The government’s new cross-government Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy, Freedom from Violence and Abuse (2025–2030), sets itself a decade-long mission and frames VAWG as a “national emergency” requiring a “whole-of-society” response: prevention and “tackling root causes,” “relentless pursuit of perpetrators,” and “support” for victims and survivors. (GOV.UK) The accompanying political messaging is even clearer: ministers promise the “full power of the state” and “nowhere to hide” for offenders, with the most concrete early announcements clustered around policing, monitoring, and enforcement capacity.
This article reads, through a socialist feminist lens (drawing on Britain’s Road to Socialism (BRS), the Charter for Women, and CPB/YCL positions), that imbalance matters more than the rhetoric. A strategy that mostly expands the state’s coercive muscle while leaving women’s material independence, collective organisation, and social provision under-specified is not “root cause” policy; it is harm management with better branding.
What the strategy actually foregrounds: enforcement infrastructure
The headline commitments are institutional and technological: specialist rape and sexual offence investigation teams across police forces; expanded Domestic Abuse Protection Orders with restrictions such as exclusion zones and tagging; and specialist online enforcement capacity aimed at technologically-enabled offending. (GOV.UK) The action plan frames this as modernising outdated law-enforcement tools and shifting to perpetrator-focused disruption, including online operations and surveillance-enabled identification measures (the plan explicitly references live facial recognition vans).
This is not automatically “wrong.” Survivors and families have demanded competent investigations, consistent policing standards, and meaningful enforcement for years; the strategy’s promise to professionalise rape and serious sexual offence investigation responds to real, lethal institutional failure. The socialist feminist critique is different: the state becomes decisive where it can extend coercive power, while the commitments that would reduce women’s dependency on violent men (housing, income, services, workplace power) remain weaker, vaguer, or treated as adjuncts.
What it funds: support packages, but within a service-user model
The government positions a “VAWG Support Package” as major investment, and the action plan includes large spending figures for victim/survivor support alongside targeted housing-related funding streams. That is materially significant in a sector hollowed out by years of instability and competitive commissioning. The political question is what kind of support architecture is being built: public provision accountable to women, or a patchwork where women are routed through fragmented systems as “service users” while the social conditions that trap them remain intact.
This is where the Charter for Women is the sharp comparator. The Charter treats safety as inseparable from reversing welfare and public-service cuts, restoring local authority funding for women’s organisations, guaranteeing legal aid, expanding childcare, ending casualisation, and strengthening women’s workplace and trade union power—because leaving violence requires material alternatives. By contrast, the VAWG strategy’s centre of gravity is criminal justice throughput and perpetrator management, with social provision discussed as support rather than a rebuilt social wage.
Prevention: schools and culture, but not the material ecology around them
Prevention is the strategy’s other major rhetorical pillar, and the public-facing discussion heavily stresses schools, early intervention, and challenging misogyny among boys and young men. (GOV.UK) That aligns with long-standing movement arguments that misogyny is reproduced culturally and institutionally, and that prevention cannot start at the courthouse door.
But prevention that is largely academic—without rebuilding youth services, tackling poverty, addressing housing precarity, and strengthening collective protections at work—risks becoming an “attitudes project” floated on top of worsening social conditions. BRS makes the opposite claim: women’s oppression is reproduced through the material organisation of society (paid super-exploitation and unpaid domestic labour; welfare erosion; precarious work; ideological gender norms), and violence is rooted in and reinforced by those relations, not just by “bad beliefs.” (YCL Britain)
The CPS strategy: better prosecution, same horizon
Alongside the cross-government strategy, the CPS has published its own VAWG Strategy 2025–2030, built around improving casework quality and rebuilding trust, with emphasis on trauma-informed practice and specialist capability for evolving offending (including tech-facilitated abuse). (Crown Prosecution Service) Taken seriously, this is an institutional admission that the system has failed victims and must change its internal culture and practice.
The socialist feminist limitation is structural: even an improved prosecution service can only process cases that reach it, inside a wider environment where women’s ability to report, leave, and survive is determined by income, housing, immigration status, and the capacity of independent specialist services. Prosecutorial reform can reduce harm; it cannot substitute for women’s liberation as a material condition.
Does it include what the movement said it must?
The YCL Women’s Commission highlighted a National Police Chiefs’ Council analysis that estimated 2 million women are victims of male violence every year, describing the situation as a “national emergency.” However, VAWG, which accounts for 20% of all reported police crime, is severely underreported, revealing a national disgrace where women continue to be failed. They pointed out that in 2021, of £4.1bn in government grants to charities, only 1.8% was allocated to women’s services. The Commission emphasized that studies have shown in 64% of femicide cases, abuse had been previously reported to the police. They called for domestic abuse specialists to be adequately funded and trained. Additionally, the Commission demanded that the government’s VAWG strategy explicitly include women seeking asylum, as over 85% of female asylum seekers experience rape or torture, underscoring the need to address the violence faced by these vulnerable women. (Young Communist League of Britain) The government strategy’s prevention-in-schools emphasis partially overlaps with this, and the “whole of society / men and boys” framing nods toward the cultural dimension. (GOV.UK) But the strategy’s enforcement-heavy centre and its reliance on police expansion sits uneasily with YCL’s analysis of policing as both ineffective and, at times, complicit. (Young Communist League of Britain)
Migrant women, NRPF, and the firewall (what “Sisters” demanded)
Southall Black Sisters’ response is the clearest test case: it welcomes limited moves towards safer reporting (including consent requirements before data-sharing with Immigration Enforcement) but argues this is not a full, unconditional firewall; it criticises failure to resolve No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) as a structural driver of abuse; and warns that “by and for” services still lack guaranteed, ring-fenced long-term funding. (Southall Black Sisters) On this axis, the strategy meets the movement halfway in language, then retreats into conditionality—precisely the pattern socialist feminists flag: the state offers procedural tweaks while maintaining the coercive border regime and the dependency it produces.
