Introduction

Police Scotland has made significant improvements to its service and approach to tackling violence against women and girls (VAWG) since publishing our VAWG strategy in 2023. This places the victim at the heart of prevention and detection of crime through embedding trauma informed practice, by listening to voices of victims and survivors and by upskilling our workforce.

These improvements are designed to be continuous and delivered in multi- agency partnerships to ensure an appropriate and inclusive approach in line with our values and ethics while recognising the gendered nature and impact of such violence. Some examples of cross cutting work include training partners to use the Partner’s Intelligence Portal (PIP) which captures valuable information to develop a rich picture of VAWG in Scotland, the embedding of trauma informed practice and listening to and acting on women and girls experience of the criminal justice system and how we can improve what we do. This paper briefly outlines our recent progress on how we tackle and use our influence to deter, divert and detect VAWG.