Examining the gap between the Government’s commitments and the reality of its immigration policies: Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy.

By Isabella Rooney, Research and Engagement Policy Officer, and Monserrat Escudero, Policy and Communications Manager on VAWG.

This is our third entry analysing three of the government’s key policy strategies to see if they hold water when it comes to migrant women and girls. If you missed our first entry on the Homelessness Strategy, you can read it HERE and our second entry on the Child Poverty Strategy, HERE.

VAWG Strategy 

During his Manchester mayorship Andy Burnham launched a 10-year campaign to tackle gender-based violence¹, where he aimed to tackle sexual harassment in public spaces. He recognised his “personal responsibility to lead a new conversation about the change we need to see” introduced a new campaign aimed at men and boys², committed to promote accountability of their behaviours. 

The Labour Government previously pledged to halve VAWG within a decade³. In spite of these commitments, our analysis demonstrates that these pledges will again be impossible without specific measures to address the specific barriers migrant women and girls face as survivors of VAWG. Here are a few key aims in the VAWG Strategy and the ways they will be impossible to achieve without incorporating the perspectives and needs of migrant women:

• Break cycles of abuse through prevention and early intervention

The Strategy enshrines prevention as one of the three pillars to achieve its goal, placing particular focus on targeting online abuse and child sexual abuse. It makes provisions to strengthen school response to VAWG and misogynistic attitudes, providing training on healthy relationships. It also establishes the need to support families in parenting, as well as an increased investment in social services for early intervention. Finally, echoing Burnham’s claim to involve men and boys in VAWG efforts, it establishes a national summit to address root causes of VAWG. When outlining methods to achieve these goals, the Strategy completely omits the experiences faced by migrant women and girls, who face dehumanising and harmful misogynistic content online⁴, ignoring how structural factors such as NRPF and poverty perpetuate cycles of abuse. Targeted early intervention will not break cycles of abuse if migrant victims are not believed or supported by statutory services. Statutory failures prolong the time that children spend experiencing domestic violence first-hand.

• Increase accountability for perpetrators of VAWG

The VAWG Strategy commits to ending perpetrator impunity through its second pillar, pledging to address barriers to reporting and lack of trust within Family Courts and Criminal Justice System. It acknowledges survivors are re-victimised and there is need for reform and improved awareness of dynamics of domestic abuse, including coercive control, within the justice system. In spite of this, violence perpetrated against migrant women is conspicuously omitted when approaching accountability mechanisms. Fear of deportation is the most common barrier to reporting for migrant victims of VAWG⁵, and data-sharing practices prevent effective investigation of VAWG, allowing perpetrators to repeatedly abuse with impunity and continue committing crimes⁶. The Government cannot deliver real accountability if crimes against migrant women and girls go unreported, uninvestigated and without redress. 

• Provide wrap-around, targeted support for victims and survivors

The Strategy recognises immigration status as a barrier for migrant victims, and pledges to introduce a consent-based data-sharing policy between the police and Immigration Enforcement to improve engagement and access to justice. This policy is a recognition of the importance of safe reporting mechanisms for victims of VAWG⁷. However, the structural power imbalance with the police, the mistrust in the Government’s data collecting practices, and the hostile immigration environment are pressing issues that a consent-based form does not address. A full firewall between statutory services and Immigration Enforcement is needed, and structural barriers to accessing services must be removed, to ensure migrant women have equal access to support, protection and justice.

Tailored, holistic support that meets victims’ diverse needs is essential, including specialist by and for services. The intersection between VAWG and other forms of discrimination shapes experiences of abuse and makes it harder to access services or justice. By and for organisations have to press statutory services to support vulnerable victims, with the 2025 Nowhere To Turn Project finding that 67.4% of women supported had ‘inadequate and unsafe responses’ from statutory services and 61.5% of families with NRPF failed to be supported by children’s services⁸. In spite of the Strategy’s claim that  ‘no one should be forced to remain in an unsafe situation because they fear becoming homeless’, the housing system consistently bars migrant women from escaping abuse. Another pillar is access to healthcare, with the NHS being crucial in early identification and support, as healthcare is often the first point of disclosure. 

Migrant victims face systemic challenges barring them from safe accommodation and healthcare, including fear of reporting, lack of information about rights, and the consequences of abuse/exploitation, requiring extensive specialist advocacy to access. Many women are forced to remain with, or return to, the perpetrator to avoid homelessness, who prevents them from accessing healthcare. The specific barriers to wrap-around support for migrant victims and survivors are not addressed in the VAWG strategy. 

Conclusion

Across all three of these key  strategies analysed in our 3-part series, the omission of migrant women and children is glaring and harmful. We see a joint-up, across-the-board effort to marginalise migrants by enforcing a harmful narrative, maintaining a hostile immigration environment, and introducing laws and policies that either rollback on previous rights and protections or introduce new restrictions. All of this amounts to discrimination on individuals and groups on the grounds of their immigration status. 

This concerted effort to marginalise migrant women cannot continue to take hold of the public agenda if the government is serious about meeting its policy objectives. We call on the Prime Minister to keep his promise, change course, and build a country that works fairly for everyone, everywhere.

References:

1.  Greater Manchester Combined Authority (September 2021). Gender-Based Violence Strategy.
2. Greater Manchester Combined Authority (December 2021). ‘Mayor Andy Burnham launches new campaign to tackle gender-based violence.’
3. Great Britain. Home Office. (2026). Freedom from violence and abuse: a cross-government strategy to build a safer society for women and girls. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/freedom-from-violence-and-abuse-a-cross-government-strategy/freedom-from-violence-and-abuse-a-cross-government-strategy-to-build-a-safer-society-for-women-and-girls-accessible
4. Young Women’s Advisory Board. (February 2026). Voices of Young Latinas: Peer research on online abuse and the impact of fetishisation
5.  Mcilwaine, C., Granada, L. and Valenzuela-Oblitas, I. (May 2019) The Right to be Believed: Migrant women facing Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) in the ‘hostile immigration environment’ in London 
6.  Gracie Mae Bradley (December 2018). Care Don’t Share: Hostile environment data-sharing: Why we need a firewall between essential public services and immigration enforcement. Liberty. 
7.  LAWRS (18th December 2025). ‘Government’s new VAWG strategy: Safe Reporting Mechanisms for Victims and Survivors of VAWG’
8.  Women’s Aid. (2025). Executive Summary: Nowhere To Turn, 2025.