Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps the Government is taking to eradicate violence against women and girls.

The United Kingdom has some of the strongest protections in the world to safeguard women and girls and the Government is wholly committed to protecting women and girls from violence and supporting victims and survivors. Over the course of the previous Parliament our achievements included:

• making domestic abuse an offence to capture controlling and coercive behaviour;

• rolling out Domestic Violence Protection Orders and the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme nationally;

• criminalising forced marriage;

• introducing new stalking laws;

• criminalisation of realistic depictions of rape and revenge pornography;

• strengthening the law on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), including mandatory reporting; and

• introducing new civil orders to manage sex offenders and FGM protection orders.

This Government will build on those achievements by doing more to intervene earlier in the abuse cycle including doing more to deter and rehabilitate perpetrators, as well as to continue to improve protection for victims and to bring offenders to justice. We recognise the importance of specialist services and will work with local authorities, the NHS and Police and Crime Commissioners to ensure a secure future for specialist Female Genital Mutilation and forced marriage units, refuges and rape support centres. The work will be set out in a refreshed version of the previous Government’s strategy, A Call to End Violence against Women and Girls, which will be published later this year.

The previous Government ring-fenced £40 million (£10 million per year) for services and helplines supporting women and girls who have suffered abuse. This Government has committed to continuing that funding to April 2016 and has provided an additional funding for this period: £10 million for refuges, a £3 million fund to boost the provision of domestic violence services including refuges and an uplift of £7 million for victims of sexual violence and child sexual abuse.