VAWG Strategy Commentary: Evidence Highlights and Broad Directions for Action

The UK VAWG Strategy and action plan Freedom from Violence and Abuse: A Cross-government Strategy to Build a Safer Society for Women and Girls was published in December 2025 by the Home Office. The strategy represents the government’s renewed and long-term commitment to tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG) through a ‘transformational’ approach that: a) prioritises prevention and tackling the root causes of VAWG, b) relentlessly pursues perpetrators, and c) supports victims and survivors of violence and abuse.

In the current brief, we highlight evidence that responds to the thematic areas and priorities identified in the Strategy. The studies highlighted were featured as part of IDVRM’s series for impact ‘Evidence Bits’ and were conducted by organisations that we have in our network, members of our Team of Experts or our team in previous years. Some of the evidence is international and some UK-specific in line with IDVRM’s commitment to foster transboundary knowledge exchange and learning in VAWG responses, acknowledging increased mobilities in the world, the diverse demographic of the UK and the complex nature of violence and abuse, intersecting with conflict, displacement and migration.

These highlights are intended as early directions and points of caution to guide the Strategy’s implementation, which we propose should be based a thorough scoping of the existing evidence and be fully attuned to the lived experience of diverse communities affected by VAWG.

Key Recommendations:

Identify current research specialists in the relevant areas and create an internal library of available evidence to tap in ab initio. Put together a committee to identify evidence gaps where these exist to avoid duplication of research and rather focus on evidence synthesis, communication and uptake. The scoping of evidence should be international and not limited to the UK, but should include evidence on VAWG from countries represented in the UK’s demographic.

Involve researchers from higher education institutions, research institutes, non-profit and charity organisations where research is conducted to ensure that the evidence consulted is diverse and is not dominated, framed or conducted by the ‘usual suspects’ who may be disconnected from the realities of VAWG survivors and communities.

Engage ‘by and for’ organisations and community-based researchers in research and evidence collection to overcome epistemic biases and to acknowledge and integrate evidence based on lived experience that such organisations hold, which is often missing from or underreported in formal academic literature.