Violence Against Women and Girls - Independent Strategic Review of Funding and Commissioning of Services: report

Introduction

It is time for change in how we address VAWG in Scotland. This issue cuts right to the core of who we want to be as a nation. The human rights of women, children and young people are being breached, day after day, and this cannot go on. We are still failing to protect some of the most vulnerable people in society, even though we now know so much about VAWG and what we need to do to prevent and eradicate it.

VAWG costs Scotland a lot, both economically because of the cost of the range of services victims/survivors need to access, and in personal terms for the women, children and young people whose lives are devastated by it. Some years ago, it was estimated that the cost of VAWG in Scotland was £4bn and costs have risen greatly since then. With the time available to the Review, it was not possible to make a more up to date calculation, but we recommend that this work should be carried out.

The European Institute of Gender Equality (EIGE) has estimated that the cost of gender-based violence across the EU is €366 billion a year, with VAWG making up 79% of this cost, amounting to €289 billion. Intimate partner violence (domestic abuse) against women makes up 87% of this sum (€151 billion).

EIGE's case study analysed three main types of costs:

• Lost economic output relating to a variety of costs associated with the work status and productivity of victims.
• Costs of public services covering health services, personal costs, criminal and civil justice systems, self-funded legal costs, housing aid and child protection costs as well as specialist services.
• Physical and emotional impact on the victims accounting for reduction in their quality of life as a consequence of violence.

EIGE's new study indicates that the biggest cost comes from physical and emotional impact (56%), followed by criminal justice services (21%) and lost economic output (14%). Other costs can include civil justice services (for divorces and child custody/contact proceedings for example), housing aid and child protection.

Costing studies create a better understanding of the extent and associated costs of gender based violence and support better resource allocation across different policy areas. However, to monitor the costs closely, better survey data on the prevalence of gender-based violence and administrative data on the costs and use of services are urgently needed.

Women Against Violence Europe (WAVE) recommend that states spend 10% of the cost of VAWG on services, and an accurate estimate of the costs in Scotland will provide a target for funding for VAWG to work towards in the longer term. We support WAVE's approach.

The effects of VAWG are lasting, and can be lifelong. Its impact on physical, sexual, reproductive and mental health, for example, can be profound and enduring. Loss of education, loss of employment opportunities, loss of contact with friends and family, loss of their home – there are many losses for victims/survivors of VAWG. And, of course, some lose their lives, either at the hands of their abuser, or by ending their own lives.

We have a VAWG strategy – Equally Safe: Scotland's Strategy for Preventing and Eradicating VAWG – which is rightly recognised as an international exemplar of good practice. And yet, services are not always available, or accessible, at the point of need. Where you live affects the support you can get. A service which produces good results one year may not be there the next. As our findings demonstrate, this insecurity is largely a result of an unstable and insufficient funding model.

There are also gaps in services for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and domestic abuse experienced in childhood.

We have had fifty years of work now to address VAWG in Scotland, since those early pioneering days when volunteers came together to form Women's Aid groups and Rape Crisis Centres to support women who had experienced domestic abuse or rape and sexual assault. Services have developed significantly since then, with the vital role of prevention being dramatically highlighted thirty years ago through Zero Tolerance's powerful images – still disappointingly as relevant today.

As the landscape of services and work developed, funding has become increasingly complicated and piecemeal. As a result, even though significant amounts of money for work in local areas have been provided from a range of funders including, since 2000, the Scottish Executive (later the Scottish Government), services remain patchy in availability and quality. The Independent Review of Funding and Commissioning of VAWG Services was set up to address this situation and make recommendations about how to resolve it.

We found that the historic focus on domestic abuse is still prevalent, and much of the evidence we gathered was related to this aspect of VAWG. Childhood sexual abuse and commercial sexual exploitation are comparatively less commonly funded.

Given the nature of our work, we were particularly conscious of the imbalances of power which affect relationships between groups in society, and can adversely impact on life chances and experiences. Not just between men and women or adults and children, but also between, for example, the Scottish Government and local government; national organisations and local groups; local authorities and service providers; people with different protected characteristics and socio-economic status; and experiences of different forms of VAWG.

