Gender Based Violence
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress her Department has made on the development of the new Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy; and how her Department is working with devolved governments, including the Scottish Government, to ensure effective coordination on prevention, perpetrator interventions and data sharing.
Answered by Jess Phillips
“Freedom from Violence and Abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls”, was published on 18 December 2025. It sets out the strategic direction and concrete actions to prevent violence and abuse, pursue perpetrators, and support victims, and to deliver our unprecedented commitment to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade.
We have engaged with the Welsh Government, Scottish Government, and Northern Ireland Executive in the development of the Strategy.
Each Devolved Government has its own strategy, and ours has been informed by best practices drawn from the approaches of all three jurisdictions, including Equally Safe, Scotland’s strategy to prevent and eradicate VAWG, the Northern Ireland Ending VAWG Strategic Framework, and Wales’s Strategy for Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence. We are committed to sharing learning and best practice to make our work complementary, and this includes sharing data. VAWG is a national and international emergency, and we will continue working with all devolved governments to ensure a coordinated UK-wide response.
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