Equality and Social Justice Committee

Welcome back to the Equality and Social Justice Committee, where we're continuing our inquiry into the public health approach to preventing gender-based violence. I'd now like to welcome Dr Nathan Eisenstadt, who's a research associate at the University of Exeter, who's joining us online, and a director of Kindling Transformative Interventions, which we'll hear about later; and Dr Rachel Fenton, who's here with us in Cardiff, also from the University of Exeter law school, as well as being a director of Kindling Transformative Interventions.

We've obviously had some very high-profile crises recently around this issue of gender-based violence. The Confederation of British Industry has had its little local difficulties, which nearly destroyed it as an organisation, and similarly the Welsh Rugby Union has also had a very public airing of some of the problems related to them as an organisation. There seems to be consensus in the research community that gender-based violence arises because of gender inequality. So, how difficult is it, therefore, to tackle people's behaviour around respect for each other when we definitely don't have gender equality? And we're not going to have it any time soon, given the slow, slow burn that is simple things, like the Equal Pay Act 1970. Do you want to start off, Rachel?

I can. I was just wondering if Nate wanted to—. I can see Nate, but I don't think he can see me. So, Nate, did you want to go first, or do you want me to go first?

I don't mind. You can go, and then I'll go.

I think it's very difficult, and it really shouldn't be difficult. I think that it is about the holistic approach, and I think that's the approach that you're looking at in Wales. It's about thinking about the different levels at which this occurs and the different points at which something can be done. And I think it's, for example, if we start saying, 'Okay, well we need to work with men', okay, yes, of course we need to work with men, but we need to work with men as part of a whole load of other things. We need to work with schools, but that's no good if they're going home and getting these messages from the parents. So, I think that it's the public health approach and the different tiers and thinking about what are those influences and causes at different levels of society. So, you've got the individual level, what that particular individual is doing, saying and perpetrating, all the way up from perhaps sexist attitudes and beliefs, all the way up to being an actual perpetrator of domestic violence, and what factors are influencing that individual, but recognising that those people live within society.

I'm thinking about Hagemann-White's diagram to understand the different levels and the causes, which I personally refer to all the time. I think it's really, really helpful. So, you've got the individual, then you've got the micro levels, so all those relationships and peer relationships and the school environment that they're situated within that may facilitate that person to go forward. And then you've got the meso and then the macro level. So, the meso might be the bigger picture of the school, so the schools that don't take action when something is reported, or the university, for example, or the workplace that let it go on. And then you've got the macro level, which is the legislation, the criminal justice system, your gender inequality, the non-enforcement of laws around this, for example, the criminal justice system and the problems within the criminal justice system. So, I think it's about looking at all of those different levels and seeing what we can change as a holistic approach, because it's no good just doing one little bit; it's got to be a whole system.

Very good. Dr Eisenstadt.

Yes. I completely agree with Rachel. I was also thinking about Hagemann-White. I guess, we can't do any of these things in isolation, and we do need to tackle systemic injustice, the wider gendered inequality and the way that intersects with other vectors of difference, and not lull ourselves into a false sense of security that doing individual level or social norms interventions is going create that change upon its own. At the same time, I think we need to understand systems as co-constituted by micro-level interactions. So, systemic change takes place through top-level changes to policy and the law, but it also changes—. We have to think about who makes those changes to policy and law, and those changes to policy and law are made by people, people who have conversations with each other, who are influenced by bystander interventions in their workplace. So, I think we want to be doing this micro-level stuff at all levels, because the high-level stuff is co-constituted by those low-level interactions.

So, we've got the new curriculum. It most definitely does address a lot of these issues in both relationships and sexuality education and in our religion, values and ethics and the general whole-system approach to learning. How are we going to ensure that this good work going on in schools is really translated more holistically to ensure that all men and boys realise that they too have a responsibility towards ensuring a reduction in this gender-based violence that seems so endemic in our society?

My particular expertise is around bystander intervention, so I can talk about it from that perspective, but I think that building on what Nate was saying about those micro-level interactions is absolutely crucial. Work goes on in schools, but it can't be a one-off; it has to be repeated and it has to be repeated at the different age groups, because they're going through different changes at different times. Again, I think it's about not having a tick-box, and it's about, in the schools, very much making sure that teachers are absolutely equipped to have those kinds of conversations, and not putting it just on teachers. I think that's grossly unfair and, from the little bits of work that I've seen published, there can be quite a few difficulties with a teacher-led curriculum when they're not fully equipped.

So, that's just to think about what does that look like as a holistic thing within the schools, and what's being done in nursery education, for example, in pre-school. What's there around gender inequality, particularly when the majority of pre-school staff are female? Those are the role models that they see doing this kind of work, this pastoral, care-level work. So, it's about what's appropriate at age 11, what's appropriate at age six. How do we make sure that that is happening, and how are those—? These are very difficult conversations to be having with young people. I have a 12-year-old daughter. Can we expect the personal, social, health and economic education teacher, or its equivalent, at secondary level to be able to have those conversations? So, that would be one question.

And then the other question that I've got is around how we make sure that these kinds of conversations are happening at every level. So, we've done a lot of work with universities, but we've then started doing a lot of work with adults, particularly men and boys, but also general communities in trying to get to different levels of the population. So, I am specifically now referring to the work we've done around bystander intervention as a way of having those conversations and a way of getting to those people and changing attitudes, minds, et cetera.

