This hypothesis was the result of our combined decades of experience of the way in which the challenges people experience in their lives are compounded by systems that fail to understand that nobody’s experiences are confined to the remit of one government department, local authority responsibility or charity.
For example, I saw myself during my time leading Women’s Aid and then Shelter, that domestic abuse is both a cause and sometimes a consequence of homelessness, and both abuse and homelessness pose major challenges to parenting and risks to families. Women stay with abusers in order to avoid homelessness and their children being removed, and abusers use these very real threats in order to control their victim. We hypothesised that we would find that the systems that intervene in these frightening and dangerous situations lack the same basic requirements for success. And as we undertook research, heard evidence and iterated our recommendations in partnership, so it proved.
Social Insights Panel members who worked on the report include two leading experts in tackling violence against women and girls: Becky Rogerson MBE, former CEO of My Sister’s Place and Wearside Women in Need, and board member of RIVA, and Kirsten Westlake, co-founder of the violence against women and girls charity Let Me Know, andCEO of the Two Magpies Fund. And in the last six months we have spoken to dozens of individual practitioners and civil society organisations and groups around the country, to identify a set of “mindset shifts” which would transform the response of public services and, therefore, transform the lives of individuals and families.
To improve the response to violence against women and girls in particular, our first report – to be published in a few weeks’ time – will urge government to shift the incentives on public services so that they can meaningfully engage in preventative work. We don’t mean, as now, intervening when a crisis has already been reached, in the hope of preventing even more severe harm. We mean engaging in a far deeper level of prevention, where women feel safe enough to disclose their fear or abuse at a much earlier point. This means doing three things.
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First, the emphasis must shift to understanding what a woman needs in order to make her safe – starting with what she herself wants. This necessitates a far wider approach than just risk assessment, which is currently the gateway to any form of intervention. We heard time after time in our workshops and roundtables that the current reliance on the DASH (Domestic Abuse, Stalking and Honour-Based Violence) tool funnels support only to the most visible cases, meaning help arrives only after harm escalates.
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Second, public service funders should be building capacity in the specialist organisations where women feel safest. Building capacity means core funding, and support to build evidence of impact. There’s a role here for the Office for the Impact Economy to follow what women are saying about the services they need, and helping those services to develop their evidence base, simply unaffordable for many, rather than continuing to invest in crisis services that feed the idea that a criminal justice outcome is the only outcome that really counts. Early disclosure from women when they first become afraid is a critical part of prevention and the very places where women might disclose early are the ones most under threat of closure because of funding pressures.
Third, it should create spaces which can nurture the trust that many women lack in public services such as the police and local government. We will suggest that the idea that the interface with support needs to be simplified as much as possible, with “one front door” being the ideal, is missing the point. Community-rooted, even informal settings that are not labelled as being for victims of violence are critical. We heard, for example, from one organisation in London where a “bring and share” community meal was a gateway to support for racially minoritised women, who might not need any further intervention, but could be signposted if they did. “My friend said to come here and tell you everything,” one woman was quoted as saying. Without that community-based support, she might not have been seen at all until the police were called, probably after multiple incidents of abuse.
It’s become commonplace to say that prevention is the ultimate goal, yet it is still utterly peripheral to the thinking of government and public services. This applies not only to violence against women and girls, but to all three of the complex challenges we examined.
The government has recognised how high the stakes are. They are far too high to dodge the radical changes – our “mindset shifts” – that are desperately needed.
Baroness Polly Neate is chair of Future Governance Forum’s Social Insights Panel and former CEO of Shelter and Women’s Aid.
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