RIVA’s projects focus on the structural conditions shaping the response to violence against women and girls.
Investment and infrastructure
Ambitions to halve violence against women and girls will not be achieved without new forms of capital and infrastructure investment.
The response to VAWG has a long-standing and worsening investment problem. Despite growing political ambition, the system remains constrained by short-term funding, limited capital investment, and insufficient focus on prevention and early action.
This is not simply a question of funding levels. The VAWG system has limited access to the forms of investment needed to build long-term infrastructure, expand provision, develop new responses, and sustain reform over time.
RIVA is working to bring new forms of social investment into the VAWG field. Social investment uses repayable finance to support social impact alongside financial return, enabling upfront investment in infrastructure, accommodation, and preventative services.
We are particularly interested in the potential for social investment to support:
Expansion of safe accommodation for women and children
Earlier intervention and prevention
More sustainable and independent funding models
Stronger long-term commissioning capacity.
Building on experience across social investment, commissioning, housing, and service delivery, RIVA is working with investors, intermediaries, government, and frontline organisations to:
Build confidence and understanding around social investment
Strengthen the role of social investment within VAWG commissioning and policy
Identify opportunities to reduce barriers and de-risk investment.
Related insight
How social investment could help resource the VAWG strategy explores the role social investment could play in strengthening infrastructure, prevention, and long-term system capacity across the VAWG sector.
Modernising the response to harm
The current risk-based system is no longer sufficient to the scale and complexity of violence against women and girls.
The domestic abuse system in England and Wales is organised around the prediction and management of risk. This approach played an important role in modernising responses in the early 2000s, improving visibility, coordination, and accountability.
However, significant changes in context, alongside advances in understanding domestic abuse, now raise questions about whether the risk-based model is fit for purpose.
Across the system there is growing concern about the disproportionate focus on procedural compliance, limited opportunities for early intervention, and unequal access and engagement. This can weaken the very capacity for safety and recovery the system should seek to build.
RIVA is exploring what the next phase of modernisation should look like: how it strengthens survivors’ capacity and choice while improving efficiency and reducing unnecessary system burden.
This includes exploring opportunities to:
Clarify the core functions, incentives, and cultural drivers shaping the domestic abuse system
Strengthen understanding of perpetrator dangerousness and patterns of harm
Develop more proportionate and non-escalatory routes to support
Test, learn and grow more contextualised, trauma-informed approaches for the highest harm cases.
Related insights
Beyond risk: the next stage modernisation of domestic abuse responses explores the limitations of the current risk-based system and the case for a more proportionate and survivor-centred approach.
Intractable MARAC cases: a way forward examines the Contextualised Engagement Model developed in Middlesbrough and its implications for responding to the highest harm domestic abuse cases.
Understanding the system
Violence against women and girls cannot be reduced at scale without understanding how the wider system creates, responds to, and sustains harm across the life course.
The complexity of violence against women and girls is mirrored in the system response. Across their lives, women and children often interact with multiple services spanning housing, safeguarding, health, policing, criminal justice, welfare, education, and specialist support.
Yet these systems are rarely understood together. Policy, commissioning, and reform are often developed within institutional, age-based, or crisis-specific silos. This limits understanding of how different parts of the system interact and shape outcomes over time.
At the same time, the system is operating under significant pressure. Long-term austerity, the housing crisis, rising economic insecurity, and the impacts of the Covid pandemic have constrained capacity across statutory and voluntary services alike. Even high-quality services are increasingly limited by structural conditions beyond their control.
Despite this, there remains limited whole-system understanding of how VAWG prevention and response operates in practice: how decisions are made, where investment flows, what drives engagement, how outcomes are measured, and where opportunities for earlier intervention are missed.
No part of the system currently holds responsibility for understanding, governing, and improving the wider infrastructure as a whole. This limits opportunities to identify what works, support innovation, and develop simpler and more sustainable responses over time.
RIVA is interested in how stronger system understanding can support more effective reform, investment, and policy development.
This includes exploring opportunities to:
Map the structure, functions, and incentives shaping the VAWG system
Strengthen understanding of how investment, evidence, policy, and service responses interact across the life course
Identify where current approaches create inefficiency, unmet need, or poor outcomes
Support more collaborative, evidence-informed and sustainable approaches to reform
Explore how innovation and learning can be better identified, tested, and scaled across the system.
Related insight
What’s blocking VAWG system change? explores some of the structural barriers limiting reform across the VAWG system.
RIVA’s work is grounded in the belief that reducing violence against women and girls requires not only better services, but stronger infrastructure, clearer system understanding, and sustained capacity for reform.