What we've noticed—we've done quite a few evaluations after the universities project—is that, apart from the evaluations that show the attitudinal and the behavioural shifts, which I'm sure you will ask me about, we see that they do work in the sense that we see men of middle management coming and then, in the post-intervention interviews, saying, 'Do you know what? Because I've been on this course, I have changed the priority for the next board meeting or the next system, and we're going to look at this. I hadn't thought about that before.' And going back and saying, 'I hadn't thought about the way in which I communicate with my teenage son.' And going back and saying, 'I've had a conversation with my wife about sexual harassment and sexism on the street, and I've talked to my daughters, and I've talked to their boyfriends and I've looked at their relationships.' So, although you can go in and say, 'Right, this is a workplace sexual harassment issue,' what the bystander does is it changes the attitudes, the beliefs and the understanding that are behind that. Yes, you can go on it, and say, 'This is continuous professional development, and it's workplace,' but, actually, they're going to use it in different areas of their lives, and that improves going down the age group and going up, changing things at a higher level. On our active bystander communities, we had people coming for CPD, so we had a paramedic, for example, who then said, 'I've talked to all my police friends about this and suggested that they all do this. It's not just about me as a paramedic, but it's me out on the street; it's me when I visit people's homes; it's everywhere that I kind of go.'

Okay. Before I bring in Dr Eisenstadt, I think Sarah Murphy has a supplementary question.

Thank you, Chair. I really appreciate it, and thank you both for being here today, because you've both already used the phrase 'bystander intervention', and in your written evidence, and in everything that is out there, and I'm just going to ask a question that I hope doesn't sound twp: what do we mean by 'a bystander'? Because it's used, as far as I can see, in many different ways, contexts and phrases. 'A bystander', to me, is somebody who's passive and neutral—I get that. 'Don't be a bystander', the Welsh Government's campaign in terms of the holocaust; I get that. 'Active bystander interventions' doesn't make sense to me at all, that whole phrasing. So, can you define—? And you kind of touched on now what you mean by 'a bystander'. I'm getting that it's men in boardrooms, but can you define what you mean by 'a bystander'? Are we all 'bystanders'?

Yes.

Because we're all—. Right, okay. [Laughter.] Is it the opposite of a—? No, that's good. Is the opposite of a perpetrator a bystander?

No.

Okay. So, just to finish, basically, do we want to be a bystander, or an active bystander? And I don't know how you'd be an active bystander, because you're no longer bystanding. And I suppose, has this word been deliberately used so that people don't feel called out for being actively involved in misogyny? Please explain. Thank you.

Shall I go, and then you can add in what I've missed?

Okay.

Or do you want to go first, Nate? I've talked a bit.

Why don't we hear from Nathan, and then you can come back in?

Yes, yes.

Yes.

Okay. So, yes. As Sarah has correctly identified, we're all bystanders all the time. So, a bystander is just someone who is witness to a situation or is disclosed to about a situation, but they are not directly involved as either the wrongdoer or the perpetrator, or the victim. And we are talking about training people to be active bystanders. When we say that, it means training people to skilfully intervene in some way, to either prevent further harm or respond to harm that's occurred. A big part of the bystander approach is this kind of idea that we have a misperception of social norms and that inhibits us from intervening, and it encourages wrongdoers to keep doing what they're doing.

So, if we take the example of someone telling a sexist joke, when that happens and nobody calls it out, we look around the room and we misperceive the social norm. So, we look around the room and no-one is saying anything, and we think, 'Uh-oh, everyone else agrees.' In actual fact, most people in that room are probably thinking, 'I'm not okay with this, but I don't want to say anything, because I don't want to be the pariah. I don't want to be the one who's calling it out and I'm worried that no-one's going to back me up.' The wrongdoer's looking around the room, and they're getting a kind of false consensus, so they're looking around and thinking, 'Oh, everyone agrees with me. I'm going to keep doing this.'

So, bystander training is about equipping people to intervene in those often low-level, but not exclusively low-level, situations. Sometimes, all it takes is for one person to do that, to say, 'Hang on a minute, I'm not okay with that; that's not right', whatever it is, and to call it out in some way. And they can do that in the moment. If they do it in the moment, then other bystanders see that it's safe to intervene, and that encourages them to either support the person there and then, or to intervene in future.

And so, it's a kind of grass-roots approach to culture change, and it takes the presupposition, as you identified, that the actual social norm is better than what we perceive it to be most of the time. And this is one of the things that—. It's kind of perplexing to see the levels of gender-based harm, gender-based violence that we see in society at the moment, when we also know that there have been huge amounts of positive social change over the past 60 years. How can it be that there is this really positive shift in terms of attitudes, but we're seeing all this stuff keep happening? So, from things like the British social attitudes survey, we know that positive and healthy attitudes and norms are actually quite widespread, and what we need to do is equip people to make that a reality by intervening to prevent harm as it's unfurling and prevent further harms. I guess one of the things that we do is not only to train people how to do those small interventions in the moment, but also to have those deeper, transformative conversations after the fact. So, meeting up with a friend or a colleague for a coffee or a beer afterwards and saying, 'Oh, you know that thing you said the other day, I felt a bit uncomfortable about that because—' and you know, talking about the reasons why, to really bring people with us.

Of course, of course. I suppose I'm not—. I completely understand what 'bystander' means. I suppose in this context, the terminology—. If we're all bystanders and we're asking people not to be them, wouldn't it better to say, 'Don't be a bystander, be an ally'? I suppose 'ally' is a word that people associate with more, and I just think that sometimes the way that this term is being used—. Like I said, 'active bystander', that doesn't even make sense. I just wonder if the terminology around it is—. But like I said, we'll get into this later, I suppose. Both of you have highlighted that not all programmes are created equal and everyone is kind of bandying this around a little bit differently, I think.

Yes. So, I guess this comes into the specifics of messaging that we would use, like in a particular campaign as opposed to whether it's an effective approach to be taking overall.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair.

