The government’s VAWG strategy promises to halve violence against women and girls within a decade, but tougher policing and classroom lessons won’t get there without tackling the culture that produces it.
Earlier this year, the government published its long-awaited Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy, with a mission to halve VAWG within a decade. It comes at a very critical time. In 2024, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and College of Policing declared VAWG a national emergency, with 3,000 offences recorded every day in England and Wales, accounting for around 20% of all police recorded crime. The Femicide Census has also found that, over ten years, a woman was killed by a man every three days in the UK. And even these figures cannot tell us the full story when violence against women and girls remains significantly underreported. What they do show is why the government’s VAWG Strategy matters so much.
The strategy itself puts it plainly: “at its most violent and damaging, VAWG can kill.” We hardly need reminding. Elianne Andam, Sarah Everard, Fawziyah Javed, Zara Aleena, Nicole Smallman, Bibaa Henry and the many more we will never forget are women whose murders have forced the country to confront, time and again, the consequences of violence against women and girls.
Many of these high profile cases exposed failures in safeguarding and policing, but more importantly, they reveal a glaring pattern of deeper systemic and institutional problems. These horrific crimes were not random tragedies, disconnected from one another or from the society in which they happened. They occurred, and continue to occur, within a culture that has for far too long minimised misogyny, ignored warning signs and tolerated attitudes that, in their most extreme forms, can manifest as male violence.
They are an indictment of a society that has permitted the seeds of misogyny to take root and grow. If this strategy is serious about its mission, it must be equally serious about something far harder to legislate for: systemic and cultural change.
A whole society approach is a good place to start
So, does the strategy recognise the scale of that challenge? To its credit, in some ways, yes. Its focus on early prevention and a “whole society approach” is welcome, recognising something feminists and campaigners have been saying for decades: VAWG strategies cannot be reactive or short-term. They need to be sustained, structural and intentional.
Put simply, a whole society approach makes VAWG everyone’s responsibility, bringing government, policing, schools, health services, community organisations and the private sector into the response, rather than leaving different institutions to tackle it alone. And if the ambition really is to halve VAWG within a decade, that feels like the right approach. But bringing everyone into the response is only part of the challenge. A more coordinated system may respond better to violence, but coordination alone cannot transform the inequalities, attitudes and practices that allow it to persist in the first place, including those that shape who is protected, who is believed and whose needs are too easily overlooked.
VAWG is sustained through systemic reproduction
Yet for the strategy and its promised protections to have real impact, an honest reckoning with what sustains VAWG must come first. VAWG cannot simply be understood as a collection of individual incidents or personal failures, because while violence may happen within our most personal relationships, within our families or in romantic relationships, it does not emerge from nowhere. Its persistence is shaped by the institutions and cultures around us, by what harmful behaviours we dismiss, what abuse we take seriously and, perhaps most importantly, what becomes normal.
This is something bell hooks explores powerfully in The Will to Change: patriarchal culture does not simply permit misogyny; it actively produces and reproduces it, shaping how boys and men come to understand power, dominance and entitlement. We can see this process in ordinary life when, to absolutely no one’s surprise, controlling behaviour in a relationship is rebranded as care, or when misogynistic abuse online becomes something women and girls are simply expected to tolerate because, well, you’re a woman on the internet. These moments may seem disconnected from one another, but jointly they show us how easily misogyny can become part of the everyday.
The need for structural transformation becomes even clearer when we look at VAWG through an intersectional lens. Angela Davis’s work reminds us that inequalities are not peripheral to women’s experiences of violence and oppression, but deeply bound up with them. And really, we do not have to look very far to see this. Women experience life differently, let alone violence and oppression. Intersectionality is not an oppression Olympics, or an exercise in working out who has it worst. It helps us understand how existing inequalities change our relationship to violence, power and, crucially, protection. Race, class, sexuality, health and economic inequality intersect with gender, shaping who is exposed to violence, who is believed when they speak about it, how institutions respond and who can actually access the right support in the first place. Because even the best coordinated response is not equally accessible in a society that is itself profoundly unequal. If the structures through which women experience violence and seek protection are unequal, then those conditions need transforming too, and that means getting to some of them long before violence happens and before the point of response.
