Agenda item

Presentation by Dr Chantelle Fatania.

Chantelle Fatania, Consultant in Public Health, provided an update on the progress of the Violence Against Women & Girls (VAWG) Strategy noting that this continued to be a high priority as well as an underreported and largely hidden issue. The presentation covered the following points:

• A pilot project was delivered from April 2021 to March 2022 on a coordinated community response to VAWG. Staff from 32 venues across Haringey (such as libraries, children’s centres, places of worship and food banks) were trained to enable the venues to become ‘Safe Spaces’ where victims of VAWG could speak to someone and be signposted to specialist services. In addition, 150 VAWG Community Champions were trained to link victims of VAWG to specialist services. An evaluation of the pilot was expected to be available by late July/early August 2022 and early findings were promising.
• A VAWG Business Group had been set up to strengthen the response across key agencies and tackle structural issues within the VAWG partnership. An action plan had been co-developed with North Area Basic Command Unit (BCU) which had set up a specialist domestic abuse unit with 7 staff members known as ADAPT (Advancing Domestic Abuse Prevention Team).
• A 3-year VAWG communications strategy had been developed to deliver a scaled campaign to promote a culture where VAWG was not tolerated by delivering clear and consistent messaging about unacceptable attitudes and behaviours. A draft communications plan had been taken to the VAWG Strategic Board with the feedback used to make revisions.
• A number of training activities had been carried out including training from HumanKind to all Haringey drug and alcohol teams on early identification of domestic abuse. DVIP had been commissioned to deliver 6 sessions on developing skills in holding perpetrators to account. The VAWG team had also partnered with North London Rape Crisis to deliver 4 sessions about sexual violence with over 50 people trained and with Tender to deliver multiple sessions on the impact of domestic abuse on young people with over 100 people trained.
• Three videos had been co-produced with Haringey young people to challenge the high prevalence of victim blaming around VAWG.
• Solace Women’s Aid had been commissioned to deliver training to key staff from all secondary schools by March 2023. The training would focus on improving knowledge of how to identify and respond to sexual violence and on how to embed cultural change in education and youth settings.
• A public health approach on supporting schools in preventing peer-on-peer abuse had been co-developed with the Healthy Schools Programme, Sexual Health and Anchor Project Teams.
• The Protect Our Women (POW) Project had continued to be commissioned. POW was an educational training programme about preventing VAWG and delivering sessions in schools to support young people, staff and parents around healthy relationships. POW had trained 65 staff members across 7 secondary schools and colleges and delivered workshops and training to 200 young people.
• Additional investment was being put into Haringey’s VAWG services with improvements being aligned with feedback received from communities and frontline services and women directly impacted by domestic abuse.
• IMECE had been commissioned to provide domestic abuse support services for women from minoritised communities.
• An IDVA (Independent Domestic Violence Advocate) to support LGBTQ people would be provided through specialist organisation GALOP from July 2022.
• Haringey’s core domestic advocacy service was being recommissioned with additional investment covering a range of domestic abuse issues including legal, financial, economic, coercive control, housing, immigration and forced marriage. This would provide links to smaller specialist services where appropriate. It would also provide support to older women, women who are disabled and women experiencing multiple disadvantage. Engagement work with community groups and front line service providers was ongoing and the new service was expected to be in place by June 2023. 
• A specialist domestic violence advocate would be commissioned to work with young people and children under the age of 16. This was important as children experiencing domestic abuse were affected negatively in multiple ways including mental health/emotional problems, schools attendance/achievement and detrimental impact in later life.
• Wrap-around support for women in refuges was provided by Solace with their contract extended to February 2025.
• Investment was being made into a model to target behaviour change in perpetrators with various options being scoped with the police and probation service closely involved. 

A discussion then followed the presentation:

• Asked by Cllr das Neves about the training staff in the whole school approach, Manju Lukhman, VAWG Strategic Lead, explained that POW worked with parents, teachers and students and they would be included in the dialogue ahead of the recommissioning of that model.
• Beverley Hendricks suggested that parental understanding of the impact of domestic abuse could be built into some of the programmes as so many of the young people involved with serious youth crime had witnessed or experienced domestic abuse in their homes. She indicated that she would be willing to share the findings of the audits that they had previously carried out in this area. Manju Lukhman, noted that there had been historically been a parallel programme aimed at working with children and their parents to help them understand the impact of domestic abuse on their children. A worker had been secured this year to go into refuges to work with women and children there and there were also some ongoing training programmes.
• SebAdjei-Addoh reported on the collaborative conversations that the Police had been having with the team and wider partnership and provided some data on domestic abuse incidents in the 12 BCUs in London which showed that Enfield & Haringey BCU was ahead of other BCUs. He described the holistic multi-dimensional approach that was being taken which involved not just looking at the charges or cautions made but also what steps were being taken to use policing powers to prevent or disrupt domestic abuse and this was having a tangible impact. The ADAPT team was also doing important work in terms of procedural justice.

Cllr das Neves commented that this was a thorough and important piece of work and thanked the team and all the partner agencies involved.