Coming back to schools, though, some of them will be victims of violence, others will be perpetrators of violence—in the staff, I mean—and, unless you deal with that with some pretty robust training programmes, you simply aren't going to get children and young people learning about the depth of this issue.

Absolutely, and I think that—. I think it's got to be. Again, if you think about the schools as a whole system, it's within teacher training, what's happening actually within teacher training, what's happening within nursery training and all of those trainings that staff do before they go into working with children, and how do we refresh, for somebody who is an older teacher who's been around a long time, to change their attitudes and to change their beliefs. So, it's around training the staff, making sure the staff are equipped. Because I don't think it's fair either—. We were up in Northumbria this week doing some training with people who already are experts in domestic violence, and this stuff is really difficult, to have those—. Even if you already work in the area, a lot of people were saying, 'These conversations—there's a lot of work in delivering this stuff.' It's not just, 'Here's a PowerPoint and I'm just going to go through it.' So, I think that work has to start—. It has to start in universities, if it's not already—. Do you know what I mean? We want it to start in schools, but in the universities, particularly for the people who are coming into contact with young people—. So, yes, absolutely, staff training.

Gender inequality in schools is a massive issue. How are girls being treated differently to boys? How is that being modelled? And how are we then training up our young people within our universities, colleges, nursery schools et cetera to have those conversations? Or not even conversations, but, you know, to not do the things. And that's really difficult. I think it's really important that, who teaches these subjects, they really are secure in their knowledge and their training, because I think that—. If you think about rape myths and accepting rape myths, how widespread that is within the population, of course you're going to have teachers who buy into those ideas, of course you're going to have university staff, of course you're going to have people in big companies. These are widespread misconceptions, and they can be incredibly damaging.

Okay. I'm going to bring in Jane Dodds at this point, because I know she's got some questions on perpetrator transformation programmes, which is on cue.

Yes, thank you very much—diolch yn fawr iawn. Thanks for being here. I just really wanted to ask you about perpetrator transformation programmes, or as I know them, I guess, perpetrator prevention programmes. The first batch may be towards yourself, Nate, but obviously you're welcome to come in with any other interventions as well.

It's about the effectiveness of them. It's about, really, are they delivering what we want, which is, hopefully, to get to a point where we have perpetrators transformed, walking away with a different attitude and position. Are they successful? What sort of programmes are they if they are successful? And how can the Welsh Government just approach it in a way that says, 'These are successful programmes'? So, just take that first one, if that's all right, Nate, but, Rachel, please do come in if you feel there's anything to add.

So, there are kind of four spheres of work with perpetrators that are active at the moment in England and Wales. So, you've got your one-to-one work; you've got your group work, your domestic violence perpetrator programme, more referred to as 'domestic abuse perpetrator programme', and maybe that's more what your question is around. Then we have the kind of disruption dimension, so this is at the higher-risk level, so using multi-agency risk management to disrupt perpetration through a series of different mechanisms. And then there's a wider sphere of multi-agency information sharing and co-ordination.

I'm going to—

Sorry, Nate, is it helpful if I just say it's not necessarily about multi-agency risk assessment conferences, or multi-agents, or multi-agency public protection arrangements? It's about those programmes that are either court-ordered or people volunteer to go on them. What do they look like? How effective are they, and how can Welsh Government—?

So, I guess, and sorry to avoid it.

That's fine.

One bit more. I guess it's the—. So, Gondolf's work, which was seminal work on domestic abuse perpetrator programmes, saw them as existing within a co-ordinated community response, and it's the co-ordinated community response dimension of domestic abuse perpetrator programmes that we tend to see less effectively implemented in the UK. And so that's the kind of multi-agency ecosystem that sits around the domestic abuse perpetrator programme, and that's what allows it to be—that's one of the things that allows it to be effective and accountable.

So, there's some really, really strong—. Well, there's some really promising evidence on the effectiveness of domestic abuse perpetrator programmes. So, things like the Mirabal report showed really promising signs. We've seen a number of other studies that have shown perpetrator programmes reducing violence, reducing abusive behaviours for the intervention group, and increased feelings of safety for victim-survivors. I guess what we're lacking is that gold standard, randomised controlled trial evidence of the effectiveness of domestic abuse perpetrator programmes, and that's one of the reasons that we're doing the current study at the University of Bristol called REPROVIDE. I guess, just because we're lacking that gold standard of evidence doesn't mean that those programmes that have shown really promising evidence through different methods weren't effective; it just means we can't say that they were effective as categorically. So, the absence of that 100 per cent 'yes' doesn't mean that it wasn't.

I think the Respect guidance is absolutely critical to the effectiveness and safety of domestic abuse perpetrator programmes. Like all interventions, it's one of those things where commissioners want it, commissioners look at the cost, and, then, will sometimes say, 'Can we do it cheaper?' and 'cheaper' often means not working with the organisation who works with the victim-survivor and not having integrated partner support. So, it's having integrated partner support, it's an intervention being of sufficient duration, there being a functioning multi-agency ecosystem around it, there being skilled facilitators. You can become a facilitator of a domestic abuse perpetrator programme with very little training, depending on what area of the country you happen to start volunteering or you look for a job. And it's really variable.

Of course, the higher the bar you make for someone being a facilitator of what is a really, really skilled job, which has a fairly high-risk component to it—. The higher the bar, the more expensive it becomes to deliver, and it becomes one of these things that, as a society, how much are we prepared to put in to preventing recidivism? And it's that kind of up-front cost to save money in the future. And it's not just about money—it's about reducing harm and making there be fewer victims in the future.

