Leveraging technology to prevent violence against women

9 Mar 2016 03:12 PM

£80 million funding announced for Home Office's new strategy to prevent violence against women, with technology playing a key role.

Yesterday, to mark International Women’s Day, the Home Office announced a new strategy for preventing violence against women and girls with £80 million over the next four years. Ending violence against women and girls strategy: 2016 to 2020 shifts the focus of the government away from crisis response and onto early intervention and prevention. A key pillar of the strategy is the potential of technology to improve both prevention and detection of offenses, and to increase support victims.

The strategy signals the government’s intention to harness data analytics in order to support targeted interventions by identifying at-risk individuals and offending trends, and ensuring that resources are allocated appropriately. In support of this local areas will be expected to publish data on the level of need in their area and the services they are providing to meet that need.

Increased used of body-worn video by police forces will play a role in prevention and prosecution. It enables police to gather high-quality evidence when attending domestic abuse incidents. The strategy also points out that “research from the London School of Economics showed that using body-worn video increased public reassurance and reduced fear, reductions in malicious complaints against officers and moderated behaviour by members of the public.” The College of Policing is currently working with police to support roll-out of body-worn video, and will review the guidance to forces to make sure that expectations around BWV is clear.

The Home Office will also support the trialling of GPS proximity tracking technology “to manage and disrupt persistent offenders” of domestic abuse and stalking, in order to reduce re-offending rates and to provide greater protection and reassurance for victims.

Technology is also an enabler of VAWG, with advances in communication and information sharing technology providing a platform for abuse, harassment and stalking. The new strategy commits the Home Office to “protect people from online abuse and exploitation, and new kinds of offending driven by technological change”. In order to respond effectively to cyber-enabled crime in this area, the Home Office will be working with the police-led Digital Intelligence and Investigation Programme and the College of Policing “to drive improvements in police capability to investigate and prosecute online VAWG offences”.

The introduction of an ‘online flag’ allowing police forces to record instances of crimes such as stalking and harassment taking place online, is a notable advance. Furthermore, new questions in the Crime Survey for England and Wales mean that identifying VAWG crimes with an online component will be easier.

There is also great potential for technology to provide better support for victims. The Ministry of Justice’s Single Departmental Plan sets out their plan for digital transformation of the criminal Justice system. Using video testimonies from vulnerable victims and witnesses, allowing them to give evidence away from the courtroom, would hopefully take less of an emotional toll on them by avoiding them going through “unnecessarily adversarial court procedures”. Data from body-worn video cameras gathered from police responding to an incident is also a powerful source of evidence for prosecutors. The strategy also notes that technology can help support victims maintain contact with key workers and ensure they are kept abreast of the latest developments in the case. “For example, TrackMyCrime is a secure online system, hosted on police.uk which allows victims of crime to receive updates from the police on the investigation of their case.”

techUK looks forward to working with the Police, Home Office and Ministry of Justice as they continue their efforts to realise the transformative potential of technology on preventing VAWG.