This year, we’ve been working with the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW).

We wanted to see whether we could replicate a successful model that we’ve already established in our work with The Climate Coalition, building the Local Intelligence Hub – we had an idea that the same approach could benefit coalitions of other types, and this was a chance to put that to the test with EVAW’s network of 160+ service delivery, campaigning, and advocacy organisations.

EVAW very kindly invited us into their office last Spring, where we showed them how mySociety’s tools (including WhatDoTheyKnow and TheyWorkForYou, as well as the Local Intelligence Hub) are already being used by citizens, campaigners and activists to engage with elected decision-makers. We then had a chance to talk about how EVAW and their members use—and could use—data as part of their work.

On a personal level, after having been steeped in the climate and nature sector over the last few years, it was fascinating to see how different the data landscape is in the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) sector.

A lack of data in the VAWG sector

For example, it looks like sensitivity around personal data and the safety of individuals accessing support services is having a knock-on effect on what data is publicly available. To an outside analyst trying to get a top-level picture, it’s hard to see what’s happening on VAWG at a local level.

Protecting the safety of victims and service users is obviously paramount. But these laudable protections seem to extend into a broader, less necessary ringfencing, with little transparency about spending on VAWG and the provision of services, for example.

This creates a challenge not only for the campaigners and services looking to tell a local story to bring about more commitments to addressing VAWG, but also the public bodies trying to monitor and tackle VAWG across the country.

We’re interested to see how a website modelled on our Local Intelligence Hub could help here, by bringing together safe, already public data, into a single place, so that it can inform more constructive conversations with and between public bodies.

This work is also timely given that the government has committed to halve VAWG in a decade, with only limited information about how it intends to measure its progress.

Sharing data already collected by authorities

Another approach we’ve taken to this deficit of data is by using Freedom of Information (FOI). Everyone in the UK has a right to request information held by any government or public body, and over our many years of running the FOI website WhatDoTheyKnow, we’ve seen lots of examples of how people have used this right to highlight and campaign around all sorts of social causes in the UK – from contaminated blood, to modern slavery, to disability rights.

This Summer, with EVAW, we’ve been investigating how we could use FOI to open up better data on the handling of safeguarding concerns in schools.

EVAW research has shown that schools are a critical site for tackling violence against young people, and especially girls. And yet much of the data that would help them track the scale of VAWG in schools is either collected by schools or local authorities but not then published, or published but in subtly incompatible ways between the four separate countries of the UK.

And so we’ve used WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch and projects features to send FOI requests to every local authority in the UK.

We’ve asked how many safeguarding referrals they receive from the schools they manage. While we’re still processing the responses, the disparity of data (and data unavailability) between different authorities in different areas is eye-opening. Not to mention the variety of formats we’ve received data in – plain text, PDFs, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, CSVs… it’ll be fun extracting data out of them all!

Our aim is that, through experiments like this, we can build a replicable pipeline to feed more data from public authorities’ internal records, through FOI requests, into a tool modelled on the Local Intelligence Hub, for activists, VAWG services, elected representatives, and the wider public to benefit from.

Header image: Jess Phillips, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, attends the Women’s Aid 50th anniversary conference in 2024. Photo by Andy Taylor – Home Office, CC BY 2.0.