The Morning Star’s article, “Government’s VAWG strategy ‘must include child sex abuse victims’, charities warn” (25 August 2025), stresses the vital need for child sexual abuse to be central in the government’s forthcoming Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy. Charities including Barnardo’s, NSPCC (The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) and the Internet Watch Foundation argue that VAWG and child sexual abuse are deeply interconnected, with shared root causes such as gender inequality and misogyny. They warn that failing to address this issue within the VAWG strategy would overlook a critical aspect of the violence women and girls face, with children making up 40% of all victims of sexual offences. The charities call for a comprehensive, coordinated response that includes equipping professionals to spot abuse early and improving access to specialist support for all victims.
Charter for Women vs VAWG Strategies: a socialist feminist comparison
The Charter for Women views violence against women as a structural issue, deeply rooted in material conditions such as poverty, welfare cuts, labour market inequality, racism, migration controls, housing insecurity, and the erosion of collective organization. It connects violence to economic dependence, workplace exploitation, and weakened public services, positioning it not as an isolated crime but as a consequence of women’s broader social position. In contrast, the government’s VAWG strategy, including those from the CPS, frames violence as an individual criminal issue, focusing on the failures of reporting, prosecution, and system trust. While it acknowledges structural factors rhetorically, it treats them as secondary and separate from policy solutions, focusing instead on enforcement and criminal justice responses.
The Charter calls for a transformative state that restores welfare, funds women’s services, ensures legal aid, and emphasizes social change over punishment. It centers self-organization, collective power, and material independence through secure housing, decent wages, and childcare. In contrast, the VAWG strategy operates within an existing state framework, offering short-term support without addressing root causes like housing shortages, insecure work, and welfare policies. The Charter’s justice is collective, redistributive, and preventative, whereas the VAWG strategy emphasizes prosecution, sentencing, and statistical outcomes, managing women’s experiences rather than transforming their material conditions.
Britain’s Road to Socialism explicitly roots women’s oppression in capitalism’s dependence on super-exploitation and unpaid domestic labour, sustained by divisions inside the working class and by gender ideology reproduced through institutions and culture; it treats liberation as inseparable from strengthened trade union organisation, expanded public services, universal childcare, secure housing, equal pay enforcement, and properly funded refuges. The government strategy uses “root causes” language and references misogyny and inequality, (GOV.UK) but its operative levers are overwhelmingly those of the capitalist state: policing capacity, surveillance, prosecution professionalisation, offender management, and service navigation. (GOV.UK) From a BRS perspective, that is a predictable ceiling: capitalism can promise “crackdowns” more easily than it can promise redistribution, social ownership, or the mass collective power that would materially reduce women’s dependence and vulnerability.
Article XIII(f) of the YCL Constitution, which emphasizes supporting women members, aligns with the VAWG strategy by advocating for an inclusive approach. The YCL’s commitment to recognising the needs of marginalized women reinforces the idea that VAWG solutions must address both immediate violence and underlying structural inequalities. In Britain’s Road to Socialism (BRS), Chapter 1, “Capitalism and Exploitation,” explains how capitalism emerged from feudalism through the forcible displacement of the rural population, creating a new labor force, including women. Women’s super-exploitation in both paid and unpaid labor played a central role in fuelling Britain’s industrial growth, with their unpaid domestic labor sustaining the workforce’s capacity to produce surplus value. Chapter 4, “The Labour and Progressive Movements,” highlights that the economic, social, and political subordination of women is rooted in class society. Capitalism’s reliance on women’s super-exploitation continues today, as the capitalist class seeks to extract surplus value from women’s labor, both in the workplace and in the home. This oppression is maintained by gendered ideologies reinforced by state institutions, media, and education.
What this leaves you with politically
The strategy contains real, usable openings—especially where it admits systemic failure, commits to prevention in education, and allocates serious funding to victim/survivor support. (GOV.UK) But measured against the Charter for Women and BRS, it does not re-centre women’s material independence and collective organisation as the core anti-violence mechanism; it re-centres the coercive state. The movement test is therefore straightforward: whether implementation is forced away from a prosecution-and-surveillance model and toward guaranteed housing, income security, legal aid, ring-fenced “by and for” specialist provision, removal of NRPF barriers and a real firewall, and strengthened workplace and trade union power—because without those, the strategy will improve how the system processes violence, not how society prevents it. (Southall Black Sisters)
Shaila Shobnam, is a member of the YCL’s Birmingham Branch
