The Wandsworth Council's Health and Children's Overview and Scrutiny Committees met to discuss the interim report from the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Task and Finish Group, which is working to identify opportunities for early intervention and prevention of violence against women and girls. Councillors provided feedback on the report, suggested additional stakeholders to engage, and highlighted priority areas within VAWG. The committee agreed to move forward with the final report in February.

Violence Against Women and Girls Task and Finish Group Scoping Report

The committees were meeting to discuss the interim scoping report from the Violence Against Women and Girls Task and Finish Group. The report set out the purpose of the review, and its next steps. The Task and Finish Group was established to look at the prevention of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), which is a national and local priority. The group aims to review current prevention activities and address the root cause of VAWG, and identify opportunities for Wandsworth to lead in VAWG prevention through early intervention and culture change initiatives.

Councillor Lizzie Dobres, Councillor in Trinity Ward and Chair of the Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee, noted that the final report is expected to make a number of recommendations to the council. She also acknowledged the challenging nature of the subject matter, given the high prevalence of domestic abuse and violence against women and girls.

Councillor Della Sejol echoed the chair's comments, noting that the Task and Finish group is a great example of cross-party working.

The report highlighted several key lines of enquiry for the review:

• Hearing the voices of women, girls, and children, including young men.
• Addressing harmful behaviours in schools, colleges, and youth spaces.
• Improving relationships, consent, and respect education.
• Engaging men and boys in preventing violence against women and girls.
• Promoting inclusivity and intersectional prevention work.
• Supporting and resourcing community-led prevention approaches.
• Strengthening workforce training on VAWG prevention.
• Aligning with national and international best practice.
• Improving communication of available services.

The report also included a list of eight key components of a good prevention offer for VAWG, including a primary prevention focus, multi-level interventions, evidence-based approaches, whole-system integration, targeted support for children and young people, intersectional and inclusive design, community engagement and co-production, and online safety.

The report identified a number of key stakeholders to be involved in the review, including care leavers, children with additional needs, the Children's Service Domestic Abuse Operations Group, council officers, football groups for men and boys, parent champions, Refuge, school safeguarding forums, the SEND Youth Council, the VAWG Community Forum, the Youth Council, and the Youth Partnership Board.

The committee was asked to consider the report, provide feedback on any other relevant stakeholders to be engaged in the review, and provide feedback on what priority areas in VAWG are most pressing.

Youth Council and Refuge Feedback

Members of the Youth Council shared their reflections on priority areas for young people, including expanding CCTV and public services to make public spaces safer for young women and girls, classes around respecting young women from a young age, social media messaging to encourage calling out misogyny, engaging ways to educate people at impressionable ages, and peer support groups in schools.

The Youth Council members felt that education in preventing violence against women and girls should be addressed in both primary and secondary school, and should be interactive and directly address misogyny. They also suggested integrating more intersectional studies and women representation across all subjects, as well as critical discussions and condemning misogynistic ideas when they appear in text or lesson content. They also felt that prevention needs to go further than just schools, and should include youth clubs, places of worship, and community areas in general.

Isabel LaRossi, Operations Manager for Refuge, spoke about the services that Refuge provides in Wandsworth, including a single point of access, the IRIS project¹ that focuses on training GP surgeries to identify and respond to domestic abuse, and a MOPAC² funded announced support service for clients who may have additional needs around mental health, immigration status, disability or language.

Isabel LaRossi said that Refuge's priorities for improving prevention and achieving early intervention include early identification in settings such as GP surgeries, midwife, and community health visiting services, support for hidden groups, trauma-informed practice, community safety and based prevention programs, and integrated mental health support.

Councillor Davis shared feedback she received from parent champions and headteachers, noting a high level of interest in the offer from the council and the scrutiny project. The parent champions felt very much sidelined and felt the sexism just out and about in the community, but also it gave them the opportunity to then go back home and have the conversations with their sons and daughters about what they were experiencing. The headteachers wanted to have something on sexism in the workplace, but foremost, it was about collaboration and whether the council can facilitate sharing, the sharing of best practice.

Honour-based abuse

A councillor raised the issue of honour-based abuse³, and asked what the committee was going to do to encourage people who are subject to honour-based violence to speak out and seek help, and to raise public awareness about the issue.

Gabrielle, manager in the community safety team, responded that this is an area of increasing focus for the council, and that they have instituted a standalone section within their high-risk domestic abuse Marek⁴ to ensure that they allocate more time to HBA cases because of the complexity and the need for very carefully considered engagement around those cases. They have also commissioned the DCS partner, Karin Nirvana, to come and sit with them and accompany them on that panel and to do workshops with their specialist representatives on the panel to ensure that they are continuously upskilling and getting their expertise on cases so that they can ensure that they're embedding that within their Marek representatives. Additionally, they've recently translated their domestic abuse poster into three languages within Wandsworth where they know there is some overlap in terms of prevalence of harmful practices and honour-based abuse.

