The Government’s new Freedom from Violence and Abuse Strategy, published on 18 December 2025, represents a clear acknowledgement of the reality faced by many women and the scale of the problem, promising to ‘deploy the full power of the state to introduce the largest crackdown to stop violence perpetrated against women and girls in British history.’ 

The context: 

The Strategy features several devastating statistics:  

• 1 in 8 women in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking in the year ending March 2025.
• Although almost 200 rapes were recorded by police every single day, the actual number of rapes experienced by women is likely far higher and goes underreported to police.
• Over 150 women are killed annually.  

Key Components of the Strategy 

The Strategy features an ambitious ten-year plan to reduce violence against women and girls (VAWG) by 50%. It is built around three core pillars: 

1. Prevention and Early Intervention to Address Root Causes of Abuse
   • Education and cultural change to stop violence before it starts, empowering teachers and families to address harmful attitudes and behaviours
   • Tackling harmful online content and misogyny that often feeds offending behaviour.
   • Engaging men and boys in prevention efforts, which is explained to be a critical step for reducing potential future offending.
2. Relentless Pursuit of Perpetrators
   • Making VAWG a top policing priority, with specialist rape and sexual offence teams in every force by 2029
   • Improving vetting and disbarring to prevent perpetrators from going into policing.
   • Expanding Domestic Abuse Protection Orders and perpetrator intervention programmes like the Drive Project, which is an intensive case management approach which aims to disrupt high-risk high-harm behaviour of people who habitually commit domestic abuse offences.
   • A new network of officers using technology such as facial recognition and data-driven policing to track and disrupt perpetrators.
   • Strengthening probation’s role in managing high-risk perpetrators.
3. Support for Victims and Survivors of Violence and Abuse
   • Trauma-informed services embedded across the justice system.
   • Investment in Independent Domestic Violence Advisors (IDVAs) and Independent Sexual Violence Advisors (ISVAs) to support victims through court processes.
   • Expanding safe accommodation and referral pathways from custody and community settings. 

Key takeaways and next steps: 

The cultural norms and misogynistic attitudes that enable VAWG in every part of our society, from homes and schools, to workplaces and online spaces, are already well-known to voluntary organisations working to support women in the criminal justice system, both as victims and as perpetrators.  

As a result, there is much to welcome in this ambitious strategy, and its focus on improving outcomes and the safety of victims through whole-of-society and whole-of-government collaboration across health, policing, justice and education. Given the above statistics, the prioritisation of identifying VAWG within policing and probation, the Strategy’s recognition that criminal justice alone cannot solve VAWG, and its emphasis on prevention and cultural change, is certainly a positive shift.  

However, we have several concerns surrounding the role of the voluntary sector in the delivery of this strategy and in the Strategy’s methods of addressing perpetrators. 

The role of the voluntary sector 

The Strategy recognises the role and importance of voluntary sector organisations and those with lived experience as key delivery partners. The voluntary sector will be expected to: 

• Work with the Home Office to tackle the current fragmented landscape of perpetrator programmes and establish a consistent, comprehensive offer in every local area.
• Be a part of multi-agency perpetrator management panels (e.g., MATAC) to ensure joined-up approaches to managing high-risk perpetrators.
• Play a role in testing and evaluating new perpetrator interventions, contributing evidence on efficacy
• “Engage communities in challenging harmful behaviours” and support behaviour change among perpetrators. 

However, we worry about how feasible the goals of this strategy are for the voluntary sector, since despite its increased demand for the services of the voluntary sector, this Strategy makes no mention of specific budgets, funding levels or financial allocations for voluntary-sector providers, nor does it include any references to grant amounts, ring-fenced funds, or multi-year funding commitments.  

Many service providers already feel overstretched due to short-term funding cycles and competitive commissioning and have felt increasing pressure to deliver ‘more for less’ every year. Inevitably, the voluntary sector will experience even higher levels of demand for their services once the measures of the Sentencing Bill are implemented. However, this further demand on the sector could push it to the brink of collapse without proper resourcing. We would therefore strongly urge the government to consider how they plan to resource their asks of the sector for this Strategy. 

Addressing Perpetrators 

We are also deeply concerned about the expansion of “dangerous offender” regimes and that the crackdown on perpetrators would simply lead to more imprisonment without necessarily achieving better outcomes. 

The strategy’s increased policing powers risk further racial and gendered disproportionality, which will be felt even more so by victim-perpetrators and victim-survivors who already experience multiple disadvantages. This is particularly concerning for women who have been subject to domestic abuse and coercive control, who may have been convicted of crimes committed under duress.  The Centre for Women’s Justice have previously articulated this point in their response to the Strategy, arguing that it must include legal protections, such as statutory defences for coerced offending. While the Law Commission will review homicide law, there is still no guarantee of effective defences across all VAWG-related offences. 

The Strategy also lacks detail on how justice agencies will meet the needs of women facing multiple disadvantages, including those in prison or under probation supervision who have experienced VAWG. Clinks women’s network members support significant numbers of women caught up in the criminal justice system as a direct result of histories of childhood abuse, sexual exploitation and domestic violence. The issues are often compounded by the intersectionality of issues linked to race and gender. As explained by Advance, ‘The strategy fails to prioritise the voices of specialist ‘by and for’ organisations to address the specific harms experienced by Black and minoritised women and girls, nor does it go nearly far enough to protect migrant and asylum-seeking women, offering little to no guarantee of their safety.’ 

In addition, despite explicitly mentioning the value brought by people with lived experience, the Strategy does not appear to acknowledge the possibility that perpetrators can be rehabilitated. As noted above, it aims to bar people with rape and sexual offence convictions from going into policing, despite the value that people with lived experience can bring, using first-hand experience to refer perpetrators into services and support. 

Additional Considerations 

The strategy could do more to recognise some of the hidden harms the criminal justice system inflicts on women subject to VAWG. Clinks member, Women in Prison, has identified women survivors of domestic abuse who have been required to reside in areas where they are at risk from their abusers, and electronically tagged to enforce the requirement, and a case where a woman was breached because she left the permitted area while running from an attack by her abuser. 

While technology-driven enforcement may be advantageous, it raises questions about proportionality, women’s privacy, and effectiveness, and may re-traumatise women and children if they need to tell their stories repeatedly. For example, Women in Prison cite the case of 78-year-old Gaie Delap who was returned to prison because the electronic tag she was required to wear did not fit her wrists. This is a clear example of where the strategy could do more to ensure women’s specific needs and circumstances are accounted for.  

Conclusion 

For the voluntary sector, this Strategy represents both an opportunity for deepened relationships with prisons and probation and several important challenges that undermine the quality of this relationship.  

We will continue to engage with Government to ensure commitments translate into action and that voluntary organisations are properly resourced to deliver specialist support, both for victims and perpetrators, ensuring their lived experience continues to shape policy and practice. We will monitor implementation, holding Government to account on its promise of a whole-of-society approach, as well as support our members to navigate commissioning reforms and access funding streams.