Today, the government released its long-awaited strategy for tackling male violence against women and girls (VAWG), geared toward achieving its manifesto pledge of halving VAWG within a decade. Spearheading the strategy is Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips MP.
The ten-year plan is a beacon of hope following a succession of governments that appeared to accept VAWG as inevitable. Labour’s strategy takes a three-pronged approach to the epidemic: prevention, stopping abusers and supporting survivors.
As dedicated campaigners on VAWG, we at Glamour are excited to see our and our partners’ campaigning work reflected in the strategy. Ahead of its release, Jess told Glamour that campaigners played a core role in its creation.
“I’m a campaigner before I’m a politician, certainly before I’m a minister,” she says. “#NotYourPorn, for example, and the issue of what children are growing up seeing and what the pornography landscape looks like has absolutely been fundamental to the strategy, like with what we’re doing to stop violent porn by banning strangulation.”
"We are now one step closer to comprehensive law that protects women from this horrific abuse."
Preventing VAWG
The strategy expands the previous government’s VAWG work beyond responding to violence by investing heavily in preventing all forms of VAWG. Through a £20 million funding package, teachers and families will be given training to promote healthy relationships and identify harmful behaviour early. Young people will benefit from modules designed to teach them to challenge unhealthy myths about women and relationships, understand consent and the dangers involved in sharing intimate images. Pupils demonstrating the most worrying attitudes will get extra care and support to uproot misogynistic influences. A new helpline will be available to young people who are concerned about their behaviours and want help.
The strategy also pledges to provide “wrap-around family support” to break the cycle of intergenerational abuse — nearly half (48%) of adults who were abused as children experience domestic abuse themselves — by investing tens of millions a year from 2025 to “bolster child and family social workers’ capacity and skills”.
As part of the government’s ongoing efforts to make the internet safer for young people, it will work with tech companies to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view nude images. The plans come just in time; statistics show that nearly 40% of teenagers in relationships are victims of relationship abuse and over 40% of young men view Andrew Tate positively. All in all, the prevention aspect of the strategy aims to prevent anyone from becoming an abuser by intervening in the development of misogynistic behaviour from a young age.
“We need to contextualise the world that young people live in because until this strategy, we’ve just expected them to deal with this crazy new world,” Phillips continues. “Young boys are exposed to porn from date dot it seems, and we’ve got to start talking to young people about how we ended up at the point where somebody’s rape or abuse became a thing that’s widely available.”
Pressure from Glamour’s Stop Image-Based Abuse campaign
To combat digital abuse, the government has introduced new criminal offences for creating sexually explicit deepfakes or taking intimate images without consent. Amongst these measures is a pledge to ban the creation or use of ‘nudification’ apps. However, there is yet to be an announcement on action for ‘semen images’, another tool of harassment used by perpetrators to intimidate women and girls online.
“I was about 19, and some random man tweeted a photo of a page he’d cut out from Nuts magazine featuring me. He’d slid it into a plastic wallet and ejaculated over it.”
“For the last 18 months, Glamour, in partnership with the End Violence Against Women Coalition(EVAW), Not Your Porn, and Clare McGlynn, Professor of Law at Durham University, and Jodie Campaigns, has been campaigning for the government to introduce a dedicated, comprehensive Image-Based Abuse (IBA) law to protect women and girls,” says Lucy Morgan, Glamour’s Purpose Director.
“We’ve chaired parliamentary roundtables, commissioned groundbreaking investigations, and even won awards as part of our campaign calling for the IBA law to include the banning of nudification apps, funding specialist services, and focusing on prevention.
“I am pleased to see so many of our campaign goals reflected in the government’s VAWG strategy; a testament to the brilliance and tenacity of the survivors, campaigners, and experts we’ve been lucky enough to work with along the way.”
Jodie, Deepfake Abuse Survivor and Campaigner, and founder of Jodie Campaigns, welcomes the the government’s approach to digital abuse, but stresses that it cannot succeed unless a cultural shift accompanies it, she says: “There is a real risk that if this strategy focuses too heavily on technical fixes without fully addressing the culture that allows these abuses to flourish in the first place, the problem will continue to proliferate at speed. Image-based abuse, including deepfakes, does not exist in a vacuum. It sits within a wider ecosystem of misogyny, entitlement and a lack of accountability that technology alone cannot solve.”
These images can be weaponised through forced marriage, honour-based violence, and even death.
While the government has legislated against non-consensual deepfakes, the law is yet to come into force, meaning survivors are living in a grey area. Elena Michael, Director of #NotYourPorn, also has doubts. “In terms of tackling online harms, it very much appears the government is out of touch with what the issues are, preferring grand commitments to filling the gaps tirelessly fought for by survivors and experts,” she tells Glamour. “A key example is their recent rejection of Baroness Owen’s vital amendments to block sites and provide 48-hour take-down measures in the Crime and Policing Bill supported by the Revenge Porn Helpline. We still have time for the government to turn this around, but they need to listen to what survivors need.”
