The government has announced an expansion of Project Vigilant, an undercover policing operation targeting predatory behaviour in night-time venues, to nine additional forces across England and Wales, backed by £1 million in new Home Office funding.
The nine forces joining the scheme are Kent, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, South Wales, Staffordshire, Merseyside, Cumbria and the West Midlands. They join Thames Valley Police, Wiltshire Police and Norfolk Constabulary, which have already received funding for Project Vigilant deployments.
The operation trains undercover officers to identify warning signs of predatory behaviour in busy night-time areas, including unwanted or sexualised contact, persistently following someone, filming women without consent, and loitering. When officers identify high-risk behaviour, they alert uniformed colleagues to intervene before incidents escalate.
Thames Valley Police, which has run the scheme since 2019, has recorded notable results. Between July 2021 and September 2023, Vigilant officers stopped 532 men, with 35% identified as suspects in a violence against women and girls offence, including rape and exposure.
Essex Police will use part of the funding to run 80 additional deployments, including traffic operations targeting predatory behaviour involving vehicles, such as men loitering in cars and the misuse of taxis to target women.
Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, said the operation reflected a change in approach: “Instead of asking women to change their behaviour, we are going after those who cause harm.”
The expansion forms part of the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, launched in December, which declared VAWG a national emergency and set a target to halve it within a decade. Accompanying measures include the rollout of specialist rape and serious sexual offence teams across every police force, and new school lessons challenging misogyny and promoting healthy relationships.
The announcement comes as The New Feminist has continued to report on the structural failures enabling violence against women in the UK, including persistently low rape charge rates and the contested role of initiatives such as self-swab kits in filling gaps left by an under-resourced criminal justice system.