Early prevention for cultural change
The strategy itself says that “effective prevention begins with education”, and schools are an obvious place to start. Young people spend much of their formative years there, making sense of relationships, gender and the world around them. The strategy recognises this, with a £20 million investment aimed at helping teachers and families challenge harmful attitudes and behaviours, alongside reforms to Relationships, Sex and Health Education (RSHE) bringing more explicit conversations about healthy relationships, misogynistic online content, pornography, AI and deepfakes into the classroom.
And education can be transformative. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks describes education as a practice through which people can question the ideas and power structures they inherit, rather than absorb them. That feels particularly relevant here. If young people are learning ideas about gender, relationships and power from the world around them, schools can also be places where those ideas are questioned and challenged. In that sense, education is not just about teaching young people how to recognise violence once it happens, but giving them the tools to question some of the attitudes and inequalities that allow it to take root in the first place.
But there is a tension here too. If VAWG is sustained through institutions, inequalities and culture, prevention cannot become another attempt to reduce a systemic problem to changing individual attitudes. Education can be part of cultural transformation, but only as part of something much wider.
For this transformation to occur, it requires more than putting misogyny on the curriculum. One teacher I spoke to described RSHE provision as varying enormously between schools, with lessons often delivered by non-specialists with little training. We are asking teachers to navigate coercion, pornography, misogyny and rapidly changing online cultures. Proper training has to be part of that investment, alongside specialist VAWG professionals who already understand these issues. We cannot simply hand teachers a lesson plan and hope for the best.
Then there is the sheer scale of the online world young people are navigating. We tend to focus on the obvious figures, the Andrew Tates and podcasters adults have learned to recognise, but misogyny is embedded across a much wider online subculture, moving through gaming communities, forums, memes, humour and increasingly the everyday language young people use with one another. Another teacher I spoke to raised exactly this problem. Often, adults are not even privy to these spaces until something that began on the fringes has already become popular culture.
Listen, even the best classroom cannot do this work alone. A young person can sit through a lesson on consent, respect and healthy relationships, then open their phone and step straight back into a world where misogyny is recommended by an algorithm, repackaged as humour, repeated by their peers or manipulated through AI. We cannot expect one lesson to magically cancel all of that out. Early prevention has real potential, but only if we understand the scale of what we are asking schools and teachers to push against.
“You cannot arrest your way out of a culture”
And then there is the strategy’s final pillar: the “relentless pursuit” of perpetrators. There is a lot of emphasis here on identifying, restricting and prosecuting those who commit violence, and of course there should be. Women deserve justice and perpetrators should be held accountable, hardly a radical position. But after everything we have just said about prevention and culture, there is an obvious problem: punishment and prevention are not the same thing.
The strategy itself acknowledges that the misogynistic attitudes enabling VAWG “permeate every part of our country”. Yet you cannot arrest your way out of a culture. By the time we are relentlessly pursuing a perpetrator, a woman has often already been harmed.
Feminist thinkers including Angela Davis and Françoise Vergès have long challenged the idea that punishment alone amounts to transformation. Removing a perpetrator may deliver justice and protect women, but it does not remove the misogyny, inequality and power that allowed the violence to happen in the first place.
And this is not an argument for less accountability. Quite the opposite. It is a question of why our political imagination around VAWG becomes most energetic after a woman has already been harmed. We can imagine tougher sentences, stronger restrictions and relentless pursuit, but changing the conditions that produce violence? Suddenly, we seem rather less imaginative. If we are serious about halving VAWG, our ambition has to begin before there is another perpetrator to pursue and another woman waiting for justice.
The government says it wants to halve violence against women and girls within a decade. That is a target worth holding it to. But it will not be met through awareness campaigns that come and go with the news cycle, or through a justice system that only takes notice once a woman has already been harmed. Halving VAWG means changing the conditions that produce it. That work is slower, harder and far less headline-friendly.
None of this has to be invented from scratch. Feminists, activists, specialist services and grassroots organisations have spent decades naming these conditions, challenging them, often on shoestring budgets, and setting out what something different could look like. The strategy should be built with them from the start, not run past them once the decisions are made.
Culture is made by people, which means people can remake it. Violence against women is not a fact of nature, and neither is the inequality that lets it continue. This strategy is an opening. Ten years from now, we will know whether the government used it or let it close.