Thank you. So, I just really want to be clear. Domestic violence intervention project programmes have been going on for 20 years, maybe more. Is what you're saying that there isn't anything that tells us that this is the best model, the most effective model? Is that the situation? Or is there anything we can look at? You mentioned, is it, the Mirabal report. Is there anything we can look at that says, ‘This is what's effective. This is what works. This is what it costs’? Is there anything we can—?

Absolutely. So, Mirabal’s fantastic. They looked at what is really the dominant model of perpetrator programmes in the UK. Also, Hester and Lilley's review of perpetrator programmes and Vigurs's 'What Works' review of perpetrator programmes, and the Respect guidance itself are all extremely helpful in terms of what is most likely to be effective. The reason that we don't have—. You might say, 'Oh, they've been going for 20 years, we know all this, and this is all through expert practitioner analysis and through academic research and a huge amount of qualitative research: how can it be that we don't have a randomised controlled trial that categorically says that this is the way to do it?' Part of the reason for that is methodological and ethical. It's extremely difficult. So, if you think, just quickly, 'Okay, so we're going to do a perpetrator programme and it's going to be a randomised control trial, so x per cent—maybe half, maybe a third of the people—aren't going to get the intervention.' So, okay, your family needs help; you've been identified as a sufficient risk level—'Sorry, mate, you're not going to get anything, but we still want you to complete four sets of questionnaires over the course of a year, minimum, maybe over two years, and we also want your partner or ex-partner to complete questionnaires over the course of a year, maybe two years, and possibly do some interviews.' So, your attrition rates, your drop-out rates, for the control side of the intervention are often really high. Often, there's a lack of matching within the control. It's a really difficult topic to study through this kind of medical approach, and it's something we're trying to do, but I think we also have to, as a society and as people—. We have to think, based on what we know, what is most likely to be effective to tackle this complex problem, and maybe we don't have this standard, but we have a good standard of evidence. To me, that implies an ethical responsibility to do, to the best of our knowledge, something about it.

Thank you.

Okay, but you could compare one type of approach to another. I appreciate you couldn't do no approach, because of the ethical—

You can do A versus B, yes, you can do that, and there have been some studies that have done that, with promising results. Bizarrely, and I think it's a feature of the chronic underfunding of both work with perpetrators and research with perpetrators, we're at a really early stage. Although these interventions have been going for a long time, we're at a really early stage of—. We should be thinking with fine granularity around what facilitates the change: is it this activity or that activity? No. We're trying to figure out does it work or not, and we're using a really catch-all intervention in trying to figure out if that works and, if we can show that, then we will move on and say, 'Okay, let's go a bit more granular.' But we're years behind where we would hope to be by this point.

Okay. Back to you, Jane.

Thank you. That's fascinating. I join with Jenny in this in that I find it incredible that, over a period of time, we haven't got a programme that works. I get we can't do RCTs, but we can do something that says, a year after programme’s finished, two years after, five years after—. May I ask, Chair, if there's anything you feel we could look at that would help us to understand what a successful model looks like? Would it be possible, Chair, just to ask you just to send a link through to the committee clerks or anything you feel would be helpful? Thank you.

So, just moving on, may I ask both of you the question that I asked in the previous panel, which is, this inquiry that we're conducting is called 'a public health approach to gender-based violence'. I wonder if both of you could just explain or just give us your perspective on what you think that looks like for us in the Senedd. What does a public health approach in Wales to gender-based violence look like? I'll give Nate a break, having grilled him, so perhaps maybe ask Rachel to go first. Diolch.

Yes. My understanding of a public health approach is a lot of focus on prevention, so trying to stop something before it actually starts, and looking at the three different layers, which is often, I think, presented as a triangle, although it probably, in a way, shouldn't be. So, the primary level is what can we do at the very low level to try and stop it actually becoming a thing before it starts, or when it's perhaps, in this context, at the very low level, and then the second is how do we respond at the secondary—so, when it is happening, the first response, so when sexual violence has happened, when domestic violence is happening. And then the tertiary is the work after the event with perpetrators.

But, I think I would come back again to Hagemann-White and the diagram that—. Literally, I pulled it up on my phone, in case you haven't seen it. It's really helpful for understanding the response to the different causes. So, in one half, it looks at what are the causes at the different levels, and then what interventions are needed, all the way from the legislative down to the individual risk factors that people have.

So, I think, for example, with bystander, it can work at the bottom end, at the micro and individual, and possibly the meso levels, for example, but it's not a macro thing, but you would think about what might work at the macro, or even a super-macro, if you thought about international obligations around violence against women, for example—the Istanbul convention, those kinds of things. What could we do with law and policy that makes these things happen at the lower level?

So, I think, for me, it's a combination of public health looking really at primary, because we spend—. It isn't just the cost exactly, as Nate said, but that cost of the secondary and the tertiary is so immense that we should be doing the stuff at the primary level.

Thank you so much. Nate, I don't know if you have anything to add to that. Thank you.

No. I mean, I think Rachel has described the public health approach. We can talk about different dimensions of what we would do with people, but I think that's enough, yes.

Thank you very much. Diolch yn fawr iawn, Gadeirydd. Thank you.

Okay, very good. Thank you. Over to Sarah Murphy again.

Thank you very much. I'm going to ask some more questions about bystander interventions, which is what I was asking earlier on about what we mean when we say that. I was going to also mention that you talked about the World Health Organization 'RESPECT Women' report, and that clearly says—the No. 1 thing that it says that all countries must be doing is to advocate to make violence against women unacceptable, and that such violence should be addressed as a public health problem. So, I wanted to ask you how—. I mean, we've just heard from my colleague Jane Dodds about how we go about doing that, but what questions do you think we should be asking Welsh Government about this bystander programme to demonstrate its effectiveness? As I know you've already said, it is difficult to measure, but when you look at the WHO 'RESPECT Women' report, it had a number of areas, and we are seeing work across the globe that is proving to be effective. So, what can we be pointing to when we ask Welsh Government to look at this and to be able to demonstrate that their programmes are going to work?

