“We need a What Works Centre Dedicated to VAWG”

In the first of our RIVA Conversations series - interviewing transformation and practice leaders across the violence against women and girls (VAWG) system - Dr Laura Knight, Head of Toolkit and VAWG at the Youth Endowment Fund, talks about the role of evidence in driving policy and practice to prevent children and young people becoming involved in violence, and what VAWG could learn from the public health approach to youth violence.

What does the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) do?

It was born out of the growing evidence and support for a public health approach to violence prevention, with the stimulus being the national crisis around knife crime among children and young people. The question was: what can we do as a country to address this? Can we build the sort of quantitative evidence base on what works, while broadening the conversation about children and young people involved in violence?

It replicated a What Works Centre. The vast majority of the endowment funds programmes and evaluations to build the evidence base - randomised controlled trials (RCTs) alongside work to develop global evidence maps. We then turn that evidence into products that our change team can use to support policy and practice nationally and locally.

The YEF Toolkit now covers around 40 approaches to violence prevention, and we're producing another 10 to 12 each year.

Why is it important YEF is an independent charity?

The What Works Centre model holds a neutral space. It's not steeped in specific disciplines and can be durable across political persuasions.

It also means we're not invested in a single academic institution. As a funding body we have commissioning relationships with hundreds of academics and institutions.

Youth violence has successfully adopted a public health framing. Why has VAWG struggled to achieve the same?

One of the biggest contributions of the public health approach was developing the language that violence is preventable. The idea of prevention became credible across different sectors. I'm not sure we've achieved that in VAWG. I don't think we yet have a shared narrative that violence is preventable in the same way.

It might be to do with how we think about responsibility. In youth violence we take a child-first approach. We accept that there are conditions, environments and relationships that have shaped a child's behaviour. On the whole we've moved away from blame and the need for a punitive response. Instead we ask: children are responding to the situations they're in, so what can we do as responsible adults to protect them?

I don't think we have the equivalent narrative around perpetrators of domestic abuse. The idea of helping or treating perpetrators is unpalatable to most people. In VAWG we're struggling to think about what a public health approach would look like for adults, particularly in relationships where harm is typically hidden.

Is it because VAWG is fundamentally about coercion and control, rather than violence alone? Its intention is rooted in power, and we struggle to talk about power.

That doesn't hamper youth violence work in the same way. There's collective agreement that power sits with adults and with the systems and processes that children have no agency over, so we all have a duty of care. But that shifts as soon as you start talking about adults, and perpetrators of violence against women and girls in particular.

What difference has the public health approach made in practice?

The biggest difference is that it created a credible narrative that violence is preventable. It also gave us the data – on prevalence, trends and outcomes – to measure change and reinforce the idea that prevention is a collective responsibility.

That has enabled proper multi-agency working: panels, conversations and shared spaces where there's a common understanding of the issue, shared responsibilities around safeguarding, and a shared duty of care. In some places that leads to genuinely joint commissioning; elsewhere it's better data sharing, referral processes and pathways.

The child-first approach also destigmatises those causing harm and makes it possible to argue for investment in early intervention – something we still struggle with in VAWG. The vast majority of funding still goes towards responding after harm, and there's understandably resistance to investing in earlier intervention or work with perpetrators while victim-survivor services remain significantly underfunded.

The public health model created confidence in talking about primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, and in allocating resources across that spectrum. It became politically and socially acceptable to invest earlier.

How do you decide what evidence to invest in?

We use evidence maps to understand both what we know and where the gaps are. One focuses on systems – things like multi-agency working and practitioner development. The other maps the global evidence on programmes and interventions and helps us decide where new evaluations are needed.

Those maps underpin the YEF Toolkit, which in turn underpins our guidance. We produce both practice guidance and systems guidance. The practice guidance helps professionals make evidence-informed decisions, while the systems guidance looks at how funding, policy and inspection can create the conditions for those decisions to happen.

How else do you think your work on knife crime parallels violence against women and girls?

