Ending male violence: Joint letter to the Prime Minister of the UK

Today 97 specialist organizations supporting survivors of violence against women and girls across the United Kingdom have written to the UK Prime Minister with serious concerns about the UK government’s current response to male violence.

The tragic death of Sarah Everard has sparked a national conversation about the violence and abuse that women and girls experience daily. This is a conversation that must also be widened to include all women who have had their lives taken – including Wenjing Xu, Nicole Smallman, Bibaa Henry, Blessing Olusegun, Joy Morgan, and Sian Blake and her children, Jillian Grant, Natasha Wild, and Katy Sprague. We need to ask why the deaths of Black and minoritized women, disabled women, and others facing discrimination rarely garner the same response. We also need an urgent shift away from a response focused on more street-lighting and undercover police officers, to deliver the solutions women and girls need.

This means a secure future for specialist women’s support services, reforming the broken criminal justice response to these forms of violence and abuse, tackling intersecting layers of inequalities, and delivering the societal shifts to end men’s violence altogether.