Funding the fight against misogyny
Last week, the Government launched a new National Taskforce for Tackling Misogyny. Bringing together ministers, women's organisations, charities, academics and local leaders, its remit is ambitious: to look at how misogynistic attitudes develop, how they spread through online spaces, workplaces and communities, and what can be done to prevent them.
It's a welcome recognition that misogyny isn't just a problem of individual bad behaviour. But there's an important question we think needs more attention: where do misogynistic attitudes come from in the first place?
The Government's existing VAWG strategy talks about tackling the root causes of violence and abuse and identifies sexist beliefs, harmful social norms and the spread of misogynistic content online as important drivers. These things undoubtedly matter. But attitudes don't develop in a vacuum. They're shaped by the society people grow up in and the institutions, economic structures and power relationships they encounter.
Women and men don't enter that society on an equal footing.
Women continue to undertake a disproportionate share of unpaid care. They're more likely to work part-time, take career breaks and experience economic insecurity, while women's reproductive role has historically been used to justify their exclusion from economic and political power. The result is a society in which women's labour – both paid and unpaid – has often been treated as less valuable, while the costs associated with caring and reproduction are disproportionately borne by women.
This is part of the structural context in which misogyny develops and is reproduced. If we're only focusing on changing 'attitudes', without looking at the systems that continue to produce women's inequality, we risk treating the symptoms without addressing the conditions that sustain and reproduce them.
There's already considerable expertise in the women's sector on these structural inequalities. As the Muslim Women's Network UK has pointed out in its response to the taskforce, women's organisations have spent years telling successive governments what the problems are and what needs to change. Its message is that the taskforce should turn existing knowledge into action, including tackling sexual harassment, holding technology companies accountable and addressing the experiences of minority ethnic women without reducing violence to a question of culture.
Women’s Aid has made a similar point from the perspective of its decades of work supporting survivors: we already know much of what makes a difference, including properly funding specialist women's services, investing in prevention and education, and ensuring women can access justice and support.
Which brings us onto funding.
Changing the conditions that produce misogyny is long-term work. It requires organisations to build expertise, develop relationships with communities, test approaches, campaign for institutional change and stay alongside women and girls over many years. That's difficult to do when funding is short-term, uncertain and often tied to individual projects.
The Forever Fund is being built to address part of this problem. As a permanent financial resource for the women's sector, our aim is to create an ethical endowment that can generate sustainable income for organisations working towards women's equality and liberation.
We believe that if the government's serious about prevention and tackling the roots of misogyny, it needs to look not only at what we teach people to think, but at the structures in which people live. And it needs to invest in the organisations that understand those structures and are working to change them.
The new taskforce has an opportunity to build on the knowledge that already exists across the women's sector. The Forever Fund's role is to help ensure that sector has the financial foundations to keep doing that work for the long term.
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