Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, how many staff in his Department work on (a) the preventing sexual violence initiative and (b) the preventing sexual violence team of experts; and of those staff, how many are deployed overseas.

We have three staff working full time in London on the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative (PSVI). The Team sits within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s Gender Equality Unit, and additional staff from the unit dedicate a significant proportion of their time to PSVI. Furthermore, PSVI work is mainstreamed and taken forward by staff around our network of posts. They advance PSVI as part of a broader portfolio, including through our work on Women, Peace and Security, Girls' Education and wider human rights. This makes it very hard to establish the exact number of staff who work in some capacity on PSVI issues

The UK’s PSVI Team of Experts (ToE) is one part of the Civilian Stabilisation Group (CSG), a roster of external experts managed by the UK Government Stabilisation Unit. The CSG offer a skillset that is not available in the Civil Service. The ToE currently consists of 38 independent experts (26 women), including criminal lawyers, policing advisers, gender based violence experts, international investigating officers, training experts and psychosocial experts. In 2017, twenty experts were deployed to ten countries to provide training and mentoring to judges, prosecutors and members of the armed forces on gathering and preserving evidence of sexual violence, prosecution and protection of civilians. Additional expertise on gender issues is regularly deployed from the wider CSG.