Who would you like to go first?

Well, why don't you go first and then we'll come to Nathan? Is that all right?

Yes. So, I think this point about, 'Not all bystander programmes are created equal'—I think Nate's picked out a lot of difficulties and issues around the research around perpetrator programmes, and that's the same when we look at all the evidence. If we looked at all the evidence worldwide, there's a significant amount of evidence, but what's really crucial is that the programme that the Welsh Government is going to employ, and the people doing it, have that credibility within the field. So, it's about what is in that programme, how do you show that it's based on best evidence, how do you show a logic model, as opposed to—. Because there are providers now; it's become a popular thing, as you said. Bystander has been everywhere since myself and my team did the initial work for Public Health England back in 2013, 2014; it's become bandied around a lot. So, it's about what is the evidence that makes us think, in Nate's words, that it is going to be the best, that it's going to be effective—what's that based on, and then, how are we going to evaluate that? So, making sure that, within that, we are looking at, is it effective, what measures should we be using for effectiveness, and making sure that it's delivered in a way that is absolutely skilled.

So, I think we're looking at what are the changes from pre to post with people, looking at a variety of measures that have been documented within the literature extensively, thinking about are they the right measures as well—always that bit of thinking—and then producing reports as it goes along. So, I think, if you're following all of those things, if you're working with academics, working with the public sector, working with providers and making sure that it's absolutely relevant to the people doing it—. So, that's the thing: it's got to resonate with the people who are doing it. It's no good giving them things that just are not what their everyday life and experience is; it's not going to work. So, absolutely checking all the time for evaluation, and evaluation is part of the public health approach. So there's the public health approach generally to violence, and violence against women, and then there's the specific public health approach within primary prevention. And that approach requires that it's long enough, it's of sufficient dosage, it's comprehensive, it takes people through a set of psychological changes, that it is evaluated, that it is delivered by really skilled people. Because the danger is that if you don't do it well, you can send people back the other way. So, if they come to you with a question and it's not answered or it's not dealt with in the right way, you can make them more entrenched in what they believed in the first place—yes? So, it is a skilled process, and it takes time and, of course, when something takes time, it takes money.

Thank you very much. And my second and last question is to—. You explained that good bystander interventions are designed to increase the ability, then, of bystanders to make safe and effective interventions, and also function to change those attitudes and beliefs, as you so brilliantly explained earlier on, Nate. You know, when people see others speak out, it can have that positive, wider effect, which is wonderful. But I also just wanted to ask, which I talked about in the previous panel as well, about this accountability, because Dr Burrell, who we met in the previous session, his research, actually, where he sat down and had conversations with men in response to campaigns, is excellent, because it shows that, actually, in some cases, the men wanted to transfer, really, talking about the gender-based violence against women and girls and say, 'Well, what about women who are perpetrators?', and almost slightly shift the accountability. Because, as we've heard, going for the individual and bringing that shame and bringing that blame isn't effective. But there's also this balance to be struck where you don't create this dichotomy of the 'good man', of the 'bad man', of the 'good people', of the 'bad people', of the bystanders and the people who are the perpetrators, I suppose; it's working towards a place where we all take responsibility, right, for what's happening in our society. So, do you have any thoughts about that as well, to make sure that we're always being aware of that accountability, and not letting that narrative shift?

Absolutely. So, the bystander approach is profoundly pragmatic. And while it may be right to say, 'You are in the wrong, you need to take responsibility, you need to do this and that', you're not going to bring anyone on board doing it. And sometimes, we have to mobilise concepts that feel a bit uncomfortable in order to get the right result. So, I think, by approaching people as 'good', by approaching people as potential active bystanders, as people who can speak up, who can do the right thing, that's the way that we're most likely to bring most people on board. And we know that within that room, there are going to be people who are perpetrating, but we want those people to be in a space where they don't feel persecuted, because that's when they're most likely to be able to take on information that contradicts their pre-existing beliefs. And when people feel persecuted, when people feel shame, when people feel fear or discomfort about being put in the box with the bad people, even if they are the 'bad people' or they are acting in harmful ways, they just don't take it on board.

So, I think we're very careful in what we do, when we're thinking about people who cause harm, or if we were doing training, we would say 'the wrongdoer', rather than 'the perpetrator', and recognising that there's a huge spectrum of harmful behaviours, and all of us have grown up in a misogynistic, racist, ableist, thin-supremacist, et cetra, et cetra supremacist society, and it would be ludicrous to think that we didn't carry some of those biases and preconceptions and practices into how we articulate ourselves and be human beings. So, it's not like, 'There are these bad people out there', it's, 'There's this thing that we're all part of, and we all have a role to play in changing it'. And, yes, we deal in quite a focused way with what's called backlash, misogynistic backlash, that Stephen Burrell and others have written about, and I guess that you're taking about. And for us, it's really about trying to connect with what are the feelings and needs that sit beneath, and how do we connect with—it's men and boys that we're talking about—how do we connect with men and boys in ways that connect the shared humanity that we have with them, and, yes, orient it to what world they wish to live in.

Absolutely. Thank you very much. And just to add as well, because I know that there are people at home today who will be watching this who have been victims, and we are obviously primarily focusing today on the perpetrator and bystander interventions. But I also can understand that it must be very difficult for victims who see their perpetrator participating in these groups, not actually being called out. And I know I've had constituents get in touch with me, where they've said, 'My perpetrator is now part of a group', and that can be also, I think, very triggering for victims.

