Following up on our work in 2021, we held a large and successful public meeting in Hereford in September 2022 involving senior panellists from the council, police and sexual violence support agencies. the outcomes from this meeting can be viewed here: https://northherefordshire.laboursites.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/567/2023/01/Ideas-generated-at-the-Time-to-Tackle-Violence-Against-Women-and-Girls-meeting.pdf

Now in 2023 we are following up this work and have asked ask public questions of the Herefordshire Council Connected Communities Scrutiny Committee in February 2023. This committee scrutinises he work on the Community Safety Partnership (CSP). The committee welcomed our questions as important and to the point, following up the issues we raised in their recommendations to the CSP. See our questions, the answers and our report here.

Meanwhile we continue to press for action to tackle VAWG on our social media platforms and in the mainstream media.

A comment from our policy officer was included in a BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester programme on 9th January 2023 in relation to a feature on police reports of nearly 50,000 reports of violence against women & girls in a year and this figure increasing, police think, due to unchallenged online contact promoting hate against women and girls. Some of this was reflected in comments on the BBC site prompting her to say :

“we know these are reports of actual violence against women and girls. That is what the police record. We also know there is under-reporting of these assaults. We know the police are stretched. We know that violence and sexual assault on women are connected. We know this is traumatising to victims including children. [People] may not know that a lot of money and effort is going into a whole raft of preventive measures too. Others commenting may not know that prosecutions are made and their frequent apparent slowness is partly since the police have to move at a pace the victim can cope with which may take months of recovery. This violence is a complex problem in many ways but we must tackle it if we want a safe and civilised society. We don’t need to know if it’s increasing or to compare it to [levels of] other crimes like theft in order to combat it. We just have to act, all of us. That means all men calling out hateful comments and attitudes towards women and supporting women who try to do that too.”

To read about our work in 2021 please go to : Action in 2021: Violence against women and girls in Herefordshire