Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she plans to bring the harms experienced by girls under 16 into the scope of the monitoring and accountability metrics of the Freedom from Violence and Abuse Strategy.

Children and girls under 16 who experience sexual abuse and exploitation are considered throughout the Strategy, with specific commitments aimed at tackling the appalling crimes of child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The key way we’ll measure progress against our ambition to halve VAWG is through a combined prevalence estimate of the proportion of people (aged 16 and over) who experienced any of domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking in the previous 12 months, as measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales. However, as the CSEW does not survey people under the age of 16, we cannot include them in this combined headline measure.

We do though recognise the importance of understanding the experiences of children and young people. As such the performance framework in the Strategy includes a sub-metric on the prevalence of VAWG among children and young people and we are considering the best way of measuring this.