Thanks for raising that. I just want to clarify, when we're talking about groups, we're talking about population-level prevention groups, in workplaces and schools, and that there may be people who have perpetrated within those groups but they're not participating in those groups as perpetrators, and the facilitators wouldn't know that they were perpetrators. And when we're working with perpetrators, many of the same approaches apply around being non-shaming, but with that additional very strong orientation to accountability for what they've done, and really naming that.

Okay. Thank you for that.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair.

I'll bring in Altaf Hussain now, who's going to pursue this a bit further on specific points.

Thank you very much, Chair, and good afternoon to both of you. Dr Fenton, you undertook a study of bystander experience of domestic violence and abuse during the COVID-19 pandemic. Were there are any lessons for the Welsh Government from this research in terms of preventing domestic violence?

Who did the study? Was it both of you, or—?

I was involved—

Rachel.

Rachel. Okay, Rachel.

—with the violence prevention unit. What we learned from that study is that the people who, first of all, answered the survey—. One of the biggest difficulties is how do you actually get people to answer the surveys if they don't know what domestic abuse actually looks like. So, it's a mind-blowingly difficult thing to do. The people that answered the surveys were people who already had knowledge, so they were people who'd already done training at some point during the last five years, and they were people who were already community minded. But the very fact that they responded to the call for the survey meant that they understood what domestic violence and abuse was. So, you're already picking a biased population.

What I think was really interesting about that was that it confirmed that theory of change about the different processes—so, the more community minded you are, the more likely you are to intervene. The more you feel confident that you have a skill set—even if you actually don't, it's about feeling confident—the more likely you are to try to do something. And one of the things that really struck me about that was that the people that had intervened were having doubts about had they done the right thing; it was consuming a lot of their emotional energy. You know, 'I wasn't sure. I did this. I knew I needed to do something. I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do'. So, one of the things that is really key to these bystander interventions that are done properly is that a lot of time is spent on their skills training. So, it's building a bank of strategies and tools that can be used, and spending a good couple of hours really thinking about different scenarios and what you could do and say in different situations. And what's really key about that is not just that it gives you the skills; it gives you the confidence and it's almost the validation from the facilitators or the rest of the group that those are the right skills to be able to have. So, we train a lot of people, for example, who go through the first three stages, which is that they notice it in the first place—which is half the battle—they feel responsible, they feel motivated, but they get to that point where they don't know what to do. And most of us are in that position a lot. We're like, 'Oh, but I don't know what to do so I'll leave it to somebody else who is better equipped'. So, we saw that with the study as well. It really reaffirmed to us that those people who did have some confidence—maybe not a lot of confidence—were able to do something. It really confirmed, I think, the theory of change for us.

And I think it's about how we get those people who wouldn't have noticed it in the first place, because the noticing and the knowledge element of bystander is the very first thing. The analogy I always use is if we live in a society where dropping litter on the floor is the norm—you don't bat an eyelid if you're walking down the street and people are throwing litter; it doesn't even occur to you—so, if we live in a society where sexism, sexist banter, sexual violence, sexual harassment is the norm, we don't even notice it. And we might say the same about race and racism. If you don't know what the nuanced forms of it look like, then you can't notice it. And so, that noticing element, it's—. We might all know what something really serious looks like, and what we might not all recognise in a workplace is that nuanced sexism, gender inequality, and out on the street what sexual harassment actually is.

Thank you, Dr Fenton. And can you outline the case for legislating to ensure schools, colleges and universities respond to and prevent gender-based violence, specifically implementing evidence-led bystander interventions such as the Intervention Initiative?

I'm not entirely sure I get the whole question, because there was a little bit of sound. Sorry.

I was asking can you outline the case for legislating to ensure schools, colleges and universities respond to and prevent gender-based violence, specifically implementing evidence-led bystander interventions, such as the Intervention Initiative.

I think there's a case, because everything that I've seen, perhaps over the last decade, since we really started talking about universities and this issue—. It wasn’t that there wasn’t an issue; it was that it started to come to light, and, in the States, it had come to light 30 years beforehand, but we weren’t really looking at it. It came to light with some of the first studies about prevalence and what women were experiencing at universities, and what we’ve seen is a response at the policy level. So, we’ve seen, after the publication of the Intervention Initiative, which was the work that we did out of the University of the West of England, we saw Government writing to all vice-chancellors asking them to take up the programme. We then saw what is now the Office for Students but then was HEFCE putting millions of pounds into universities with match funding, to get them to roll out the policy and the reporting and the prevention level.

So, at the prevention level, it was specifically bystander intervention, and it was specifically the Public Health England model that we had created, and very small numbers of universities have actually tackled that agenda. So, we’ve just published—it should be online at Durham; I don’t think it’s online yet at Exeter, but there is a summary out there—. We did a study with some academics at Durham and at the University of Central Lancashire, and we asked people who work in the universities what’s actually been done and where are you. So, four, five years after the Universities UK report that said all these things, some universities had done nothing at all—nothing. And that was about 11 per cent of our respondents. Some were in the very first stages; they might have had a task and finish group, but they hadn’t really done very much. Where they had done the bystander and they’d done the prevention, they changed it. So, they’d either watered it down, bringing in loads of other topics, or they had sort of done it so it is an hour intervention, and it wasn’t being put within the curriculum, so it was based on volunteers. So, therefore, who do you get when you do a volunteer violence against women programme? You get women, you get survivors, and you get the people who don’t need to be there. Getting the people who need to be there is one of the fundamental problems. And the Women and Equalities Committee looked at it, and looked at it several times, and equally said, ‘We need some kind of accountability’. We also know that the EHRC is a terrible enforcer as well, so it’s about where is the accountability for universities for not having some basic things in place.