The government will also introduce a pilot scheme of covert online operatives to tackle VAWG offences in digital spaces, just like we currently do for child sexual abuse. Police forces will be encouraged to use advanced data analytics to identify and target the most dangerous perpetrators of VAWG, the same techniques currently used to track organised criminals and terrorists. New forensic technology will enable police forces to track down rapists and sexual offenders, even reopening cold cases to give victims justice even years later.
Significantly, the government is committed to providing every police force in the country with a specialist rape and sexual offence (RASSO) team by 2029. Currently, fewer than 30 police forces have one.
While discussing how to balance entrusting police with tackling VAWG and rooting out misogyny and perpetrators within that force, Jess Phillips cited Dame Elish Angiolini QC’s inquiry into Sarah Everard’s death, saying, “One of the things that will be worked on is banning anyone who has a history of any sexual crime from ever becoming a police officer in the first place. We will have VAWG units within every police force by 2029, but along the way, police forces’ culture is going to have to change, not just by vetting and disciplinary actions but also through core training and expectations.”
Supporting and protecting survivors
To improve the protection and support of victims of VAWG, the government will roll out Domestic Abuse Protection Orders (DAPOs) across the UK, imposing curfews, tagging and exclusion zones on abusers. Over 1000 orders have already been issued since the pilot began in November 2024. The government also plans to improve the implementation of the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (“Claire’s Law) and the ‘Right to Know’ scheme for victims of stalking, as well as considering the expansion of both schemes to encompass other forms of VAWG.
Additionally, the government has pledged over £1 billion for victims of domestic abuse to access support. Previously, the government announced £480 million in funding for local government budgets and £550 million across justice over the next three years to fund court guidance, counselling and children's services to support victims.
However, Gemma Sherrington, CEO of Refuge, says this still isn’t enough to plug the holes in funding across the sector: “While the Government’s commitment of an additional £19 million for safe accommodation over the next three years is welcome, it represents only a drop in the ocean compared to the number of survivors for whom safe housing could be the difference between life and death. The estimated total yearly shortfall from current government spending on specialist services is £307 million, including a £62 million shortfall for refuge services and £212 million for community-based services.”
We need comprehensive image-based abuse laws – and we need them now.
“What we’re saying in the strategy is that where we give down this refuge funding or where we give down funding for the police and crime commissioners is that there will be standards that will have to be put in place that look at making sure — and it’s a thing called the duty to collaborate — your local commissioners or local authority have to work together to serve that community,” Phillips explains. “We will be keeping a much greater eye and having much more accountability about what that has to look like.”
The help doesn’t stop there. A further £50 million will go towards improving support for survivors of VAWG through the NHS. This Steps to Safety initiative will connect survivors to services within their local area through the GP, which will be accompanied by training for GP practice staff to identify and respond to domestic abuse and sexual violence.
Not forgetting…
Within the strategy, the government is also driving forward a programme of work to combat childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Despite only making up 20% of the population, children make up more than 40% of victims of all sexual offences reported to police. Survivors of CSA are also more likely to become victims of domestic abuse or other types of sexual violence, making this an essential component of preventing VAWG.
As set out in the Tackling Child Sexual Abuse Progress Update published in April 2025, the government has committed to delivering many of the recommendations put forward by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, including a new mandatory reporting duty for people responsible for children and removing the three-year limit for victims and survivors of CSA to bring personal injury claims against perpetrators.
Additionally, the strategy pledges to take a “whole society” approach to ensure that frontline staff across all sectors have the awareness and training required to spot instances of VAWG and to intervene. Alongside this, the government will run a campaign to improve society’s understanding of VAWG, to increase reporting rates and empower people to call out abuse when they see it.
The stakes have never been higher in the fight for online safety.
What happens next?
While organisations like Refuge have welcomed the strategy’s publication, many agree that the government must maintain its momentum to see real change in VAWG.
“The VAWG Strategy still presents an opportunity to make a lasting difference to the lives of women and girls,” says Gemma Sherrington, CEO of Refuge. “However, this will require sustained leadership and robust accountability across government, alongside urgent action to fix the chronic underfunding of specialist services. Without this, women and girls will continue to pay the price.”
The government will chair a cross-government VAWG Ministerial Group every quarter to review progress and create an Innovation Council to find solutions to emerging threats. It also plans to hold a national summit on men and boys in 2026 to complement the strategy.
The strategy aims high and the passion behind it just might make it possible to achieve Labour’s goal of halving VAWG in a decade because behind it all is a commitment to collective responsibility. Whether the money pledged will be enough to solve a global issue that inflicts hundreds of billions in damage to survivors and society remains to be seen.
Speaking in the House of Commons today, Phillips added: “This strategy is more than a document, it is a call from a government that recognises this as a national emergency, a government that is willing to back up its words with action. Ending VAWG is the work of us all, those of us who might spot a boy from turning down a darker path, those who might see troubling signs of behaviour or perhaps in themselves, it will take all of society to step up and end the epidemic of abuse and violence that shames our country. The challenge is great, but I have never felt more confident that we can rise to it than I do today.”
