Two Stories, One pattern

I was half-listening to Women's Hour on Radio 4 this morning when a news item caught my attention. The renewed Women's Health Strategy came out last week, and apparently, the budget attached to it is smaller than the one that came with the men's health strategy announced last November. Yesterday, the Times reported on this, the headline stating that men's health is getting a 60% bigger funding boost than women's. That's worth sitting with for a moment.

Then last week also brought news of a study from Lancaster University and Royal Holloway - led by the esteemed Professor Sylvia Walby - that found government statistics are systematically undercounting violence against women. Not by a small margin either. The research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, looked at nearly two decades of data from the Crime Survey of England and Wales and found that the official figures underestimate the extent of violence against women by as much as 39%. For domestic violence specifically, the undercount reaches 59%.

The reason is a capping system: the ONS limits how many times a repeated offence against the same victim gets counted. And because domestic violence is disproportionately a repeat offence, and because women are disproportionately its victims, the cap hits women hardest. As the researchers put it, the statistics are masking "the repetition of domestic violent crime against women." The data that should be driving funding decisions, decisions about which services get resourced, which interventions get commissioned, is, in other words, wrong. And wrong in a very specific direction.

Health strategy funding and crime statistics are obviously different domains. But they're both examples of the same basic problem: when you don't measure women's experiences accurately, you can't fund responses to them adequately. And when the funding doesn't match the need, you can always point to the statistics and say the numbers don't justify more.

You can pay lip service to women's equality all you want, but unless it's tied to reliable and accurate data, as well as the funding needed to match the need, then we're stuck on this merry-go-round where reality isn't matching the rhetoric, which, in turn, is the basis for mistrust, disillusionment and limited progress on the government's aims and commitments to women's equality.

The Lancaster researchers are calling for the ONS to scrap the capping system and replace it with something that doesn't continue to embed this bias. That seems like a reasonable place to start. WRC will make sure we raise this wherever we can in our policy work.