Refuge responds to long awaited Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy
In December 2025, the Government published its long-awaited Freedom From Violence and Abuse Strategy and an associated Action Plan. Together, these set out how it intends to deliver on its election manifesto commitment to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) by 2034.
The Strategy comes amid unprecedented levels of VAWG. At Refuge, we know that one in four women in England and Wales will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime. In 2024, police chiefs described VAWG as a national emergency, as data revealed that it accounted for 20% of all police-recorded crime between 2022 and 2023.
Despite attracting criticism for the significant delays to its publication – which came 18 months after the Government was elected – the Strategy is a signal from the highest level that VAWG is being taken seriously.
Although it strikes an ambitious tone, promoting systemic change through policy and funding commitments from the full suite of government departments – a coordinated approach which previous strategies have lacked – Refuge is concerned that these bold aims have not been matched with the level of funding required to deliver meaningful change.
By running through the Strategy’s three priority areas of focus: prevention, pursuing perpetrators and supporting survivors, Refuge’s explainer will take you through some of its key features and what they mean for survivors and the services they rely on.
1 in 4 women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime
20% of all police-recorded crime relates to domestic abuse
1 in 3 UK women have experienced online abuse or harassment
Preventing VAWG
Pillar one of the Strategy focuses entirely on prevention measures, with a significant emphasis on educating young people about relationships and tackling early signs of misogyny in schools, backed by a dedicated £20 million innovation fund.
This includes funding for a pilot of healthy relationships training, which Refuge previously welcomed, and a dedicated £3 million teacher training fund to educate teachers on how to talk to children about key issues, including misogyny, pornography, consent and intimate image abuse, ensuring the curriculum in this area has maximum impact.
While this represents a much-needed recognition of the importance of tackling the misogyny at the root of all VAWG, Refuge is concerned that the commitments around education do not include technology-facilitated abuse specifically. At the end of 2025, Refuge released data revealing a 62% year-on-year rise in the number of people reporting this kind of abuse to us. Exclusive data from our services also shows a worrying rise in abuse among teenagers and we know this age group is exposed to particularly high levels of abuse involving technology.
Against this backdrop, we are concerned that the Strategy fails to sufficiently recognise the scale and prevalence of tech abuse, with no clear plan for a coordinated national response. Time and time again, we have seen tech companies prioritise profits over women’s safety, as illustrated most recently by the image abuse scandal involving X’s AI tool Grok (read our response here). It is therefore disappointing that the Strategy fails to make good on Refuge’s longstanding call to upgrade Ofcom’s VAWG guidance into a legally enforceable code of practice, ensuring there are clear consequences for tech companies that do not comply with their online safety obligations.
Key measures to welcome include the ban on depictions of strangulation in pornography (which was announced last year, ahead of the Strategy’s publication) and a commitment to better understanding online misogynistic image-based abuse which may not be fully captured by existing criminal offences. We know this kind of abuse is rife, with non-consensual AI-generated deepfakes proliferating at unprecedented levels, and platforms seeing a rise in other forms of misogynistic image abuse, including so-called ‘semen’ images. This highlights the urgent need for a dynamic policy response to prevent emerging harms.
Pursuing perpetrators
The Strategy’s second pillar focuses on investments in schemes for perpetrators and reforms to policing. This includes funding for a dedicated network of officers to target offenders perpetrating VAWG in online spaces, including apps and websites.
For years, Refuge has campaigned with others in the sector for action to tackle institutional misogyny in the police and police perpetrators acting with impunity. We welcome the news that the Government is finally fulfilling its manifesto pledge to suspend officers under investigation for specified VAWG offences, as well as introducing a new policy requiring all officers to hold and maintain vetting clearance or face dismissal. New mandatory vetting standards will exclude those with a caution or conviction for certain VAWG offences from policing roles.
These are welcome steps, along with plans to improve police responses to VAWG through mandatory dedicated training. However, we need clear details and deliverables for all these reforms. Specifically, Refuge is calling on the Government to provide more information about the specified offences for suspension and the timeframes for when new vetting rules will come into force.
The case of Sarah Everard all too clearly illustrated the fatal consequences that can occur when vetting and VAWG are not taken seriously. The measures in the Strategy promise a positive shift towards embedding the safety of women and girls at the heart of policing.
Now, it is critical that the focus shifts to effective implementation. At the end of last year, we saw the publication of Part 2 of Dame Angiolini’s report, which showed that many police forces have not made the changes demanded of them following the crimes of Wayne Couzens and David Carrick. It is vital that the VAWG Strategy measures really make a difference.
Supporting survivors
The third pillar of the Strategy is all about supporting survivors. This includes reforms to support some of the most vulnerable survivors of abuse, including plans for a firewall between police and immigration enforcement – reflecting long-standing campaigning by organisations including Southall Black Sisters and the Latin American Women’s Rights Services.
Although this is welcome progress towards enabling migrant survivors to report abuse free from fear, Refuge is alarmed by the consent-based approach to the firewall. Requiring police to simply seek consent before sharing information with immigration enforcement weakens the firewall, making it an unreliable safeguard – particularly for survivors who do not speak English as a first language.
Similarly, while the Strategy sets out plans to put processes in place to improve the support offering available to migrant survivors, visa conditions such as the ‘No Recourse to Public Funds’ (NRPF) condition continue to perpetuate a two-tiered system that limits where many migrant survivors can turn for support and Refuge will continue to back calls for wider reform of asylum and immigration rules.
At Refuge, we also hear from many survivors who face the unimaginable choice between staying with an abuser or becoming homeless. The Strategy aims to tackle this by providing a £19 million funding boost for councils, aimed at delivering dedicated safe housing so that all survivors have somewhere safe to flee to. While this is welcome, this sum is a drop in the ocean in terms of what is needed.
Enhanced support for survivors of economic abuse – including ensuring that coerced debt is accurately reflected and addressed on survivors’ credit files – is another welcome development. Recent research by Surviving Economic Abuse (SEA) revealed that one in seven UK women – equivalent to 4.1 million women – have experienced economic abuse from a partner or ex-partner in the past year.
While these are welcome steps forwards – along with £5 million of hard-won new funding from the Department of Health and Social Care – services like Refuge play a vital role in supporting survivors, and the lack of additional investment in specialist support services is a critical failure of the Strategy. Although there is a £550 million investment in victim support services over the next three years – equivalent to a 2% uplift – Refuge has raised the alarm that this will not address the ongoing funding shortfall. On top of this, it is currently unclear how much of this funding will be ring-fenced for specialist domestic abuse services.
What’s next?
There is no doubt that the Strategy should be seen as the most ambitious plan to date to tackle VAWG. However, like others in the sector, we are alarmed that the level of investment proposed to achieve it is simply not enough.
Refuge will be calling on the Government to make provision for new and sustainable investment into specialist services. Without this, the Strategy risks failing the very survivors it seeks to protect, by forcing them to rely on a system that is already overstretched and unable to meet demand.
Alongside this, Refuge’s policy team will be pushing for clarity on details, timeframes and the scope of various commitments, as well as contributing to the VAWG Strategy Advisory Board to provide feedback and drive accountability for how the Strategy is working in practice.
As one survivor told us: “We want to ensure that survivors have a voice and a place going forward in embedding the Strategy.” This kind of engagement will be critical to ensuring a dynamic Strategy which is grounded in survivor experiences and responsive to the reality of violence and abuse.
