Agree wholheartedly…. indeed I’ve just blogged about it myself!

Before getting too caught up in Cameron’s ‘proposals’ its worth pointing out that:

1. Making consent a compulsory element in sex education is only fully worthwhile if sex education, itself, is compulsory – which it isn’t, of course.

2. Under current government policy and the national compact with the voluntary sector, local authorities should be moving all mainstream voluntary sector funding to three year agreements, anyway.

The questions that have to be asked is:

a) why this hasn’t happened already in many areas, and

b) given that rape crisis (and domestic violence) services are often woefully underfunded, just how much money will Cameron be putting up to back up this commitment and where is it coming from?

Three year agreements are only useful if they provide sufficient funding to run services effectively and such service are too often badly underfunded, not to mention the first in line for cuts when things get tight.

3. New sentencing guidelines were only introduced earlier this year – I’ll dig out a link later – so should we (and Cameron) not be seeing how those pan out before jumping in on the question of sentencing.

So far as I can see, Cameron’s offering plenty of rhetoric and nothing of substance here. Even his proposed ‘review’ is likely to be a waste of time as all it’s going to tell us is what we already know, and very well documents, which is that significant investments in specialist investigation/prosecution services is what’s makes all the difference in raising the number of cases that actually get to court and the number of convictions.

(Oh, and btw, the actual conviction rate in cases that do get to trial is about 50% – not as good as it could/should be but yet another indication of where the real problems lies)

The problem with all this, as usual, is that what’s actually needed is both expensive and time-consuming – its needs a long term investment in order to generate significant results which means its not a good bet for a bit of eye-catching rhetoric to grab the headlines.

I’d disagree with the idea that Cameron has ‘made a start’ simply because when you look at the facts, he’s actually brought nothing new whatsoever to the table.

Unity – good points!

On the funding issue, I believe that the problems that rape crisis centres are experiencing are partly to do with the fact they are not funded in a mainstream way. The current crisis, anyway, is because they were getting money from a special ‘victim’s’ pot of money (presumably from central government).

I believe that the problems that rape crisis centres are experiencing are partly to do with the fact they are not funded in a mainstream way. The current crisis, anyway, is because they were getting money from a special ‘victim’s’ pot of money (presumably from central government).

That’s pretty much the current situation, yes.

The Home Office did inject some medium-term funding in RCCs a while back, on the premise that this would build up services that would then be main-streamed by local authorities.

Inevitably, in some areas, the main-streaming of services didn’t happen and we’re back where we were before.

Good piece Jess, but just to back up what Unity is saying… the 3-year funding commitment is something that IDS identified in his social justice report earlier in the year. I haven’t checked today, but I’m pretty sure that this was one of the aspects that Cameron picked up on and agreed to.

It only applies to C&V orgs that are engaged in service level agreements with local (or national) governments. So if a rape crisis centre has been given a contract to run a local service on behalf of the local authority, then they will be helped by this commitment. But:

A. Lots of RCCs will not have such a contract and will still be scrabbling around for funding wherever they can, and

B. This is an old announcement repackaged and re-presented, rather than a new commitment.

Another (new) commitment in Cameron’s speech, which hasn’t received much media attention, is to develop an integrated strategy to tackle all violence against women. This is something that the End Violence Against Women campaign and others, such as the Fawcett Society where I work, have called for in recent years. It is a vital step in tackling violence against women and is very welcome. Hopefully the Government will match it.

Jess/Ally:

I have to say that the more I look at the content of Cameron’s speech, the worse it gets in terms of lack of substance and underlying (poor) assumptions.

You’ll find my detailed views here: