London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Friday, Oct 03, 2025

New police lead on violence against women says trust has been ‘broken’

New police lead on violence against women says trust has been ‘broken’

Maggie Blyth says forces will put ‘relentless focus on perpetrators’ as part of efforts to rebuild confidence

Police forces will put a “relentless focus on perpetrators” in an attempt to tackle soaring levels of violence against women and girls, according to the new national police lead.

Speaking at the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners’s joint conference on Thursday, Maggie Blyth, the deputy chief constable of Hampshire police who was appointed into the new role of national police lead for violence against women and girls five weeks ago, acknowledged that trust between women and the police had been “broken through some of the tragic events of the last few weeks and months”.

Blyth said she had put together a two-year plan to transform how forces tackle crimes against women and girls, after the deaths of Sabina Nessa, 28, and Sarah Everard, 33, and the conviction of a serving police officer for Everard’s killing.

“Our first focus, our first pillar is on the relentless focus of perpetrators and our policing response very much around perpetrators,” she said. The “perpetrator-focused approach is currently being piloted in Avon and Somerset and involves attempting to disrupt and track suspected sex offenders including rapists, instead of focusing on the credibility of victims.

Maggie Blyth, the national police lead for violence against women and girls.


Blyth was appointed in September after a highly critical report from the police watchdog, which warned that England and Wales was facing a “national epidemic of violence against women and girls”.

She told officers at the conference that police needed to act quickly to rebuild trust and said there were “immediate police improvements that mean that action is needed in the next few weeks straight away”.

The police were “very much in listening mode, and that’s really important … because of the dip in trust and confidence,” she said, adding: “We won’t move forward at all in any of our policing work and our wider partnership work on violence against women and girls if we don’t make a change and rebuild that trust that we know has been broken through some of the tragic events of the last few weeks and months.” That work had to focus on “culture and conduct and behaviour”, she added.

During a panel discussion on violence against women and girls, which noted that “the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving police officer has prompted widespread concerns about women’s safety and male violence, as well as raising serious questions about culture, vetting and recruitment across the service”, the victims’ commissioner, Dame Vera Baird, made a direct challenge to the assembled officers.

She said the treatment of violence against women and girls in the police had “no central direction, no central resourcing, but it does kill a woman every three days”.

Baird called for a overhaul in police culture, for more status to be given to officers specialised in tackling violence against women and for VAWG to become a strategic policing priority, like terrorism, to give the issue central direction and extra resources, particularly for specialist officers.

“Ask yourselves, after 30 reports and 30 years of women’s voices raised against violence against women and girls: why are you still not policing it properly?” she said. “Don’t you owe it to the public to see that and to change culturally around by 180 degrees and start to lead us out of this epidemic of violence against women and girls?”

It comes after a YouGov poll, on behalf of the End Violence Against Women (EVAW) coalition, found 47% of women and 40% of men said their trust in the police had dropped since the conviction of Everard’s killer, Wayne Couzens. About one in three said they continued to trust the police.

EVAW’s director, Andrea Simon, told officers: “We are concerned … there has been a comparatively swift leap towards various initiatives which seem aimed at improving public perception of policing, before substantive transformation and improvement in our criminal justice response has taken place.”

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
FBI Removes Agents Who Kneeled at 2020 Protest, Citing Breach of Professional Conduct
Trump Alleges ‘Triple Sabotage’ at United Nations After Escalator and Teleprompter Failures
Shock in France: 5 Years in Prison for Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
Tokyo’s Jimbōchō Named World’s Coolest Neighbourhood for 2025
European Officials Fear Trump May Shift Blame for Ukraine War onto EU
BNP Paribas Abandons Ban on 'Controversial Weapons' Financing Amid Europe’s Defence Push
Typhoon Ragasa Leaves Trail of Destruction Across East Asia Before Making Landfall in China
The Personality Rights Challenge in India’s AI Era
Big Banks Rebuild in Hong Kong as Deal Volume Surges
Italy Considers Freezing Retirement Age at 67 to Avert Scheduled Hike
Italian City to Impose Tax on Visiting Dogs Starting in 2026
Arnault Denounces Proposed Wealth Tax as Threat to French Economy
Study Finds No Safe Level of Alcohol for Dementia Risk
Denmark Investigates Drone Incursion, Does Not Rule Out Russian Involvement
Lilly CEO Warns UK Is ‘Worst Country in Europe’ for Drug Prices, Pulls Back Investment
Nigel Farage Emerges as Central Force in British Politics with Reform UK Surge
Disney Reinstates ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ after Six-Day Suspension over Charlie Kirk Comments
U.S. Prosecutors Move to Break Up Google’s Advertising Monopoly
Nvidia Pledges Up to $100 Billion Investment in OpenAI to Power Massive AI Data Center Build-Out
U.S. Signals ‘Large and Forceful’ Support for Argentina Amid Market Turmoil
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
Vietnam Faces Up to $25 Billion Export Loss as U.S. Tariffs Bite
Europe Signals Stronger Support for Taiwan at Major Taipei Defence Show
Indonesia Court Upholds Military Law Amid Concerns Over Expanded Civilian Role
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch Join Trump-Backed Bid to Take Over TikTok
Trump and Musk Reunite Publicly for First Time Since Fallout at Kirk Memorial
Vietnam Closes 86 Million Untouched Bank Accounts Over Biometric ID Rules
×