Whole System Approach and the Justice System

A councillor asked whether there had been any work with the justice system and the courts in terms of looking at repeat offenders, and people who are released early or dealt with in a way that is not helpful and supportive for survivors of violence against women and girls.

Gabrielle responded that their IDVA⁵ service provides support to victims as they're going through the criminal justice system if they choose to take that path, and that they track repeat offenders in the Marek so that that is an automatic high-risk escalation if someone is, if it's a repeat offense. She also noted that the Crown Prosecution Service has recently reinstituted a cross-partnership domestic abuse subgroup to look at exactly the outcomes and improving outcomes in the justice system for victim survivors, and that she is sitting on that group as well.

A councillor agreed that court delays are a huge problem, and asked that the work here be able to raise that and make that really clear.

Curriculum Changes in Schools

A councillor directed a question to the Youth Council members, asking for their thoughts on what could be done to change the curriculum based on some of the things that they said, and whether they'd consider perhaps through this group or via council officers, perhaps reporting back to the Department for Education about the work that they've done here to try and shape the future of the curriculum as it goes out to really look at what can be changed in it.

One of the Youth Council members responded:

I think it's quite loaded in the sense that there's a lot of things that go into shaping the curriculum. But I'd say having it be something that students can actually resonate with. Because I think when it's delivered by someone who maybe you don't relate to as a student, it can, I guess, lead to you wanting to seek out more radical views in terms of how to approach a situation. And I think that's how people get indoctrinated because they're not taught how to think critically. But I think as teachers, there's kind of that duty to ensure that you're able to relate to young people in a sense. So I'd say it's not necessarily even just about the curriculum itself, but it's also about how educators are able to relate to young people and ensure that they feel that the curriculum sees people like them in it. Because it just makes it so much easier to learn when it's being delivered by someone or you're being taught about someone who's a little bit more similar to you.

Another Youth Council member added that the lessons that they're exposed to are very passive and it's more of a something to get to just do once a week, and that attitude is where the problem stems because it shouldn't be another 30 minutes of a lesson, it should be something more interactive and should really have that important discussion, not something to sit down and watch the slides or the PowerPoint because it's so much more to that.

Engaging Young Men and Boys

A councillor picked up on the comments from the Youth Council about the need to engage young men and boys in the subject matter, and asked how exactly do we make sure that not only we get that conversation, we get the right conversation with young men and boys on this subject.

One of the Youth Council members responded that by having groups where young men and boys don't feel necessarily like they're being villainised, it's how you have more open and interactive discussions and kind of recognising that it is an issue and you are able to call it out.

Group Exploitation Scandals

Councillor Daniel Ghossain said that he was surprised that there isn't any mention of the large scale group exploitation scandals, particularly the rape gangs in places like Rotherham⁶, and the inquiry reports of the role of institutional fear around race and religion in those scandals. He asked why the report doesn't reference those national inquiries into group-based child sexual exploitation, and whether the chair will commit to adding those explicitly into the literature and policy review that will inform the work of the group. He also asked whether the data review will include information on perpetrators as well as victims, including ethnicity, age, and offending patterns, and how the group will ensure that fear of being accused of racism or stigmatising particular communities doesn't stop agencies from naming and addressing patterns of offending that have been identified in national inquiries.

Councillor Lizzie Dobres responded that this is their interim stage to have conversations about the scope of the review, and that as the group contains members of both sides of the group, it's the option is to kind of suggest, you know, things that could be a part of the literature review.

An officer responded that from a safeguarding perspective, they have a variety of mechanisms that they would use to look at grooming and grooming gangs in particular, including a daily meeting with the police and with a variety of partners to think about children who have been missing overnight, children who have patterns of going missing, and initiate a kind of immediate safeguarding response. Separately to that, they have a multi-agency panel once a month that looks at children who are being exploited or at risk of being exploited, criminally and sexually.

Another officer added that there was quite a substantial literature review that was undertaken to help inform the work of the task and finish group, and that they have drawn down from those learnings, from national inquiries, but that they acknowledge the point that they need to reflect that more in the report.

Councillor Daniel Ghossain responded that he submitted an amendment to the Health Committee a couple of years ago, and there still hasn't been an explicit commitment of the council to learning the lessons of those scandals, and asked whether the council is committed to learning the lessons of that scandal and incorporating whatever change is necessary to ensure that something like that never happens in Wandsworth.

Phones in Schools and Temporary Accommodation

A councillor said that they would like to see something about phones in schools, as there is an issue where schools, different year groups are allowed phones and obviously schools are different. They also said that they know of children in their own ward who have ended up in temporary accommodation in another borough and obviously at risk, because they're in accommodation, schoolgirls, primary schoolgirls are in accommodation with adult unrelated males.

One of the Youth Council members responded that they attended a school from year seven which did not allow phones and phones were like not allowed on the premises at all, and that they did see a difference on, in general, treatment of students, which includes treatment of gals, because the fact that there is no phone limits the possibility for uncomfortable conversations to have between whether there is a group of boys or even girls between each other.

