“The Government must take responsibility for prevention”: Professor Katrin Hohl OBE delivers evidence in parliament meeting on tackling violence against women and girls • City St George's, University of London

City St George’s criminologist urges the government to shift the dial at a Public Accounts Committee session on tackling violence against women and girls.

By Eve Lacroix (Senior Communications Officer), Published Monday, 31^st March 2025

“We have had review after review. I do not think that, to date, Government have taken responsibility for prevention,” said Professor Katrin Hohl OBE as she gave oral evidence to a Public Accounts Committee on tackling violence against women and girls in March.

Halving violence against women and girls is one the Labour party’s pledges made in their winning electoral manifesto.

The evidence session invited leading experts working to share their recommendations and insights.

Professor Hohl was the only academic invited to provide evidence and brought a wealth of experience bridging academia and practice in the area.

In February 2024, she was appointed an Independent Advisor to the Government’s Rape Review. She is also the co-creator of Operation Soteria, a programme which has been running since 2022 and overhauled the police approach to rape and serious sexual offences by introducing a suspect-focused, victim-centred and context-led approach. This has been credited with increasing the rape charge rate from 2% in 2021 to 8% in 2024.

She spoke alongside Nicole Jacobs DBE, Domestic Abuse Commissioner England and Wales and Farah Nazeer, Chief Executive Officer of Women’s Aid, who are both fellow experts working to make change in this area.

During the evidence session, Professor Hohl called for better data systems around sexual violence and argued that the Online Safety Act should allow regulars to go after big tech companies that allow normalise violent pornography to proliferate online. She said:

Without data, you have no idea how much sexual violence there is. You have no idea what is working.
The second barrier I would wish to see tackled is really going after big tech companies properly.
Today is significant for the Online Safety Act; yesterday, the deadline ran out for big tech companies to assess whether they have illegal content on their webpages.
If we do not get the data in place and Government do not go after big tech, very little can shift in this area.

She believes there needs to be a split between intervention (in cases where people had already committed sexual offenses) and prevention. Prevention has another added benefit of reducing crime of all type. She said:

On prevention, we know that a whole-school and holistic approach works better than one‑off going in.
We have to work with boys and men. We cannot just focus on girls. Focusing on consent and healthy relationships is not enough; it needs to be about respectful relationships.
Any money spent on preventing male violence against women and girls is probably going to prevent some terrorism and other types of crime. It is a mistaken belief that people who offend against women only offend against women; they do not.

She noted that the overlap between strategies to tackle violence against women and girls and strategies to tackle child sexual abuse were great, and suggested efforts are currently being redoubled. She added:

The most common age of victims and perpetrators of sexual violence is 11 to 20. The average age has come down, successively, year after year. These statistics are what the police know about, so this does not even include what is not reported.
Young people now spend a lot of time online. We know from Baroness Bertin’s pornography review that they see incredibly extreme pornography. They see illegal images all the time. This is part of their life.
This is the time to act so that they don’t go into a world where they see those things and think they can get away with it because it is normalised. To them, non-consensual sex, rape, is normalised. It is what they see when they go online. The time to act is now.

One of the places where she noted a positive change was awareness. Furthermore, there is solid evidence showing that victim support works for prevention, though efforts to provide support remains lacking.

“Nothing we already know will shift the dial,” Professor Hohl said, in a plea for further innovation.

She called on the Government to take responsibility, which would include milestones and an appointed department able to create and track milestones and progress.

The full recording of the meeting can be viewed on Parliament TV here.

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