EVAW

3 winning campaigns	Judicial review of rape policy

End Violence Against Women (EVAW), founded in 2005, is a leading coalition of specialist women’s support services, researchers, activists, survivors and NGOs working to end violence against women and girls in all forms. 

Isla’s grant has allowed EVAW to:

• Capture public attitudes to abuse and test out how they could be reshaped.

• Carry out polling throughout the mayoral and local elections on women’s experience of sexual harassment on public transport and in the streets. This led directly to work by the police and transport authorities to step up work to deter sexual harassment and assaults, which is now a permanent policing priority.

• Carry out opinion polling during local elections to indicate enormous public support for the maintenance of local refuges, helplines and counselling centres.

• Secure a Government Rape Review through lobbying which is looking at why rape prosecutions are falling and what should be done. Isla is funding a ‘shadow report’ that will be soon be published.

• Help bring compulsory Relationships and Sex Education in all schools into law – a major campaigning victory – and a measure which is key to challenging the attitudes which make excuses for abuse before they set in.

• Secure changes to school safeguarding rules so that schools have to recognise sexual harassment and assaults on schoolgirls as serious child protection issues.