Trust, or rather the lack of it, was also a recurring feature of our evidence gathering. Lack of trust between and within organisations, between national and local services and networks, between national and local government, between funders and funded organisations. Our recommendations, particularly around commissioning of services, will require much more trust and relationships built on respect if they are to succeed. We believe that this is possible, and found an example in Dundee (more details on page 61) where, as the Violence Against Women Partnership themselves put it, organisations and services put their egos aside allowing transparency in their approach (particularly to funding), supporting collaboration and creativity, and allowing them to hold each other accountable.

We need more of this approach in Scotland.

We were also very conscious that the Review was taking place shortly after Covid impacted on all our lives, exposing existing inequalities, particularly in relation to gender and ethnicity, and driving new ones. These impacts are ongoing and it is important to acknowledge and seek to address them. Rates of VAWG increased and services worked at pace to find new ways to deliver amid rising demand during lockdown and service shutdown. We wanted to learn from those experiences and retain any developments which were beneficial.

There are strong foundations to build upon – we found a history of commitment and good will from a range of funders and a shared understanding about the important role of services.

However, we also heard about what is perceived as a drift towards the provision of universal services, and away from services tailored to the specific needs of women, children and young people. This is not a direction of travel that we support.

The Review provides an opportunity to ensure Scotland takes a significant step towards becoming genuinely Equally Safe, and to provide the level and type of support to women, children and young people who have experienced VAWG which they need to survive and thrive.

Our remit was to: develop a more consistent, coherent, collective and stable funding model that will ensure high quality, accessible specialist services across Scotland for women, children and young people experiencing any form of VAWG.

In order to achieve this, the Review has considered and made recommendations on:

• the development of a Scotland-wide framework which establishes a definition of the minimum level of trauma-informed, specialist service provision, tailored to Scottish demographics and geography, specifying minimum core support provision and essential services, and guided by progressive realisation
• the method of protection in Scottish law for services for women, children and young people, including domestic abuse refuges, advocacy, counselling, rape crisis centres
• a definition of specialist services as those provided by organisations that take a human-rights approach, have a commitment to intersectional gender competence across the workforce and work to a gendered analysis of VAWG grounded in intersectionality
• a Scotland-wide mechanism for the oversight and distribution of funding based on need at national and local levels which will explore how Local Authorities and Health & Social Care Partnerships can be supported to develop a strategic and collaborative commissioning and procurement framework, aligned robustly to the delivery of Equally Safe
• the optimum length of funding periods and streamlining application, monitoring and reporting processes
• opportunities for involving survivors in commissioning processes/evaluations
• the role, contribution and resourcing of local VAWPs

There were a number of stages in our evidence gathering:

• A Call for Evidence
• An extensive engagement programme
• Commissioning research papers
• Reviewing previous research

Further details about/links to the above are provided in the Annex.

As we went about the Review, many issues with the funding of VAWG services were raised with us. Some were not a surprise, such as the problems caused by short-term, competitive funding rounds.

Others were more surprising, although perhaps should not have been, for example the unsuitability of the current service offer for minority ethnic women, children and young people, and both older and younger women.

Our recommendations and our model of minimum core services are based closely on the Istanbul Convention and its four pillars of Provision, Protection, Prevention and Participation, the CRC, CEDAW, and ICESCR in particular.

The Review found a wider need for collaboration/collective leadership working across systems. We can put legislation, governance and frameworks in place but these need to be consistently applied and 'owned' and understood by all the key players. Organisational development support around implementing our recommendations is crucial and potentially connecting horizontally to share and grow good practice on the ground both strategically and operationally.

The Review sits within the wider context of public service reform and work on the Local Governance Review, all of which is highly topical.

There is a clear and pressing opportunity to consider the recommendations of this Review, particularly in relation to the allocation of resources from the Scottish Government to Violence against Women Partnerships underpinned by Equally Safe via local government budgetary settlements, within the current ongoing development of the renewed Partnership Agreement between Scottish Government and COSLA. This would lead to transparent and sustainable allocation of resources to VAWCYP locally and would afford the opportunity for Audit Scotland to fold in compliance on VAWG duties and activities and reporting on the utilisation of resources and subsequent outcomes as part of their planned inspection regime.

