What’s Blocking VAWG System Change?

Violence against women and girls is an endemic problem – a national emergency. Yet progress on system change is stuck. Why is this? This was the first question we asked when we set up RIVA. Speaking with over 50 VAWG experts, special advisors, local government leaders, and think tanks, we drew a picture of policy agenda without a clear institutional home or the political power to drive system-change.

inhibitor 1 - agenda without a home

In both central and local government no single organisation is clearly responsible for leading on VAWG. Its impacts span multiple systems – families, health, housing, employment, criminal justice – but this breadth creates ambiguity rather than ownership. As one local authority chief executive described, VAWG is everywhere and therefore nowhere: no single part of the system is mandated, resourced, or held accountable for leading change.

At the local level, this absence of ownership makes co-ordination a technical and political challenge. Responsibility is distributed across safeguarding partnerships, policing, housing, and health systems, each operating to different statutory duties, funding settlements, and strategic priorities. These fractures absorb the energy needed for system-change.

This is compounded by how system leadership happens in local services. Its typically anchored around core professions, like social work, medicine, education. These bring with them instructional influence, shared practice frameworks, and a pipeline of leadership. VAWG doesn’t have this, and so it misses out on the centralising force and political weight professional ownership provides.

The same patterns are visible in Whitehall. Responsibility is split across departments. The government’s most recent VAWG strategy opens on the question of ‘togetherness’ and calls for whole-system working across departments. This is absolutely right – but we don’t yet know what it means.

inhibitor 2 - lack of political capital

The VAWG field has been shaped and led primarily by women, for women. This reflects both the origins of the sector and the nature of VAWG as a harm that results from – and reinforces – women’s social, political, and economic marginalisation. Feminist leadership has built policy discourse, practice, and services since the refuge movement began in the 1970’s. However, this history continues to shape how the agenda is positioned outside the mainstream of investment and strategy.

This is reinforced by the fundamental issue that personally and professionally, people are uncomfortable getting involved in these interpersonal and gendered harms. This is a political issue. It creates a degree of distance and discomfort among many of those with the authority and influence to drive change. We see this acted out every day in how services like police, mental health, immigration, and children’s social care respond to victim-survivors.

These factors mean that in practice, senior system leaders, major institutions, and parts of the policy and think tank community have been slower to engage than in comparable areas of public policy. Across our discussions, people described both discomfort and a perceived political risk in engaging, including concern about the potential penalties attached.

The effect is a constraint on the breadth and weight of political leadership on VAWG. This give it a too-narrow base of leadership and limits the range of skills and expertise - policy, economic, and technical - brought to bear. To sustain policy attention, investment and reform, a wider coalition is needed.

inhibitor 3 - the case for change hasn’t been made

The government’s VAWG strategy sets out an ambition to halve violence against women and girls. We commend this. This level of political focus has always been needed. However, it is not matched by investment. The funding is not there. This tells us the case for change has not yet been made: until ambition translates into investment, the case has not been won.

This pattern of underinvestment is visible across the system. At national level, ambition is not backed by funding. At local level, commissioning continues to prioritise acute pressures over earlier, preventative intervention. This holds even where there is a credible fiscal case for investment – for example, in reducing demand on high-cost services such as children’s social care.

The issue is not simply one of competing priorities. Working with survivors and perpetrators creates a persistent discomfort for our risk-averse state services. This could be described as a lack of confidence. In practice, this has led to the – costly – proliferation of partial responses across the system, rather than a strategic approach to prevention and early action.

Building the case for investment requires deliberation and collaboration. The state needs confidence in credible models of early action if its to move to preventing demand, not just managing it. his means demonstrating credible outcomes, showing how investment risk has been thought out, and aligning opportunities to the frame of government’s priorities and duties.

inhibitor 4 - absence of a system for learning and improvement

In other areas of public service, research and continuous improvement are built into the system. In the NHS, around a million people participate in health research each year. These directly inform clinical practice and commissioning. Other sectors are supported by ‘what works’ centres, established think tanks, and dedicated policy functions within Whitehall. These create a pipeline through which evidence is generated, tested, and supported into policy and practice.

However, in VAWG such infrastructure is largely absent. There is no equivalent research and development function, no pipeline of investment to support innovation to scale. The result is a system incredibly hard to shift. Even when innovation is proven and impactful, it may never be picked up and replicated. This is why the last major modernisation of VAWG was twenty-five years ago, when the risk-based paradigm was introduced. It’s why despite rapid social change and evidence of the suitability of more relational approaches, the risk model remains dominant.

Similarly, there is no mandated responsibility to assess what is working across the whole system. We do not know how investment relates to outcomes, or evidence to decision-making and governance. This has prevented the system’s ability to learn, adapt, and improve.

These inhibitors are interdependent. They are structural limitations blocking government’s ambition to halve VAWG. What we need are efforts to widen the policy constituency working on these system issues. Its only through seeing the bigger picture we can address it. That’s when system-change can become a reality.