You Can’t Halve Men’s Violence. You Can Fund Women’s Survival.

The Naked Empress of VAWG Policy

The government is not going to halve violence against women and girls.

This pledge and now strategy document from Labour should be splashed across a London bus to supercede its predecessor-in-made-up-claims;  Brexit providing £350m more per week to the NHS.  

Labour’s commimtent to halve something they’ve struggled to even measure, relies on an unachievable utopian vision that has yet to be realised even in Iceland, that most feminist of nations whose entire female population went on strike back in 1975.  Which was, incidentally, about the same time there grew to be a global consensus that men’s violence against women and girls can be ended.  In 1979, the UN adopted their Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) with the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention finalised in 2010, aspiring to “create a Europe free from violence against women and domestic violence”.

Back in the noughties, there would have been eye-rolls about the literal half-heartedness of this strategy’s commitment to halving the problem.  Ending violence against women was the name of the game (and the organisations and the straplines and the conferences and the books).  There was great excitement and hope as a thousand Christmasses came at once for those who had tirelessly worked to support women and their children. Charities working hand-to-mouth finally had a commitment to sustained funding through the Labour Government’s “Supporting People” money, in which unpredictable and unsustained grants were superceded by commissioned contracts, with enhanced housing benefit approved to fund refuge stays (few realised this forced women into unemployment in order to get safe).

As with everything before the 2008 financial crash, there was a lot of money, a lot of hope, and an unwavering belief in the myth of progress.  Looking back, commissioning was a poisoned chalice; the more business-minded charities became greedy, sacrificing their feminist values for a bigger piece of the commissioned pie, gobbling down smaller services as they moulded themselves into whatever version of the work was demanded of them.

And the work that made the biggest difference to women’s (and their children’s) lives was decimated, in favour of risk assessments, acronyms, and phone-based contact.  Any meaningful work with women is generally being done in spite of, rather than because of, the systems that currently exist. Charities remain on a knife-edge; some are shutting their doors (like THESE three rape crisis centres in the last 18 months), others have staff poised for redundancy. The specialists at responding to these issues are on their knees. Never minding halving men’s violence, could we just give refuge staff some job security?

In the midst of what can only be described as a binfire, the Government launched Freedom From Violence and Abuse; A Cross-Goverment Strategy to Build a Safer Society for Women and Girls just as parliament went on their Christmas recess and the women who run specialist services had planned to take time off to make Christmas special for their kids (cue frantic reading of the 86-page document while rushing to do the Christmas food shop). As I’ve written HERE, perpetrators love to ruin Christmas as part of their efforts to humiliate and degrade their partner, and while I’m sure the Government weren’t intending to replicate perpetrator behaviour on a national scale, it’s not a good look, is it?

While this is the first VAWG strategy to commit to a fully cross-governmental approach and seems to be well-intentioned in its efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and do preventative work with boys and young men, the uninterrogated (and most eggregiously wrong) assumption that underpins the whole strategy, and guarantees its failure, is it’s unwavering belief that men’s violence towards women and girls can be ended (the foreward alone insists this six times).

With fifty years of work under our belts, the only thing we can really declare to have eliminated is any hope that men’s violence can actually be eliminated. Liberal assumptions that, given the right resources and climate, every human being will make good, wise and kind choices is well and truly dead (perhaps this is why this strategy and the government's snake campaign feels just slightly less vintage than the Stranger Things finale will tonight, it all belongs in the mid-noughties).

Digital technologies supercharge the abuser’s toolkit, women take on third/fourth/fifth shifts while men do little more in the home, and we can’t even make a dent in either the gender pay gap or the ever-proliferating sexually violent pornography available in all of our pockets.  Boys have Andrew Tate as a role model, while little girls’ role models are Only Fans stars, “Hey girls, you can have sex with 100 men a day too!”

