THE CHAIR ASKS
what it means to many women and girls. We know that men and boys are also victims, but predominantly the data is showing it is a crime that disproportionately impacts women and girls.
In last 12 months since you’ve had the portfolio, what has worked? Has anything been particularly successful? I took up my role a year ago and we split how we were going to tackle VAWG into three broad areas. Firstly, trust and confidence. We accepted that trust and confidence from many victims of crime was really broken, particularly from women and girls. We also accepted, and this was largely driven by the absolutely tragic death of Sarah Everard, that the trust and confidence of much of the public towards us in policing was really broken. Trust and confidence were the first element - how can we get women and girls in particular to report these crimes? It meant looking at our workforce ourselves, and at us as leaders - how can we be sure that we have standards and behaviors within our organisation that don’t undermine that trust in any way?
The second part was to look at our job in policing, which is to go after those that cause the crime. We wanted this to be that absolute relentless focus on the perpetrators of VAWG, to make sure that we’re staying suspect- focused, offender-focused. We know that many of the perpetrators are men - how do we turn the tables on those men who cause violence towards women and girls? The third bit was how do we focus on
forensic marking around domestic abuse perpetrators. We are seeing that real drive through all levels of the organisation to provide the right response and have the right capability, along with all the other things that policing must do, but to really keep that spotlight on keeping women and girls safe.
It’s enabled us, for the first time, to be
able to provide a national response of what’s working well and where we know we’ve still got areas to improve in.
Are there any specific barriers that you think have been highlighted that could be changed in the next 12 months? I think that that’s a really important question. One of the challenges we’ve got in policing is that we are 43 different organisations. We don’t have one way of doing things across policing. I think that gives us enormous strength because it allows us to flex and respond to what’s going on at a local level. How the Met responds to violence against women and girls, quite rightly, is different to how it is
We want to look at how can we improve that for domestic abuse. Knowing that there is an increasing understanding of who are the perpetrators, who often might be the same for RASSO and domestic abuse, how do we look at the way that some men behave, so that we can improve our investigative response to that area? That’s something we need to be consistent with nationally. At the moment, some forces do this much better than others. We want to try and lift the benchmark, so that wherever you are as a victim in a community across England and Wales, you know that your police response to domestic abuse and rape and serious sexual offending will be far more consistent. I think that’s one area that we really need to continue to work on into 2023.
“The amount of crime that’s happening that is in the ‘violence against women and girls’ space, in my mind, makes it an epidemic”
in Devon and Cornwell or Northumbria. But there are some things that we can consistently get right, that we need to get right.
safer spaces? How do we make sure that those spaces, whether they are online, behind closed doors or in public spaces, how are they kept safe? What is the policing part for that with other agencies, working with licensing authorities and working with local partners to make sure that we improve safety for women and girls?
Looking back at the last 12 months, I’m enormously proud of the response that we’ve had from policing. Every police force has an action plan that shows what it’s doing to tackle VAWG, and that’s from the top of the organisation, led by chief officers, right down to the front line. I’ve seen some good examples of how policing is tackling the perpetrators, whether that’s a focus on outstanding suspects at daily management meetings, days of action or specific approaches like we’ve seen recently in West Yorkshire with
Breaking that down into tangible change, the first thing we need to look at is our performance in tackling VAWG crime. That still remains a challenge. The volume crime that is domestic abuse is something that we still need to work very, very hard on improving.
Some of our specialist responses
to some areas like rape and serious sexual offending (RASSO) still needs improvement. If I break that down again a little bit further, what we are looking at in terms of rape and serious sexual offending is to take some of the green shoots and early learning from work started in Avon and Somerset Police in tackling RASSO, Operation Soteria Bluestone, which looks at a suspect-focused approach to investigation. It looks at ensuring that there’s close collaboration between policing and the CPS, it looks at improving investigative approaches to tackling this particular type of crime. Some of the early findings have really made a difference to charge and prosecution rates.
The second area that we still need to get a lot more improvement on is how our own organisations are working in terms of tackling standards and behaviour that fall short. I’m amazed at some of the courage that our own workforce has shown to come forward and share their own stories where they face sexism, misogyny, or sexualised behaviour at work, and I want us to have a workforce where we know
that victims of that type of behaviour will be supported to come forward. There’s a lot of work going on with Chief Constable Craig Guildford, who leads the misconduct portfolio for the National Police Chief’s Council, to look at how we improve the support we give victims and complainants in those circumstances to come forward.
If a woman or a girl has experienced violence, either recently or historically, what should they do to seek support? I really want us to be proud, as police officers, of the service that we give to victims. I think we have to say we want women and girls, and men and boys, to report anything to us. We want to say that you can trust the police, that you can come forward. We will treat this with the utmost seriousness, but we know we’ve got to do more work across our investigations and work with the CPS to keep victims involved and engaged through what can be a very long process at times. I think that needs to involve victim support at local level. We are talking to police and crime commissioners across the country to make sure that where there
19 | POLICE | DECEMBER 2022
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