From academic conferences to Policy Live: Bringing healthcare evidence to the Violence Against Women and Girls debate

Professor Gene Feder

By Gene Feder, GP and Professor of Primary Care, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol, and Director, VISION – The Violence, Health, and Society consortium

Over the years, nay decades, I have become used to academic conferences, with opportunities to meet colleagues across – in my case – the primary care and violence research landscapes and hear what they have been up to. Our conferences are mostly modest affairs with (relatively) tight budgets and far from policy impact. 

A couple of weeks ago I landed in the parallel universe of a conference devoted to policy and leveraging governmental action. BIT, the organiser, started out as the Cabinet Office’s Behavioural Insights team 16 years ago. Spinning out from government, it is now a global consulting firm with specific expertise in conducting multi-sectoral randomised controlled trials.

The Policy Live conference was in County Hall, right across from the Houses of Parliament, which made it easy for a minister and a couple of MPs to attend. The venue was definitely high-end, as was the food and the coffee on tap from a machine that looked like it could fly to the moon. And I have never been in a green room before.

Addressing the evidence gap: violence against women and girls

I was invited to sit on a panel to discuss The evidence gap: What it will take to halve violence against women and girls. The panel was chaired by Helen Brown, UK Managing Director of The Behavioural Insights Team with Seyi Akiwowo, (founder of Glitch, a UK non-profit dedicated to ending online abuse and misogyny), and Jess Phillips one of the MPs who came across Westminster Bridge to the conference and (recent) ex-Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG).

It was an opportunity to hear about the challenge of reducing online abuse and the difficult task of implementing the national VAWG strategy, in which Jess played a central role until she resigned in the dying days of the Starmer premiership. Violence against women and girls is a violation of human rights with severe and persistent damage to health.  In the UK, a woman is killed by a man every three days, and 1.6 million women experience domestic abuse every year. Yet, until relatively recently, the health sector has lagged behind criminal justice and the voluntary sectors in responding to this pandemic. 

I spoke about the health care response to domestic abuse, which has finally had the political attention and (some) national resource needed for the implementation and scaling up of evidence-based programmes. In identifying some of the obstacles I highlighted the dis-connect between the Department for Health and Social Care’s development of the national Steps to Safety programme and deployment of the research and the cumulative expertise of IRISi, the social enterprise that has scaled up the primary care response nationally.*

Emerging themes

The advantage of a panel over individual presentations is the conversation within the panel and synthetic themes that emerge. One that stood out for me was the tension between the long-standing expertise of the domestic abuse sector and the short institutional memory of government departments, with inevitable inertia not necessarily about policy but in resourcing implementation.

The siloing of domestic abuse prevention policy nationally and locally was another theme, which means that new dimensions and tools of abuse, not least in online spaces, do not get an integrated policy response.

Audience and impact

So, who was listening? Looking out at the audience, unlike my academic conferences, I only recognised a couple of faces. My sense from conversations overheard in the social area and green room is that most were policy professionals or political advisors.

My hope is that our conversation made a constructive contribution to clarifying VAWG prevention priorities, clarifying where we do have evidence and where we don’t, and naming some of the obstacles to putting that evidence into practice.

* Conflict of interest disclosure: I am a non-executive director of IRISi.    

Watch the recording

The panel discussion was recorded and you can watch it on YouTube or directly below: The evidence gap – Seyi Akiwowo, Dr Helen Brown, Gene Feder, Jess Phillips MP.

AI illustration provided via Adobe Photo Stock subscription