What works to prevent violence against young women and girls? 

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a public health and human rights crisis, and it is now a national priority. 

The Home Office’s new strategy places much greater emphasis on prevention and early intervention to address the root causes of abuse. This includes significant investment in identifying which approaches are most effective in changing harmful behaviours and misogynistic attitudes in young people. For the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), this is a pivotal moment to strengthen what our Toolkit can offer to these seven essential sectors that are vital in preventing VAWG. 

As Dr Laura Knight outlined in her blog, YEF’s core mission of preventing children from becoming involved in violence and offending must inherently include preventing violence against women and girls. The Toolkit already contains evidence on approaches that address these types of violence, such as relationship violence prevention and bystander interventions to prevent sexual assault. 

What is changing now is how deliberately we are building the evidence base around it, ensuring that our focus on VAWG prevention is as rigorous as the rest of our work 

Measuring VAWG 

Our YEF Outcomes Framework identifies which outcomes may contribute to decreasing the likelihood of young people becoming involved in crime and violence. However, because it was not originally designed to track the specific harms associated with VAWG, our understanding of what works to prevent them has remained limited. 

A major challenge is how varied and inconsistent the existing research can be. Studies often examine a wide spectrum of harms – from coercive control to technology-facilitated gender-based violence – but use overlapping terminology to describe them. As well, much of the evidence measures changes in young people’s attitudes or knowledge about violence, rather than actual reductions in harmful behaviour. This makes it challenging to compare findings, spot patterns and trends, and assess which interventions would be most beneficial for commissioners and practitioners to implement in their local context. 

The VAWG Outcomes Framework 

To solve this, I have developed a new violence against women and girls outcomes framework for the YEF Toolkit to help us gather and synthesise evidence more accurately and consistently.  

The framework gives us greater specificity to track gendered harms, including: 

• Sexual and emotional violence; 
• Dating and relationship violence; 
• Technology-facilitated violence; and 
• Harmful gender norms and attitudes. 

This stronger basis allows us to understand not just whether an approach reduces violence overall, but whether it actively reduces the gendered harms that matter most in this area. 

Precision in language: GBV vs. VAWG 

The framework also sharpens how we use language across our work. 

In Toolkit systematic reviews, evidence gap maps, and effect-size reporting, we will often use gender-based violence (GBV) as the broader analytical construct. This is because many studies in this field include boys, young men, and gender minorities. 

However, in Toolkit strand summaries and other public-facing outputs such as Systems Guidance, we will use violence against women and girls (VAWG). This ensures we stay aligned with national policy language, reflecting the evidence base accurately while still naming the gendered pattern of harm clearly. 

What this means for the Toolkit 

This shift will immediately change what readers start to see in the Toolkit. 

This year, we are producing new strands that reflect a more realistic picture of how pervasive and deeply woven violence is in the lives of young women and girls. It is not confined to a single setting, but across intersecting contexts: in intimate relationships, peer groups, schools, neighbourhoods, at home, and in digital spaces – with online and offline harms often reinforcing one another. 

Our upcoming strands include: 

• Gender-based violence prevention programmes; 
• Universal and targeted technology-facilitated gender-based violence interventions; 
• Harmful sexual behaviours secondary and tertiary prevention programmes; and  
• Child and adolescent to parent violence and abuse interventions. 

We will start with Cash Transfers, due to publish in May, which will be the first Toolkit approach to include a VAWG impact rating.  

Building a stronger evidence base 

We still have a great deal to learn. Our evidence review highlights major gaps around perpetration, higher-risk groups, online harms, and what works in UK contexts. Therefore, this framework is just the beginning of a more focused effort to build the evidence where it is currently most limited. 

Jess Southgate, YEF’s VAWG Lead, is spearheading this initiative, leading our research and change agenda to bring together academic, practice, and policy insights to produce guidance for frontline practitioners and system leaders in 2027. I will support this effort by helping to strengthen the evidence base and ensure that VAWG outcomes and recommendations are clearly reflected in the Toolkit. The broader strategic direction is being led by Dr Laura Knight, whose leadership has been instrumental in shaping this work. 

The YEF Toolkit summarises the best available research about different approaches to preventing violence involving children and young people. With a national priority to halve violence against women and girls, the evidence base for prevention needs to catch up. YEF intends to help mobilise that.