We noted with interest the three missions outlined by the First Minister on 18 April 2023. which centre on the principles of equality, opportunity and community and will be key over the next three years, to improving the lives of the people of Scotland. Tackling VAWCYP maps very precisely onto all three missions and therefore our recommendations for new models of services and funding are ideally suited to being placed at the heart of implementation of the FM's vision for Scotland.

Implementation of our recommendations will be challenging and require a great deal of development work in a phased approach. This is a very significant change programme and we recognise that it will take a number of years to achieve full implementation of our recommendations. We expect, and indeed recommend, that the Scottish Government and COSLA work closely in partnership to achieve this.

Terms used in report

In our report, we have used the term VAWG – although we have had some discussion about this and its limitations particularly in relation to boys and young men. We recognise them as victims in their own right while at the same time excluding them from the descriptor. Worldwide, it makes sense to speak about VAWG given the significant violence and abuse experienced by girls and young women because they are girls and young women. In Scotland, this is less the case, and the large numbers of boys and young men who experience childhood sexual abuse and domestic abuse present a rationale for their inclusion. However, other than suggesting that it may be helpful to revisit discussions about this term, and indeed others commonly used (for example domestic abuse with which we have heard both younger and older women do not identify) we have made no recommendations about this. We have used the term violence against women, children and young people (VAWCYP) on occasion throughout the text and also gender based violence (GBV).

Intersectional gendered analysis – we have worked to the gendered analysis, which underpins Equally Safe and locates the different forms of VAWG in the context of the differing gendered reality of men's and women's lives. Opportunities, status and power in society are distributed unevenly between men and women, and patriarchal institutional and organisational structures serve to enshrine the rights of men, and to some extent those of boy children, over those of women and girls. Women and girls are at an increased risk of violence and abuse throughout their lives because they are female. We have taken an intersectional gendered approach, which acknowledges wider structural inequality and layers in the impacts of different characteristics such as race, disability, sexual orientation, faith, age, gender reassignment, and economic status.

Women who sell and/or exchange sex – we have used this term as we understand that it is the one preferred by women engaged in commercial sexual exploitation.

Minority ethnic – there is a plethora of terms in current usage to describe women, children and young people with a range of ethnicities, and many of these terms are problematic in different ways. We have opted to use minority ethnic as it emphasises that everyone has an ethnicity, and indeed many minority ethnic communities in Scotland would be majority ethnic in other countries.

We have referred to victims/survivors, victims, survivors and women, children and young people who have experienced VAWG where it seemed appropriate to do so.

Minimum core – 'Minimum core', in the context of human rights, is intended to be a baseline of social, economic and cultural rights that every state should implement immediately. We have used this term to describe the model of services we have developed during the course of the Review. Our model is intended to be a floor, not a ceiling – other services can be made available but our minimum core services must be available.

Progressive realisation – we understand the current difficult fiscal context for local and national government and recognise not all our recommendations will be implemented immediately. We expect the Scottish Government and local authorities to work towards implementing our recommendations to a published timescale and to provide an initial progress report in 18 months.

Non regression – an equally important aspect of our recommendations is that they should establish that 'floor' of services mentioned above and that there should no longer be the regression in services which has characterised this sector for decades. Once a service which is included in our minimum core is established, it should continue to be available, at least until it is agreed that there is no further demand for it.

Targeted universalism – Targeted Universalism aims to achieve universal outcomes with targeted or tailored measures, programmes or interventions. This enables different approaches to be taken for people with different characteristics, experiences and service needs, rather than a 'one size fits all' approach.

'By and for' services are provided by members of a minoritised group (including ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, transgender identity, religion or age) for other members of that group. Such services are embedded in their communities and can therefore address victims/survivors intersecting needs more effectively.

Transversal policy making is based on the recognition that VAWG is a complex and cross cutting issue which is the responsibility of different policy domains (e.g. education, health, social work, justice, etc) and which requires the active engagement of all sectors.

Maximum available resources – Under Article 2 of the ICESCR states have a duty to use their maximum available resources for the progressive realisation of economic, social and cultural rights. Even if a state clearly has inadequate resources at its disposal, it should still introduce low-cost and targeted programmes to assist those most in need so that limited resources are used efficiently and effectively.