Engender blog

Joining Up Policymaking to Prevent Violence Against Women and Girls

At Engender, one of our areas of focus is preventing violence against women and girls (VAWG) before it gets the chance to occur. This approach, known as primary prevention, focuses on tackling the root cause of violence, gender inequality, by embedding gender-sensitive thinking into every area of public policy.

Through our Delivering Equally Safe project, we explore how different areas of public policy can prevent violence from occurring. We believe that to truly move the needle on VAWG, we need more than good intentions. We need policy professionals across sectors to work together. That’s why, in 2024, we brought over 50 policy professionals from 30 different organisations together for our first Primary Prevention and Policymaking Conference.

Our first conference showed just how vital cross-sector collaboration amongst policy professionals is to embedding primary prevention. Fast forward one year, and we were delighted to be joined by policy professionals from across Scotland in Glasgow in March to reflect, share the findings of our recent research, and look ahead. It was a chance to share knowledge, build relationships, and spark real momentum.

Where We Are a Year On...

At this year’s event, Hannah Brisbane, our Delivering Eqaully Safe Policy Officer, kicked things off with a deep dive into the Delivering Equally Safe (DES) project. Her presentation unpacked what some of the key components of a primary prevention approach in policymaking, including:

• Equal representation across all levels
• Intersectional gender analysis
• Designing policies that actively promote women’s safety

Hannah also shared reflections from the previous year’s conference, noting that attendees had expressed a sense of pride in Scotland’s world-leading approach to addressing VAWG but were frustrated that budgets and capacity did not match the scale of the challenge we face.

Good Practice and Missed Opportunities

Following last year’s conference, we commissioned research to find out more about local primary prevention approaches in Scotland, and we’re delighted to share the report produced by independent research consultant Kathryn Ramsay with you now.

The report highlights several structural barriers to primary prevention work across local areas, including:

• a lack of authority for VAWPs,
• a lack of funding and resources for existing work and
• insufficient priority given to prevention work by leaders. Kathryn also shared other challenges beyond these, including
• the poor implementation of the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), the
• lack of reliable measures of progress with prevention and
• the use of potentially confusing terms and jargon

In Kathryn’s research, numerous interviewees highlighted existing Equally Safe programmes (Equally Safe at School, Equally Safe at Work, and Equally Safe in Practice) as good practice happening locally on primary prevention. These initiatives are real-world examples of how prevention can be embedded into different areas, and it’s interesting to note that these good practice examples were designed and delivered by women’s sector organisations.

Reflections

We asked attendees at this year’s conference to reflect on what enables them to take a primary prevention approach, and what gets in the way. Not surprisingly, funding and capacity came up as one of the most common barriers to implementing primary prevention. However, many attendees also noted the potential for funding and capacity to be vital enablers when provided adequately and sustainably.

Other key enablers included:

• Gender expertise and competence
• Intersectional thinking
• Networks like the the National Violence Against Women Network, the Authentic Voices Network and the Safer, Sooner Domestic Abuse network

It’s clear to us that there is a strong appetite for cross-sector collaboration, and that people want to work together to build policies that prevent violence before it starts. While opportunities exist to facilitate this collaboration, Kathryn’s research shows that some of these are not reaching their full potential.

What’s Next?

We’ll be using the findings from Kathryn’s report and from the sessions throughout this year’s conference to push for meaningful change in relation to the implementation of primary prevention in Scotland. We’ve created a conference report that explores what was shared in workshop sessions on gender mainstreaming, VAW in politics and public life, a public health approach to preventing VAWG, and applying a primary prevention lens to public policy.

Read the conference report here.

Read Kathryn’s research report here.

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