Chaired by Natalie Sands of NEC Digital Studio, this seminar from the Modernising Criminal Justice conference brought together lived experience, frontline practice and specialist expertise to examine how technology could help fix a fragmented response to violence against women and girls (VAWG) - an umbrella term covering domestic abuse, sexual violence, stalking and coercive control, among others.
Natalie opened with the scale of the problem: over two million women experience domestic abuse every year in England and Wales, against a new cross-government strategy aiming to halve VAWG within a decade. She said NEC has spent the past year working with experts across policing, local authorities and specialist services to map the system's failure points, describing a landscape of disconnected agencies, repeated retelling of trauma, and support that varies significantly depending on where someone
lives.
Kerry, who runs Surrey's survivor network DA Seen, grounded the discussion in her own experience. She described a moment when police responding to a non-fatal strangulation incident focused entirely on her husband's suicide threats, leaving her - despite visible injuries - without a statement taken or a referral made. That single failure, she said, set off a 15-year chain of events. Her central argument was that each agency - police, health, social care, family and criminal courts - operates as its own system, understanding its own processes but not each other's, leaving survivors to join the dots themselves. She compared this to the human body: distinct systems that only function when they communicate, and which put the whole body at risk when they don't.
Michelle Blunsom, who leads Surrey's domestic abuse partnership alongside East Surrey's outreach service, linked this to how services are commissioned and structured, arguing many were founded in an earlier era not built around today's access to data and technology. Dan Ryan, from SafeLives, described findings from case reviews across 52 local areas: on average, 33 missed opportunities to support a family before a domestic homicide review is triggered, driven largely by a lack of multi-agency buy-in rather than any single point of failure. Carl Hall, from Interventions Alliance, which delivers perpetrator programmes, identified data fragmentation as the single biggest obstacle - agencies often hold pieces of the same picture but can't, or won't, connect them, partly from genuine GDPR concern and partly from institutional caution.
On what "good" involvement of lived experience looks like, Kerry was direct: it isn't a resource to be extracted. She described survivors being asked to open up their trauma for organisations to draw from, with little thought for what's offered in return - and argued genuine involvement requires clear communication about how input will be used, fair compensation for time and expertise, and real influence over decisions, not just consultation. Michelle described how Surrey's approach shifted from being asked to supply survivors for consultation, to a self-organised group setting its own agenda, which has since shaped police domestic abuse and rape policies directly.
Turning to technology's role, Kerry argued that AI, used carefully, could help identify patterns of risk and summarise complex case histories, so that important information follows the person rather than the postcode - without replacing professional judgement or exposing personal data unnecessarily. Michelle raised a growing concern about AI-generated abuse content, including manipulated images and voice notes used in coercive control, and questioned whether frontline officers currently have the tools to identify this in real time. Carl and Dan both underlined that any new technology must be piloted properly and built with survivors from the outset, rather than reinventing approaches that already exist in pockets of good practice.
Asked for one change each panellist would make, answers converged on a shared theme: fixing data fragmentation between agencies (Carl), genuine cross-organisational collaboration without institutional ego (Michelle), removing the burden of coordination from survivors themselves (Kerry), and better judicial and magistrate training on the realities of domestic abuse (Dan).