The government has announced that the most dangerous domestic abusers will be monitored more closely and electronically tagged.
Police forces will be required to treat violence against women and girls as a national threat that is as important to tackle as terrorism.
The law will be changed so that police, prison and probation services have to jointly manage offenders with a sentence of at least a year, or a suspended sentence for controlling or coercive behaviour – putting the crime on a par with physical violence.
New civil orders are being trialled in three areas of the UK which could see abusers electronically tagged and made to attend behaviour change programmes and the Ask for Ani codeword scheme, which allows victims or those at risk of abuse to discreetly signal they need help, is to be further piloted in Jobcentres around the country.
Around 2.4m people in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse in the last year, with around one in five homicides related to it, according to the Home Office.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said tackling violence against women and girls was being made a “priority” for police forces, adding that making the way offenders are managed tougher will help with “preventing more of these crimes from happening in the first place, and bringing more perpetrators to justice.”
No woman or girl should ever have to feel unsafe in her home or community and I am determined to stamp out these appalling crimes,” he said.
