EMPOWER: The East Midlands Partnership on Violence Against Women and Girls

Description

The EMPOWER Partnership is a multi-agency research group funded by the ESRC and based at the School of Criminology. Its main objective is to develop a collaborative agenda to effectively address violence against women and girls (VAWG) through a holistic partnership, which spans criminal justice, health, academic researchers, and community and third sector responses to VAWG. The East Midlands has witnessed increases in both sexual and domestic violence since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and national policies highlight the urgent need for effective responses to VAWG. The partnership is aimed at developing a shared agenda to tackle VAWG both in the East Midlands and nationally. EMPOWER has four main objectives:

Partnership building: To build a regional alliance of key agencies and voices of survivors to effectively work together under the umbrella of EMPOWER.
Co-creation and co-design: To enable the active participation of stakeholders to generate key questions that need to be answered to effectively intervene in VAWG.
Sustainability: To deliver a long-term research strategy and sustainability plan for EMPOWER that facilitates change in addressing VAWG locally, regionally, and nationally.
Research capacity building: To develop the ‘research-ready’ capacity of stakeholders to engage in research that addresses VAWG.