Landscape Review: Policing Technology-Facilitated and Online Violence Against Women and Girls

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a strategic priority for the UK government and for the police service. The police service response to VAWG has been under intense scrutiny since the appalling abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer in 2021. This has led to unprecedented political, media and operational focus on the policing response to VAWG, including VAWG being included in the Strategic Policing Requirement as a national threat, alongside terrorism, serious & organised crime and child abuse and exploitation. The current government has made a pledge to halve VAWG over ten years, and has established a new national centre to co-ordinate and lead the policing response.

At the same time the way in which crime is taking place has been transformed by the digital revolution. This is a long run trend, but has been boosted by the pandemic, which accelerated adoption and consumerisation of underlying trends such as social media use, videoconferencing and remote working. Undoubtedly these trends have affected how and where VAWG offending takes place. This transformation includes how technology is facilitating existing offence types such as sexual assault, domestic abuse and coercive control; and enabling new ones such as cyberflashing, deepfake image-based abuse and crimes in the metaverse.

This profoundly affects the policing response to VAWG and the need to recognise that boundaries that once made sense operationally and organisationally, e.g. that online and offline crimes were separate and needed distinct responses, may no longer make sense. And in many ways these distinctions undermine the policing response to the overall VAWG challenge.

This report looks at the following four questions about the response to VAWG in England and Wales:
- How is technology affecting VAWG offending?
- How are the police responding to technology facilitated and online VAWG?
- What good practice currently exists?
- What gaps need to be addressed?

This analysis in turn informs three proposed priorities for future work aimed at supporting and improving the policing response to victims and survivors of technology facilitated and online VAWG.

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