Only halfway?: A rights-based approach to ending violence against women in the UK

Violence against women and girls remains stubbornly persistent. It brings harms, fear and diminished freedom for women and girls, while we all live with the corrosive impacts of male aggression, entitlement and control over women.

In this pamphlet, Dr Purna Sen and Dr Sara Hyde present a rights-based framework through which to build a country and a world that works for women and girls. Centring elimination, they argue that the government’s pledge to halve VAWG within 10 years must be a milestone, not a final destination. Elimination is already a state obligation; it requires delivering rights for all women in their complexity and with attention to overlapping dimensions of discrimination, across domestic and international work, on all areas of violence.

Government intervention must flow from a comprehensive analysis violence against women, how it operates, and an understanding that it will finally end not when women and girls avoid ‘risks’, but when abusers stop their violence.