Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they will take to protect adults who fear assault.

The Government is committed to reducing serious violence and putting an end to the tragedies afflicting our communities. It is important that we work across government, statutory, private, and voluntary sectors to deliver change.

We have announced we are investing a further £25m into the Safer Streets Fund this year, focused on ensuring people feel safe in public spaces and building on the £45m we have already committed. This investment will be launched in May once the pre-election period attached to local council and Police and Crime Commissioner elections has ended.

The Fund will deliver physical crime prevention measures, such as improved street lighting or increased CCTV coverage. There is strong evidence to show that simple solutions like these helps prevent crimes before they happen, empowering communities and individuals, including women and girls, to feel truly safe.

Violence Reduction Units are a key component of the Government’s investment to tackle violence at a local level. They bring together local partners in the 18 areas most affected by serious violence to deliver an effective, joined up approach to tackling violent crime and its drivers. The Home Office has invested £70m funding over two years (19/20 – 20/21) for Violence Reduction Units (VRUs). On 8 February, we announced a further £35m of funding for VRUs for 2021/22.

We are committed to tackling all forms of abuse against women and girls. The previous VAWG Strategy included sexual harassment for the first time in recognition of the disproportionate impact that it has on women and girls.

The Government takes all forms of harassment extremely seriously. Whether it is in the workplace, on the street, or as part of domestic or sexual abuse – sexual harassment, in any situation, is unacceptable.

We will be publishing a new Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy in 2021 which will help to better target perpetrators and support victims of these crimes and increase our ability to tackle emerging forms of VAWG such as ‘upskirting’ and revenge porn.

To inform the new strategy, we launched a Call for Evidence on 10 December, inviting responses from the public, victims, their friends, family and colleagues as well as victim support organisations, frontline professionals, and academics.

Following the tragic case of Sarah Everard and subsequent outpouring of stories and experiences of women who have faced violence or harassment, the Home Secretary decided to re-open the Government’s Call for Evidence on Friday 12 March, for a 2-week period, to inform the new strategies to tackle Violence Against Women and Girls. So far there have been over 147,000 responses to the call for evidence.