In terms of public narratives, there are real similarities. Immediately after a serious knife incident, the conversation often becomes about blame and identity politics: whose fault is this? What's the ethnicity or immigration status of the person who caused the harm?

You absolutely see that in VAWG as well. That's why it's so important that a What Works approach is sturdy enough not to be swayed by the latest incident or the latest rhetoric. We need to keep building the evidence base and guidance, even when the public conversation moves elsewhere.

One of the challenges in my role is that we're looking at specific interventions – mentoring, social and emotional learning – and asking what works. But those interventions sit within much wider systems. What are we doing about racism, poverty and inequality? Part of the role of a What Works Centre is to hold that longer-term ambition for wider systems change.

In VAWG there are some areas where the evidence is stronger, and others where there's very little evidence at all. At YEF we've had to accept that randomised controlled trials - the kind of causal evidence government often wants – don't work in every context. That's true in VAWG too. The question becomes: how do we develop evidence that's robust enough to give us confidence in changing policy and practice?

What has made the YEF model work?

One of the biggest advantages was that the Home Office introduced Violence Reduction Units in the 20 areas with the highest rates of violence. That gave us a set of key stakeholders who shared our goal, were required to work in partnership, and were expected to use evidence to inform their commissioning, policy and partnership working.

The Home Office also required them to spend part of their budget on approaches that YEF had evidenced. That immediately systematised the relationship between the What Works Centre and what was happening on the ground in local partnerships. Today, all police force areas have serious violence prevention partnerships that are expected to spend part of their violence reduction funding on approaches with the strongest evidence.

That means you've got policing, education and children's services talking about evidence, primary, secondary and tertiary prevention, better use of violence data, and stronger strategic needs assessments.

We've also had important national policy wins. For example, we've helped strengthen the conversation about the links between education and violence, making it much easier for the Department for Education to engage. There could be a similar opportunity in VAWG, by making a clearer case for the impact on education, employment and wider economic outcomes.

But none of this happens quickly. We started by funding large evaluations, and it's only now that we've built enough evidence to produce practice and systems guidance. We also don't reach the whole commissioning landscape, so our influence varies across different parts of the system.

What lessons should be applied if a YEF model were developed for VAWG?

What matters is the strategy for moving from evidence into change. It's about investing in implementation products, systematising evidence into commissioning and partnership working, and getting government policy teams to do that work nationally.

There are lessons too – something we've been criticised on ourselves – about how you reflect the voices of children and young people. Weaving those voices into evidence, systems and policy change is incredibly difficult, but it's essential.

We've also found value in having an external strategic advisory group, where influential people from across sectors have a space to challenge decisions and feel heard. They'll still critique, but from an informed perspective. At least we understand each other when we're out there sharing different views.

From your perspective then, and in light of Cabinet Office launching a What Works programme in April 2026, what is the value of a YEF or What Works Centre for VAWG?

There hasn’t been a convening place that brings together the existing evidence base across the multiple different types of VAWG-related harms, or one place that clearly points to the evidence gaps and helps to prioritise them. There are such different types of harm, with hugely different theories of change around how you create mechanisms for change and how to evaluate their impact, so there’s value in holding and articulating that in one independent space.

For example, we need a much wider conversation about types of evidence. Feedback surveys on their own just aren't enough, neither are RCTs if you want to understand context and experience. We need different types of evidence on implementation, outcomes and what works in practice, including in areas that some people see as problematic and others see as innovative. Having a YEF-type organisation that can bring together various disciplines and research methodologies can facilitate deep and robust evidence building that can drive impactful change at national and local levels.

Across the YEF, Foundations the What Works Centre for Children & Families, and the National Centre for Violence against women and girls and Public Protection that focuses on policing – our existing What Works Centres are contributing to the evidence base on VAWG responses and prevention. However, we need to coordinate our work to drive evaluation and learning, to produce stronger evidence across systems and sectors, and to translate it into policy and practice change.

We've got What Works Centres for homelessness, youth employment and youth violence – we need one dedicated to VAWG.