The number of men killing women has remained static, even as advances in medical science should, alone, have reduced the number of women dying at the hands of the men who profess to love them (partners, sons, fathers).  In fact, the noughties Labour government’s efforts to prioritise risk have failed to reduce men’s killing of women, and have instead led to domestic abuse services turning away ever more women, as their risk assessment tools and government funding has ascertained the abuser is not dangerous enough to warrant the woman getting support.  No wonder the most likely person to kill a woman abused by her partner is the woman herself.

The noble goal of eliminating men’s violence towards women was driven by the truth that men choose to abuse, out of their sense of ownership and entitlement.  If abuse is a choice, then surely it can be ended?  This truth underpins the ill-advised Labour commitment of £53million to efforts to stop the most dangerous male partners who have been reported to the police.  Jess Phillips struck a triumphant tone:

“Through bold initiatives like the Drive Project and Project Vigilant, we’re going after perpetrators wherever they pose a threat. We are shifting the focus onto those who cause harm, challenging dangerous behaviours and making it clear that the responsibility for ending abuse lies with perpetrators, not those who suffer from it.”

Behind the scenes, there seemed to be confusion amongst the Labour leadership as to why the women’s sector were not giving them a standing ovation. No wonder!  This is the equivalent of the Health Secretary giving £53million to treat a rare and aggressive form of cancer with no commitment to fund other cancer treatments in a wider climate where 23.7% of people were being denied chemotherapy (refuge funding is so deficient that 23.7% of women and their children fleeing an abuser are turned away from such accommodation). You can read another health related analogy from me HERE.

Decades of asserting that we can eliminate all discimination against women and nobody seems to have noticed that this particular Empress is stark naked, awaiting the 93rd man queued up to penetrate her.  The admirable goals of ending men’s violence are dead in the water.  And no smart schemes can resurrect it, no amount of talking about her fancy clothes are going to make her any less naked, or any less violated.

If we can end men’s violence towards women, then refuges, outreach workers, children’s workers, support groups and trauma counselling are all temporary resources that can end when men stop.  After COVID, funding for Furlough, testing centres and PPE stopped when the crisis abated. Similarly, upon the elimination of men’s violence we’ll all be able to pack up our refuges and enjoy the utopia.

And this is one of the starkest realities of the new VAWG strategy, support for women comes last on the list, and as yet has zero budget promised to specialist services.  There’s a promised overhaul of commisioning practices, but no £££ to keep the lights on, the printer full of paper, or even a cup of tea for the woman who has just fled her home without even her shoes; nevermind secure funding for salaries.

Until Government policy, and crucially, the budgets that underpin these, accept that we cannot eliminate men killing, raping, and abusing women and children we will not see the right sort of strategies emerge. In the same way we that cannot eliminate death, illness, childhood or people chewing too loudly and annoying me, we cannot eliminate men’s violence, abuse, rape and murder of women and girls.  Upon realising this, refuge funding becomes as necessary and permanent as hospitals, chemists and schools (I appreciate they can’t include “quiet chewing classes”).  Outreach services, support groups, trauma therapy and an abuse-literate society become a core part of our social infrastructure, and novel efforts to stop perpetrators are provided in addition to this core infrastructure, rather than being prioritised over them. 

At some point, our utopian ideology of ending men’s violence overtook the much more meagre but achievable goal of making women’s lives better.  The assumption is that by halving men’s violence we will make women’s lives better, but that simply is not the case, as the Government’s strategy evidences. Women and girls are literally the last priority in the strategy; coming after perpetrator accountability and misogyny classes for boys.

The empress is naked and violated, let’s hope everyone stops admiring her lovely gown and her misogyny classes, while clamouring for some more of the poisoned pie long enough to realise that she needs clothes, safety and to be offered a gentle hug.    

I would apologise for being the harbinger of doom, if the stakes weren’t so high, but if you’d like a tonic to remind you of why making women’s lives better matters so much, get yourself subscribed up to our podcast (info HERE), Jade’s story is already live and the six other episodes land tomorrow.