The difference is that, in the US, for example, there is primary legislation that requires federally funded universities to have in place bystander programmes and a whole other set of things like data collection, so we know what’s actually going on, and to have reporting in place, and to have a proper office that deals with these complaints and all these kinds of things. So, what we see is an absolutely ad hoc response, or no response, from English universities. I would say UK universities, because I believe it’s pretty much the same. And in this study that we did, we talked to all these staff and we kind of got a consensus that most people felt that, without some form of legislation, it was never going to happen, because it’s never enough on anybody’s agenda, or they don’t want to spend the money on it.

Thank you very much. My last question is about sport. Sport is seen as a particularly important space for work to prevent violence against women. What part can bystander intervention play in sports, particularly football and rugby? And what role, if any, can sport stars and sports commentators play in helping to end gender-based violence and domestic abuse? We know that the Show Racism the Red Card campaign has been very successful in tackling hate crime on and off the pitch. Could a similar campaign work to tackle misogyny, sexism and violence against women and girls? Thank you.

Shall I go on this one?

Yes, Nathan.

So, yes, we absolutely agree that sport has this kind of—. It's a challenge and an opportunity. It's a challenge because we know about the locker room cultures and the harmful behaviours that go on in and around sport. And it's a huge opportunity because of the role that sports players play as leaders, coaches, role models—not exclusively, but particularly, for men and boys in Welsh and English and Scottish culture.

We have done bystander work in football and sport, and we are currently working in football and sport. Would a Show Racism the Red Card type approach work? I think, absolutely. So, there are two approaches. You have your deeper intervention training, where you work with coaches, you work with players, you work, possibly, with members of the club, doing the stuff around how to skilfully intervene. It's all of the stuff that Rachel has talked about around the noticing. That's longer training. It takes longer to do, and it's necessary.

Show Racism the Red Card is more like your public social norms campaign—so, more like SafeToSay in Wales. What we know from the evidence is that using multiple methods is really important to reinforce the message. So, I think that we would say, yes, having some kind of big public campaign, reinforced through video, social media, et cetera, which reinforces the message that's coming through the training—.

In terms of how to make that happen, many of the challenges that Rachel just spoke about in terms of getting this off the ground in schools and universities and workplaces remain within football and sport. One of the things that we thought about before is that this is health and safety training. This should be a key part of a requirement to volunteer at this club, to play at this club. And it could be part of the corporate social responsibility. We just worked with a huge—. We did a bystander programme with an office of the police and crime commissioner—so, Rachel just touched on this—and we worked with a large company. A large manufacturing company signed up to the training. They sent their factory floor workforce on it, and it was really unusual because it was almost exclusively men on that training, and it was so powerful. They wouldn't have signed up voluntarily, but was there resistance? No, it was a really amazing group. Guys reflecting in the closing go-round of, like, 'Yes, I can really see how I'll take this into speaking to my mates. This has changed the way that I'm going to—. I've got a young son and a daughter, and I'm going to stop telling my son to "man up"—this has really made me think about it.' So, I think it's really how we—. I think, as Rachel said, it needs to be top-down and bottom-up, and then we do have to mandate it in some way to get people in the room, because, yes, those are the people we need to be making this change.

We've ran out of time, but I was just wondering if we could extend it for five or 10 minutes max, if that's okay with you, Nathan, as well as Rachel. Fine. Excellent. You wanted to say something, and then I'm going to bring in Sioned Williams.

Yes, just on football and sport, we have done a proper evaluation, a controlled evaluation, working with a football club, and controlling with another football club, and we've seen really significant results. What we found, working with those people, was a real—. We worked with a club to develop the programme, and what we found within that club was a good starting point, because they're all people who want to work in the community. But also, there were little things going on within football and sport that they weren't even aware of, that they had never really thought of in that way, and we saw massive shifts in their attitudes and their beliefs and their bystander behaviours from pre to post, and again at follow up. So, there is definite evidence that it can work.

Again, at the moment, we're working with a charity called Healthy Stadia and Merseyside violence reduction unit, who are funding them to deliver our intervention across that area with grass-roots and bigger clubs. And again, you see it's that thing about—. It's because Merseyside have wanted to do something, and it's not coming from a place of, 'Everybody should be doing it'. It's all individual based, which is an issue.

What I would really like to see, as the Welsh Government goes forward with its bystander programmes, is real leverage and, I guess, real comms and campaigning that makes corporates and really influential places like football clubs and rugby clubs, particularly in Wales, want to get on board, where they start to be perceived as being not on board if they're not doing it. And then you can have individual players, who are such role models for young men, coming out with these messages. I think it would be really, really powerful. But it can't always come bottom-up. It's not that it has to be mandatory, but it has got to be this big thing that we launch in Wales that makes everybody want to buy into it. And I think it's getting those sports clubs on board, because they work, not only at the public perception level, as role models and players, but also the trusts that go alongside them outreach to probably hundreds of thousands of young people in football training, coaching at the lower level, so reaching those people is going to be so important.

Thank you. Sioned Williams.

Thank you, Chair. You've mentioned some examples of good practice in terms of preventing violence against women and girls in other parts of the world. That example from what's happening in terms of the university sector in the US was interesting. Do you have any other examples, perhaps after what you've just mentioned in terms of sports clubs? Are there any international examples in terms of the corporate sector, in terms of the public sector, in terms of sectors such as the sports sector that you could share with us?

Did you want to go first, Rachel?

I can. I'm just trying to rack my brains now about sports. I might have to—

You can write to us if you need to.