Gabrielle responded that housing is a challenge across London and it is something that they're working on very closely with housing, and mentioned a new domestic abuse housing policy that has been released internally that was consulted on with survivors as well as across the different council departments and agencies and partners, the domestic abuse housing accreditation process, and a domestic abuse coordinator post in housing, including temporary accommodation.

Voices on the Margins of Society

Councillor Laura Wara raised a concern about how the voices of people who operate on the margins of society or in the legal grey area are actually captured and who are not part of the stakeholder groupings that you've seen, such as women and young girls who are controlled through faith-based organisations, trans women, lesbians, sex workers, people who are subject to immigration control, and people who are part of the drug-using community. They also asked how we ensure that once we've got to the end of this, we don't fall back into the patterns of silo working.

Councillor Lizzie Dobres responded that many of those marginalised communities that Councillor Laura Wara talked about, they're really glad to have some of those grassroots organisations represented in the voluntary sector forum, especially around LGBTQ+, women and girls, and women that identify as girls, and that absolutely, they're going to be at the heart of the evidence review. She also touched on a really important point around no recourse to public funds, around some of those points around the Home Office, and again, absolutely, the council is looking at what we can do to better support those women, and that needs to be at the heart of this review.

An officer added that they put together a kind of a literature review and a review of all of the activity that's going on, and it was actually phenomenal, the amount of work that's already actually being undertaken in this place, but that they all recognise there's opportunities to continue to strengthen that connection, though, as well, and ensuring that, one, there's a visibility within the organisation about what's on offer, but actually ensuring that that visibility is there within our communities, with our young people, with our community organisation, so they know as well what support is there, and actually that that's delivered in a really contextual and culturally informed way as well.

Education and Empowerment for Young People

A councillor said that they were interested to read in the interim report, but also to hear from the Youth Council members, too, about the support for the concept of more education and empowerment for young people, both at primary and at secondary level, but that we have to make sure it's safe and supported, and that if somebody has been the victim and discloses that they've been a victim of domestic abuse, perhaps they've witnessed domestic abuse in their home, they could experience trauma, it's going to be incredibly important to make sure that that's picked up appropriately and that that is escalated where needed and that the person giving that teaching or training is equipped to deal with those situations.

An officer responded that in both the curriculum review and in Keeping Children's Health in Education and in the updated RSE guidance⁷, that there is a real acknowledgement that this is a really serious area, which is key for schools. They also said that DSL's⁸ have very challenging roles and often are dealing with really difficult situations, and that they offer supervision through their education psychology service and through their education safeguarding lead for those individuals, many of whom take that up. They also noted that more and more of their schools are actually taking on trauma-informed practice, and that the virtual school delivers training for free to their schools on trauma-informed practice so that they understand the impact that this has on young people.

Mac Boys Football Club

Councillor Kate Stock shared some reflections from a meeting that she attended with the Chair and Mac Boys Football Club, a boys football club in Putney. She said that their insight was definitely around prevention rather than some of the kind of discussion that has taken place in terms of court enforcement and things like that, and that it was actually just interesting in and of itself that they reflected during the course of their discussion that this really had provided an opportunity for them to discuss this issue that hadn't really been there before. She also said that they really concurred with what you've said from the Youth Council in terms of education, both in and out of school, that importance, which I think you've just touched on a little bit, again, in terms of how that lesson is delivered and the importance of that being by peers and how that can really be far more powerful and memorable. She also said that they were wondering about the opportunities for promoting mixed sports, particularly pre-puberty in primary schools and whether that might be an opportunity to focus equally across the genders rather than their sense that sometimes sport was focused more on men.

Commissioning Local Groups

A councillor asked how we're actually commissioning local groups who are who are maybe from particular communities because as we found out during COVID if you don't specifically pay attention to communities and do broad brush work you can end up further marginalising groups that are all really marginalised.

Gabrielle responded that they commissioned karma nirvana around harmful practices, and that they have a very wide training offer much of which is focused on particular groups that are at risk of certain types of abuse or that they are not as effective at reaching as professionals sometimes, so the training offer has included commissions such as the traveller movement to talk about the traveller community looking at male victims looking at a wide range, and that they've done translations and have quite a few things going on.

Rhetoric Against Muslim Pakistani Men

Councillor Sana Jafri said that this evening has been really constructive and that she appreciates spending her time with you all tonight, and that it is absolutely disgusting and appalling to hear about grooming gangs across the UK and I hope and pray that these kind of incidents never occur in Wandsworth, but in terms of it's just a plea basically that we don't use the rhetoric which has been used against Muslim Pakistani men who have been predominantly known for these grooming gangs because this is just going to cause more cohesion and problems in our community and we've worked really hard with all communities and so and in terms of safeguarding this can be an issue so it's just a plea really thank you.