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Looking back on three years of coercive control legislation

As we come out the other side of the Christmas festivities and look to the new year, it’s worth pausing. Today marks the three-year anniversary of coercive and controlling behaviour being established as a criminal offence in the Serious Crime Act 2015.The domestic abuse sector raised a glass to celebrate this landmark day – signalling that the criminal justice system had registered the impact and seriousness of this daily, insidious abuse, where one person seeks to control another, with or without the use of physical violence.  

For girls to fulfil their potential, we need to understand the whole picture

Yesterday was International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and marked the start of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence. We know that empowered and free, girls can live the lives they want; carving out careers and the economic independence to make their own decisions, loving who they want and how they want. And yet, in the UK, we’re obscuring our ability to help girls achieve this huge potential – often through our own very good intentions.  

We need to take domestic abuse as seriously as national security

Of the ten years I spent working in government, some of my fastest and most effective learning came from working in the underground bunker known as the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms, or COBR. This time taught me a huge amount about the way people work under pressure, and how a world class response to threats to life comes about by hard work and commitment, not by accident.

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Why we're shining a Spotlight on LGBT+ survivors of domestic abuse

What comes to mind when you hear 'domestic abuse'? The chances are that most people see a heterosexual couple, in which the man is physically or emotionally abusive to the woman. Of course we know that the majority of people experiencing domestic abuse are women, and the majority of perpetrators are men. But for too long those who fall outside of this group have been ‘hidden’ from the services that should be supporting them, as our new report shows. 

A choice no one should have to face

A home is more than bricks and mortar. It’s where I should feel most at ease, most myself. The sanctuary to come back to at the end of a long, tiring day. But thousands of adults and children making their way home this afternoon, when they open the front door, are hoping in their hearts that it won’t be ‘one of those nights’ – again. Home is a place of fear and tension. Two million adults had an experience of domestic abuse in England and Wales last year so if this is my home and my experience I'm not alone – but I might well feel it.