The Coalition to End Violence Against Women: A FiLiA International Women’s Day interview
The 8th of March commemorated International Women’s Day. It provides a moment for society to reflect on the struggles, the advances and the continued fight for the liberation of women and girls around the world. At FiLiA, we marked this date by highlighting the work of feminist campaigners or organisations around the world who dedicate their lives to tackling structural discrimination and oppression against women.
In this interview, FiLiA Spokeswoman Raquel Rosario Sánchez interviews the UK-based Coalition to End Violence Against Women. EVAW is a leading coalition of specialist women’s support services, researchers, activists, survivors and NGOs working to end violence against women and girls in all its forms. Established in 2005, they campaign for every level of government to adopt better, more joined up approaches to ending and preventing violence against women and girls, and we challenge the wider cultural attitudes that tolerate and condone this abuse.
Raquel Rosario Sánchez: You are a women’s rights advocate. When and how did you personally decide that this was a struggle you wanted to dedicate your life to?
End Violence Against Women: In 2005, a collection of frontline women’s organisations, researchers, lawyers and activists came together with a shared belief: that violence against women and girls is not inevitable. It is a cause and a consequence of women’s inequality, driven harder by intersecting inequalities. Tired of the Government’s piecemeal approach to this big social problem, which rarely went beyond criminal justice responses after the fact.
The group set out the agenda of what needed to be done. And with the critical support of trade unions and human rights groups, EVAW was launched on 25 November 2005. Our first action was to deliver Government a scorecard on its current efforts to end violence against women and girls – a measly 2/10.
RRS: How and why did the EVAW Coalition start? Tell you about the moment when you, or your founder, had the vision to create this women’s rights organisation.
EVAW: The EVAW Coalition was set up in 2005. As well as the above, there was a clear need for an independent organisation to campaign around policies, legislation and hold the government to account to end violence against women and girls. It was also clear at the time that most frontline organisations did not have capacity to do this, or receiving/seeking state funds for their work put them in a very difficult position. So the Coalition was born.
Over the first four years, the EVAW Coalition made the case to Government and the Opposition, and we were delighted when Westminster’s first Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy was delivered in 2010 and then renewed in 2016. This strategy is by no means perfect, and has suffered from being still significantly ‘owned’ by the Home Office, but it has absolutely led to some more joined up thinking in government, and key policy shifts including a change in the law on coercive control, some increased recognition of support services and the critical need for perpetrator intervention work.
EVAW set out early on to make the point about being ambitious enough to have policy to prevent violence against women and girls before it happens – news to those in Government who do regard VAWG as to some degree, inevitable. We’ve done some really focused schools and universities work, alongside many of our members, and have drawn attention to sexual harassment in schools, helped get Relationships & Sex Education made compulsory in schools in England, seen the child protection guidance for schools changed too so that sexual harassment and assaults by ‘peers’ are clearly covered, and pushed Universities UK to acknowledge and run a Taskforce on sexual violence on campuses.
We’ve just had our 15th birthday. We made a video for it and hope you like it.
RRS: From your point of view, what are the top three priorities that we should all be advocating about right now when it comes to women’s rights?
EVAW: Our focus and purpose is to end violence against women and girls through campaigning and policy work. We see VAWG as grounded in women’s inequality intersecting with other structural inequalities, such as racism, disablism, xenophobia, and others, which add complexity and harm to women and girl’s experiences of violence. In this sense, our key priorities are:
An integrated VAWG strategy encompassing all forms of VAWG ensuring equal protection for all women in accessing their rights and the justice system
An intersectional lens and practice in everything we do i.e. structural inequalities as integral part of VAWG
Movement building and collaborative responses and approaches to end VAWG
RRS: There is a lot of movement in the UK when it comes to women's rights, with a number of government consultations going on at the moment. What is your opinion of these government consultations that affect women and girls? Is there a particular government consultation that you would like to encourage our audience to submit?
EVAW: Over the last year we have submitted to several consultations. More recently, given the lack of a holistic approach to the VAWG Strategy by the government, we took the opportunity of the consultation to respond collectively and with a unified voice setting up our bold vision for ensuring a joint up response to VAWG which is grounded in the reality of women and girls’ lives.
We published, with Imkaan and Women’s Aid England a set of shared principles which many organisations in the sector added their names to, and which was circulated to our membership and others as a resource for this consultation and beyond. We are also currently responding to the Government’s Green Paper for Transforming Public Procurement which is an opportunity to call for the changes needed to address the harm caused by competitive tendering to specialist ‘by and for’ ending VAWG organisations and the women and girls that use them.
We respond to consultations with a view to holding the government to account and further our aim to end violence against women and girls. In the end, responding to consultations is just one of the many ways in which EVAW campaigns to end and prevent violence against women and girls.
RRS: On March 8th, 2020 the world was about to enter a global pandemic that has had a distinct impact on women and girls lives. One year later, what has COVID-19 taught us about women’s status in society?
EVAW: Covid-19 landed on already existing structural inequalities which have been massively exacerbated for women, disproportionately so for Black and minoritised, disabled and women from other marginalised groups. We quickly compiled a briefing in an attempt to set out theconsequences that COVID-19, and the necessary public health measures being implemented to control it, may have for women and girls who are experiencing or who are at risk of violence. At the time, we said: “We must not get to the end of this public health emergency and look back on it as a period when a ‘secondary’ predictable disaster was allowed to happen.”
