Our reponse to the new VAWG strategy
Safety Net is pleased to see the new Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, which was published by the government on 21 July. As a charity supporting the recovery of all those affected by rape, exploitation, sexual and domestic abuse across Cumbria, we understand first hand the impact that Violence Against Women and Girls can have on families and communities.
We are pleased to see a holistic approach to tackling this issue, including plans to educate young people about healthy relationships. By providing education at a young age, we have a better chance of eradicating toxic masculinity and changing misogynistic attitudes towards women and girls in future generations.
From the perspective of survivors, we would like to see more skills to enable survivors to challenge or report domestic abuse. Respondents to the victim and survivor survey which helped shape this strategy listed a number of reasons as to why they might not have reported the abuse they experienced, including “they did not believe anything would be done by the criminal justice system (46%), embarrassment (40%), and a fear of not being believed (33%).” We would like to see a wholesale change to the police response to domestic abuse, so that victims and survivors have a greater confidence that they will be believed.
We are pleased to learn that NHS England NHS Improvement are developing local pathfinder projects for enhanced trauma-informed mental health support for sexual abuse victims and survivors. These collaborative projects will use a test and learn approach to develop tailored models of care for adult survivors of sexual abuse with complex trauma related needs. We look forward to hearing more about this work and how we can shape it locally.
Lastly we support calls made by other organisations to request more stable, long term funding for the sector as a whole. The one year’s funding set out in this strategy isn’t long term or sustainable for many small specialist services such as Safety Net. We look forward to a long term committment from the government which is set to be revealed at this year’s spending review.