I might need to write to you. So, the evidence base particularly is the US, I would say, almost exclusively—not exclusively, but pretty much. In this country, there has been nothing done with professional athletes. I think our Football Onside programme is the first evaluation—it's actually the first sports programme that's been done to any rigour. There are some examples in the US, but they tend, again, to be with campuses. So, most of the body of research is with the universities in the US, partly because they're a captive audience. And there are examples of athletes and athlete programmes done in the US, and I think there are also mentors in violence prevention, but I can't remember the standard to which the evidence is on that—I would have to write to you; Nate might know better than I do.

Yes, MVP—mentors in violence prevention—they do work with coaches. It's quite a long programme, like a short intervention. And they have shown increases in bystander efficacy—so, whether people feel like they have the confidence and skills to intervene—and in attitudes and beliefs. But, yes, as Rachel said, things like—. The ones that have shown reductions in victimisation and perpetration, like Green Dot, although they do work in sport, the studies that I'm aware of were with college students—not specifically within sports teams.

Okay. Is Sioned frozen? Sioned, are you still with us? I'm not sure that we've got the connection. While we're waiting for Sioned to return—. Oh, here you are. Okay. Sioned, are you able to hear us, because, at the moment, certainly your picture is frozen?

[Inaudible.]—what does the Welsh Government need to do, therefore, to address gendered violence and to prevent gendered violence, and to protect the human rights of women and girls? Because I've heard a lot of talk about 'ad hoc' during these sessions; so, legislation, regulations, specific sectors, what are your thoughts on this?

Thank you. I think it comes back to the systems approach and what can be done. But I think it's about developing a strategy and doing that together with experts in different fields to put that approach together. So, I think what's happening is ad hoc, generally, but it doesn't need to be ad hoc, and I don't think that the different interventions at different levels are actually ad hoc. I think, if they're done with an entire outcome in mind, I think doing what you're doing, which is to collect the best evidence and putting that together, and mapping that against a strategy that is evidenced—so, mapping it maybe against Hagemann-White, for example—and making sure that it's every level. Because—and we've said this already—it's no good doing things with children if we're not doing stuff with the messages they get elsewhere, and I think that's what's really important. So, it comes down to funding, of course—it always does—and it comes down to, I think, being rigorous in the evidence, and not being tempted by what feels good. I think there's a lot of tendency to want to do things because they seem right, or they're feel-good approaches, but really question—as you are doing, actually—what is that evidence, and then working with people who have got a really, really good understanding, and who can inform the wider strategy, but looking at it as a whole and what can you do at each level, systematically really, I think, so that it's not ad hoc, if that makes sense.

Did you want to add anything, Nathan?

I think, as Rachel said, it's the whole-system approach. I guess the only thing to add is just to remind ourselves, or just to bear in mind that poverty is one of the highest risk factors for both perpetration and victimisation, and that we can't do gender-based violence in a vacuum. And often, when we talk about taking an intersectional approach to gender-based violence, we talk about various axes of difference, and that's really, really crucial to do, but we can't miss class and poverty off that. And it's impossible to do a holistic whole-system approach when there's no housing, and I know it's difficult to do, but there's not the housing to refer people out to, and it's all of that. So, just to add that in, really.

Thank you. Sioned, did you have any other questions?

Thank you. Just to say 'amen' to that last point.

Thank you. I just wanted to wrap up a couple of quick things. You were referring to HEFCE, which is the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Is that right?

Yes.

Because, obviously, HEFCE and HEFCW are rather similar. So, has HEFCW not taken any initiative on this?

I do not know the answer to that.

Fine.

This was before it became the Office for Students as well, so I don't know if HEFCW is still a HEFCW, or whether that changed as well. I am not aware of anything—

In Wales.

—in Wales. I know, certainly, we asked in the survey that I talked about with Durham, we asked and we got respondents from Wales, from Welsh universities, for sure. So, I'm pretty sure that there's nothing different or even whether that was done with HEFCW.

Okay. All right. We can look into that. The other thing is, when we're trying to get corporate Britain to take some responsibility for this, I'm just wondering what the role of magistrates and judges was when they have violence of a community nature coming in front of them—

That's a good point.

—when any of their judgments are saying, actually, x, y, z events that happened after this match indicate that there's a corporate responsibility here. There will be other examples that I can't think of at the moment, but you can see that they get the bits of society that end up in court, having to account for their offending behaviour. But there's a role not just to deal with the individual, but also to try and deal with the wider issues that have led to that situation.

Yes, that's a really good point, actually, about where there is—. I hadn't thought about that. That would be something to explore, actually, about what kind of training and what could be done in that.

Because they must see patterns of behaviour.

Yes, absolutely. I think that looking at corporate responsibility, social responsibility is something that hasn't been done, actually. I'm not aware—. I can't say that I've specifically looked. I've just suddenly realised that when corporates get involved, they only do it if they're getting public funds, and that has to be wrong. I'm thinking about what the Welsh Government is going to be doing about how we can make sure that there is responsibility, and that they aren't getting things for free that they shouldn't be, or that they can contribute to the wider society. I think it's something worth pursuing, actually, whether there is either training for, like you said, magistrates to go on, or whether there is some kind of training for people who do those behaviours that come up, when they do come before the courts, before they become massive perpetrators in terms of domestic violence. There might be something there about referring people on as part of their community time, or whatever it is—those sentences about community hours. It could be a really interesting thought.

I'll leave it with you then. [Laughter.] Very good. Thank you very much for your time. We will, of course, send you a transcript of your contributions, and if there's anything that we've captured incorrectly, obviously, please view that as the opportunity to correct the record. And we thank you very much indeed for sharing your expertise and the exciting programmes that you're involved in. Thank you very much.

You're welcome. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

We have several papers to note—five papers to note. Are Members content to note these papers? Fine. Thank you.

Under Standing Order 17.42, I now recommend that we exclude the public for the remainder of the meeting. Is there any objection? I see no objection.