in Wales, so I will add something that is easy to miss from Westminster. Wales has had its own legislative framework and its own national strategy for a decade. Policing and justice are not devolved; health, education, housing and social services are. That means the delivery of this strategy in Wales runs across a seam, and a strategy written as though England and Wales are one delivery landscape will hit that seam in year two.
This is solvable, and it is far better solved now than retrofitted. It requires the people writing the implementation plans to be specific about which lever sits with whom.
What halving VAWG will actually require
I want this strategy to succeed. So let me be constructive about what would make me more confident.
Ring-fence a proportion of the funding for “by and for” provision, and commit it over multiple years rather than annually. Publish the outcome data disaggregated by ethnicity and by immigration status, so that the national average cannot conceal a widening gap. Resolve the no recourse to public funds problem, because no amount of good work elsewhere compensates for a group of women who are structurally excluded from safety. And build the Wales interface into the delivery plan now.
None of that is radical. All of it is the difference between a strategy that reduces violence and a strategy that reduces violence for everyone.
For commissioners and local partnerships reading this before their own planning round, there is a practical version of the same point. Look at who is actually sitting on your local partnership board and whether the “by and for” organisations in your area are represented on it or merely subcontracted by it. Look at whether your funding cycles are long enough for those organisations to retain staff. And look at what your referral data tells you about who is not coming through the door, rather than only at who is. Those three questions will tell you more about how this strategy will land in your area than any national dashboard will.
I have spent my career in the space between what policy says and what a woman actually experiences when she asks for help. That gap is where this strategy will be judged. There is more in it to be hopeful about than I expected. Whether it delivers for the survivors who have always been last in the queue depends entirely on decisions that have not been made yet.
Founder and Chief Officer of the Halo Project. Former National Advisor on Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence to the Welsh Government, 2018–2026.