EVAW had been co-chairing a group of organisations meeting regularly to discuss the Domestic Abuse Bill lobbying work for some time when the Covid pandemic and lockdown hit hard in March this year. It quickly became clear that VAWG sector organisations needed a forum to discuss urgent needs related to the Covid crisis and that this group was best placed to quickly morph into a growing, weekly, rapid hour of intelligence sharing and developing shared positions. This group got a series of public communications to Government, insisting that women’s and girls’ needs were factored into crisis planning, that abuse services were included in essential services with access to PPE and key worker status, and that the ‘charity bailout’ ring-fenced money for support in this area.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the reinvigorating of the Black Lives Matter movement there were many supportive statements across the sector and beyond. We agree this needs to be translated into action from within. Our sector, which is precious and life-saving, nonetheless reproduces the racism which our whole society is built on.This, along with the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on Black and minoritised communities has highlighted the importance of tacklingVAWG within an anti-racist framework that centre sending VAWG within a wider social justice agenda.
At the end of last year a group of Black, minoritised and white women from a dozen or so VAWG sector organisations, including EVAW, have worked together intensively to form the Anti-Racism Working Group and produced a Call to Action to name and eradicate racism in all parts of our sector’s work, from service delivery through to campaigning and funding. The response has been amazing so far. The Working Group is publishing a comprehensive Chartershortly, which can serve as a roadmap to disrupting and ending racism in the VAWG sector.
RRS: How has the EVAW Coalition coped with the pandemic?
EVAW: We have 101 members, and they are all different. Everyone had to change very quickly and move work remotely. None of it has been easy, but for some members, especially ‘by and for’ specialist services it has been extremely challenging. Most, if not all face-to-face services had to close down. Community based services have been the worst affected, if you can imagine group work or any session-based work had to stop abruptly. For many smaller organisations, ‘word of mouth’ is how women arrive at their doorstep; the pandemic has made this impossible, adding to already precarious and dangerous situations. Many have had to increasingly engage with food poverty issues in their communities.
Digital exclusion is a big issue too. Whilst many organisations have developed really creative and innovative ways to reach women, such as digital chat and other invaluable online tools providing information and support, for many this has not been an option, some having to resort to phone loans to enable women to reach them. Being locked down with your abuser increases the risks of violence manyfold.In spite of all the challenges, most members have continued to provide whatever services they have been able to, with very different means, some with very few.
Remote working has presented many challenges for staff too. Bringing VAWG work home is tough, notwithstanding the additional challenges at home, different for different women, but you can imagine, navigating support for your children, maybe elders or dependents too, whilst working, for many not a dedicated space, so having to negotiate that too. We should also remember that many of the women doing this work are survivors, as are many of those who created the organisations we now know as the VAWG sector.
We’ve been extremely busy, if anything, the pandemic has put an urgency on responses which were already urgent, from calls for vigilance as girls returned to schools to intense lobbying of Parliament along with others in the sector, to support amendments to the Domestic Abuse Bill to ensure support for all women, in particular Black and minoritised, migrant and disabled women who should be protected. This is required by the Istanbul Convention, which the UK is a signatory to and should be ratifying with the passing of this Bill. Currently the UK is not complying.
Last year, just before the first lockdown, EVAW was disappointed to not be granted permission from the High Court for a judicial review of Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) Rape policy; however after our lawyers at the Centre for Women’s Justice appealed this decision on our behalf, the Court of Appeal overturned the refusal and our case was heard by the same court in Jan 2021 - we are currently awaiting the judgement.
Our case argues that the CPS changed its policy and practice with regards to prosecuting rape to erase the ‘merits based approach’ and which resulted in a sharp decline in rape charges and convictions amounting to the decriminalization of rape. Support from members and so many others out there has been magnificent and has kept us going all this time.
For the EVAW team, the shift to remote working has also been challenging, although we are very fortunate to have been able to work from home, with the necessary adaptations. We do our best to stay in touch, with regular communications. Video conferencing has helped a lot, even though it has its limitations with communication. It has also proven to turn meetings into much more accessible events, something we need to learn from going forward.
RRS: What does International Women’s Day mean for your organisation?
EVAW: International Women’s Day is a key date for our calendar. We look forward to it every year, joining the choir of women’s voices and celebrating our members’ incredible work. For us it is about getting a sense of ‘movement’, of unity, a reminder that we need to ongoingly rediscover ourselves, engage with others and do intersectionality as a practice of ‘doing with’, learning, holding up a mirror to reflect on our work: “how are we doing?”, “are we doing it?”
When we talk and do our work on ending violence against women and girls, how can it end without ending the pernicious white supremacy, male supremacy, eugenicism? Put simply, it cannot.So they must end too, and this needs to be reflected in how we work.
RRS: Do you have any projects around International Women’s Day, or this year, that you would like to share with our audience?
EVAW: Yes, we will be actively supporting the launch of the Anti-Racism Working Group’s Charter
we mentioned earlier. This Charter, which is an amazing piece of collaborative work, provides a roadmap which can be used to address racism in the sector, a set of standards to aspire to, measure ourselves by and hold ourselves truly accountable.
2020 has been unspeakably hard for the violence against women and girls sector, which has had to transform itself to stay available for women and children through the pandemic. But it is also the clear, stark racial inequalities of the way this pandemic has been experienced that amplified the global Black Lives Matter movement, and led many of us in the sector to embark on the work that is needed to become anti-racist.Black and minoritised women at EVAW are part of this work
This is gold dust, and we want to encourage everyone to seize the day and get behind this critical work.
You can learn more about the work of the End Violence against Women Coalition by visiting their website. Or follow their work on their social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter.