Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): I welcome, from the Executive Office (TEO), Geraldine Fee, director of the ending violence against women and girls division; Ryan Somerville, head of policy and research; and Fionnuala French, head of community investment. Thank you for giving us your briefing in advance of the meeting. Would you like to make some opening remarks?

Ms Geraldine Fee (The Executive Office): Thank you for the invitation to update the Committee on the ending violence against women and girls (EVAWG) strategic framework. We are pleased to have the opportunity to provide you with an update on the current delivery, future plans and some of the challenges we are working to address. As you know, the EVAWG strategic framework is a Programme for Government (PFG) commitment, which reflects the priority given to tackling violence against women and girls as a key societal issue. It sets out a coordinated approach to prevention and ensures alignment with wider objectives and cross-sector collaboration. It is imperative that women and girls feel safe and are safe wherever they live, work or socialise. Too many women have lost their life to violence here, which is a stark reminder of why the work matters. To highlight some of the shocking statistics, the 2024 young life and times (YLT) survey showed that 26% of the females surveyed reported experiencing online violence; 23% reported experiencing psychological violence; and 17% reported experiencing sexual violence within the last year.

The principles of the strategic framework have been central to the implementation of the first delivery plan, which has initiated a series of actions to begin delivering on the framework's outcomes. Data on the impact of the first year is still coming in, but we know that the programme has been well received by stakeholders, including councils, community groups and other Departments.

The feedback from the first delivery plan has been overwhelmingly positive, with high demand for grassroots funding and strong engagement across the sectors. There has been a positive effect on awareness raising and the ability to respond. The approach has been key to the positive changes we have witnessed since the strategic framework began, including the delivery of the local change fund, which is an advanced partnership with local councils. The local change fund is progressing across all council areas, with early activity focused on mobilisation and the commencement of local delivery. The early feedback, based on the results up until 30 September 2025, is strongly positive, with over 86% of participants who were surveyed reporting increasing awareness of violence against women and girls. Some 86% reported an improved understanding of the root causes, and 80% reported increased confidence in how they can help.

The delivery of the regional change fund has been driven through eight key regional, community and voluntary sector organisations that have EVAWG expertise, and they have enabled resources and programmes to be developed and delivered across schools, workplaces and communities. For example, student nurses are now undertaking embedded pre-employment learning as part of their degree due to a collaboration between the Women's Aid Federation Northern Ireland (WAFNI) Queen's University and the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). The feedback on the programmes to date shows that 98% of respondents surveyed report an increased knowledge of violence against women and girls; 96% report a better understanding of what a healthy relationship looks like; and 90% report increased confidence in what they can do to help tackle violence against women and girls.

The Power to Change campaign, which we developed in partnership with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the PSNI, aims to target the harmful attitudes and behaviours of men and boys, and it has achieved over 10 million impressions across social media platforms. The Power to Change toolkit training has been delivered to over 500 teachers and safeguarding officers. The Education Authority's EVAWG youth panels provided input into the campaign and, through that process, developed a board game called "Raise Your Game" to encourage discussion about the challenges and understanding of EVAWG for young people.

The development of phase 2 of the campaign is under way, and it will target a younger male demographic and tackle misogyny. The Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes coercive control campaign and training initiative has been piloted, and the early results are positive. After taking on board the learning from the pilot, the campaign is still being prepared for a region-wide launch and roll-out. Sectoral groups have been formed in tertiary education, workplaces and socialising environments, as well as the healthy relationships forum in Education, and we are working towards developing action plans.

Work has begun on progressing community-led reviews, including a collaboration with DAERA to establish a review of the needs of women in rural communities. To ensure that it is guided by community experts, the review is being led by the Rural Community Network (RCN) and the Northern Ireland Rural Women's Network (NIRWN).

In addition, work is progressing on the first stage of the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) HR training portfolio, beginning with an e-learning module to raise awareness of EVAWG, alongside an introduction to the bystander initiative. That will complement existing and future training materials.

That is just a snapshot of some of the key achievements to date, but much remains to be done. Collaboration is vital, and mainstreaming the work across all areas of policy and practice is equally important in order to embed a consistent, preventative approach to tackling violence, abuse and harm targeted at women and girls. We thank everyone for their input to achievements to date.

Delivering across the framework's six outcomes is fundamental, and we continue to work on how they are being monitored and evaluated. We have reporting systems in place at local and regional levels, and we continue to work with Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) colleagues to enable us to provide that data in a consistent manner for the strategic framework as a whole so that we can see how our work is effecting change at a societal level.

The forthcoming delivery plan for 2026-28 will build on momentum and progress established through the first delivery plan, ensuring continuity, consolidating good practice and allowing for the scaling of initiatives that have proven effective. By deepening and expanding our existing efforts, the second plan will strengthen long-term outcomes, reinforce community trust and demonstrate sustained commitment. Full details of all the key actions in the next delivery plan will be available once it has been approved by the Executive. A formal launch is then expected, with delivery commencing from 1 April.

In addition to the actions in the delivery plan, other key initiatives that contribute to the achievement of the framework's strategic objectives continue to be advanced by other Departments and agencies with support from TEO. The collaborations and joined-up approaches catalysed by the framework and delivery plan are strengthening the delivery of relevant strategies. Delivery of those strategies is monitored by Departments within their own structures and reported on through the strategic framework's oversight board and the Executive so that they can get an end-to-end view of the breadth of the work across the Civil Service.

The Committee for the Executive Office plays a critical role in providing feedback to progress the delivery of the strategic framework, and we are happy to answer any questions that you may have today.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): Thank you very much for your introductory remarks.

When the First Minister and deputy First Minister were here, I asked them about the research into men and boys' attitudes and behaviours relating to violence against women and girls, and they indicated that that research had been commissioned. Can you provide us with an update on that?

Ms Fee: I will give you a broad timeline update, and then I will bring in Ryan, who has seen the first report. We have received the first report. Some further work is being done in relation to it, but it is fair to say that it is proving to be very fruitful already, because it is the first study in the jurisdiction of the attitudes of men and boys.

Ryan, do you have any more detail on that?

Mr Ryan Somerville (The Executive Office): The research is targeted at 16-to-24-year-olds, and it is looking at attitudes and using that evidence base to inform the future programme. There is a series of literature reviews to see what evidence is out there already. That was built on with qualitative and quantitative research methods. There are a number of reports, and the research team at Queen's University is finalising those reports and the recommendations, which will be fed into future delivery. With the early recommendations received so far, there is an opportunity to inform the next bystander Power to Change campaign. Therefore, we can already see how the report will be used in that way.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): That is good. Thank you very much for that. I was going to come on to the Power to Change campaign around active bystanders. Linking those two together, are you targeting some of the work from the framework at sports clubs where there are men, school groups etc? To what degree are you trying to drill down to identify your core target audience for those messages?

Ms Fee: There are two levels of work. There is general awareness raising across the population. We have identified that there is a basic lack of awareness of what violence against women and girls looks like, particularly around areas such as coercive control. A recent young life and times (YLT) study showed that only 16% of 16-year-olds would recognise coercive control in their life. We are bringing forward another campaign under Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, and that will be region-wide, but we will target our training support in that to front-line workers, so that they can help people through the toolkit.

Equally, there is the Power to Change campaign, which was targeted mainly at men and boys. It was to draw awareness to what can commonly be styled as "banter" and to make people aware of the negative effects that that can have. We have moved through phase 1 of that, and we have now developed phase 2, which has also been informed by focus groups in conjunction with young people through the Education Authority. That will help us to target the messages towards the age groups that we are looking at. We know, for example, from the results of the first phase of the Power to Change campaign that the responses on TikTok were mainly from men aged 18 to 35 and the YouTube shorts were a slightly older age group. Therefore, we know, to date, how that reach has worked. Further development work is ongoing on phase 2. Then we will look again at phase 3 of that campaign.

While some of the messaging is targeted towards men and boys, we cannot do that work without the support and help of men and boys. We need to make everyone aware of what a healthy relationship looks like and what acceptable standards of behaviour are and to bring men in as our allies. That was a key focus in the Power to Change campaign, where we were encouraging men who maybe saw some behaviour that was not helpful to engage with their friends, because men need to be our allies in the work.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): I have a final question on vulnerable women: I am talking about sex workers, those in the trans community or women from ethnic minority backgrounds, who may have a mistrust, for one reason or another, of people in positions of authority. How is support provided to those women, who are probably most marginalised?

Ms Fee: I have a few points to make at the outset on that. As you know, it was part of the mandate from the Assembly and then the Executive that the work should be intersectional. We always recognised that there were women who were exposed to greater risk and faced bigger barriers to seeking help. We then decided on an approach whereby we would commission some deep-dive work in relation to what their needs were and that would be through a process of community-led reviews.

In the first delivery plan, we set out the intention of where we would put our focus in the first instance. The first community-led review is moving forward on rural women, as I said. However, we also recognise that there are specific needs in relation to the migrant community, and we are doing some preliminary work in scoping that review. We hope that that review will move forward this year.

We had identified a list of migrant women, rural women, older women and deaf and disabled women. It is not exhaustive, but we had to prioritise in some way. As and when other issues come up, we will revisit that prioritisation and consider what we need to do. I should also say that, through the money that is brought forward through the regional change fund and local change fund, work is ongoing with particular groups. In particular, a project is being brought forward by Barnardo's in relation to young asylum seekers and unaccompanied refugees in order to enable them to have a broader awareness of violence against women and girls and to give them the tools to address it. Therefore, we have a broader, watching brief on some of the issues, while we are taking immediate action in relation to others.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): Thank you. I have just thought of another point to add to that. I was at a meeting last week with a group, the Happy Women's Group, which is made up of asylum seekers and refugees. We put up a social media post, and the trolling and nastiness that followed from trying to support a group of ethnic minority women was unbelievable.

One of the issues that we talked about was female genital mutilation: that is a form of violence against girls. It is the thin edge of the wedge when it comes to violence against girls. Are you covering that work through the framework?

Ms Fee: Not directly. The intention of the framework is that we do not displace policy or funding remits elsewhere but set an overall strategic direction. Within that, through the programme board and the oversight board, we look to set priorities, drive forward work and act as a catalyst with the Departments responsible for that work. The lead on that is the Department of Health (DOH) and the Department of Justice. Certainly, it came up as a significant issue in the co-design process. We anticipate that it will be looked at as part of the community-led review, because, clearly, it is a need that requires action in that context.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): Thank you very much.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Geraldine, you spoke about a community-led review: will you expand on that? Who are your community partners? Are they the people who helped to write the initial report?

Ms Fee: It will vary according to the community-led review. On stakeholders more generally, we have an insights and reference network, which includes the organisations that were involved in the co-design process and others that we have engaged with as we have moved to implementation, such as councils and wider organisations. That is the broad base against which we operate.

For a community-led review, we will look to the leading organisations in a sector. We have worked with DAERA. The community-led review for rural women is being led, as I said, by the Rural Community Network and the Northern Ireland Rural Women's Network. They are doing grounding research. We will liaise with them as that moves forward. The ethos underpinning the strategic framework is that, as you move forward, you are informed by the lived experience of those affected, because policy made in the absence of information from those whose needs you are trying to meet will fail. It is not a one-size-fits-all approach, but the intention is to seek delivery partners in the sector who are informed and have lived experience.

Ryan, is there anything that you want to add?

Mr Somerville: What you said about how we approached the first one is right: those two groups are best placed in that sector and community to get the lived experience through. They have 30 focus groups comprising women and girls and some young men and boys from rural communities, because they are best placed. There are also researchers in place to help those engagement sessions. How the model works will help to inform the other reviews. Getting the lived experience from groups that work with those women day in, day out seems to be working so far as a methodology for the rest of them.

Ms Ní Chuilín: That is great for rural communities. However, I am concerned about working-class areas. Some of the groups do excellent work, but they are very regional. How do you get right down to local youth clubs? I am not talking about the big youth service providers; I am talking about local youth clubs and sports clubs?

Ms Fee: I will say a bit about that, and then I will bring in Fin, who can give some examples of how we collaborate through the local change fund. It is not about doing everything with the big, regional providers, but they have a role.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Absolutely.

Ms Fee: The local change fund was designed to ensure that we worked with grassroots community organisations. I think that 164 projects have been rolled out through that. As we move forward, the intention is to co-opt some of their experience into the community-led reviews. It is hard for us to say in the abstract whom exactly we will need in one particular project. The closer we get to the grassroots and the more we link in with grassroots voluntary organisations, the better our evidence base will be.

Fin, do you want to say something about the range of people whom we work with?

Ms Fionnuala French (The Executive Office): Yes. The local groups are part of the insights and reference network, so they will be communicated with whenever a community-led review is coming up and if there is applicable subject matter. As Geraldine said, there are 164 groups, and that is across all council areas. There is a wide variety from sports clubs and faith organisations to some associated with schools, community organisations and small youth clubs. The idea was that the grant scheme would have three tiers. The first tier —.

Ms Ní Chuilín: I am sorry to interrupt you, Fin. Would the first contact be with the development officer in their local council to go out to the groups? Who are the insights and reference network?

Ms French: The insights and reference network is held by TEO.

Ms Fee: It is a contact database that we use.

Ms Ní Chuilín: OK.

Ms Fee: We use that as a two-way tool for engagement. We have already put out one e-zine to share information. We use that to disseminate information. If we were, say, putting out a call for evidence or a request to partake in a community-led review, we would use that as our first vehicle. That would not necessarily be the only way that we would do that.

Ms Ní Chuilín: That is fine. The experience that I have had in north Belfast has been positive, with council officials going out to work with local groups such as sports groups and youth groups, but I am not convinced that that would be the experience across the board. If you are dependent on a council as the conduit for someone to go out to talk to the groups, you might get a council that is not as proactive.

Ms Fee: It is a bit of both. Our role is to coordinate, stimulate and direct, and that is central. We rely heavily on the councils as our delivery partners, because they have the local networks. Fin meets the councils regularly. If it became apparent to us that we were not getting much input in a particular council area, that is the point at which we would raise that with the council. We would also step in. However, we have a wider range of networks than through the councils. The councils have a very good network, but, if something seemed to be stalling or was not providing us with the input that we needed, we would act in those circumstances.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Is TEO responsible for the Power to Change toolkit, or is it the Department of Justice?

Ms Fee: It is a collaboration. It is the PSNI, DOJ and us but heavily informed by the youth panels from the Education Authority. We thought that the questions were nicely phrased, but, when the young people saw them, they thought that they did not pass muster. It is very much a collaboration.

Ms Ní Chuilín: The feedback that I got was not negative, but it was that some of the questions that they were asked were not written by young people because a young person would put it differently to try to get at experiences. You mentioned TikTok, and there is Snapchat. When it comes to reaching out with adverts and things such as that, will social media be factored in?

Ms Fee: That is being factored in. The segmentation of social media and how we reach the correct demographics is being factored in.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Great.

Ms Fee: I am surprised to hear what you said about the Power to Change, and we will follow that up. We understood that the input from young people through the youth panels had influenced the wording of the questions. If there are gaps in that, particularly as we move to phase 2, we will want to follow that up.

Ms Ní Chuilín: The way that it was described to me was that the questions were there but the people in the youth sector who were asking them put them into more comfortable words. I wonder whether it is a class issue.

Ms Fee: That is certainly something that we have to look at.

Ms Ní Chuilín: Would you look at it?

Ms Fee: Yes, definitely.

Ms Ní Chuilín: I know that one size does not fit all. It is about reviewing the learning, and you are open to that. The programme really needs to work, given the number of women who have died but also the number of young women who are trapped in coercive relationships. It is frightening.

Ms Murphy: Thank you, folks, for coming in.

Following on from Carál's questions, I will stay on the point about councils and the local change fund in particular. Has TEO received any feedback from councils or recipients that delivered grassroots projects?

Ms Fee: I will bring in Fin, because it is her area of work. Yes, we have received feedback, and we are monitoring it as we go along. We have received some data but not all of it. We have kept the programme under review. We were aware of some issues that arose because of the different approaches taken by councils. For example, a council may have allowed something to be paid for under an application to the change fund, but others would not. We refined the process where it crossed over. We have tried to be responsive to the feedback on how the scheme was administered. We are still waiting for the data on how successful the schemes have been; we have data up to 30 September.

On top of that, Fin has regular meetings with each of the councils, and she is doing that next week. One of the things that worked very successfully was a shared learning event that we held last June, where we brought all the councils and regional providers together. The cross-fertilisation of ideas that came from the event was very positive. We were supposed to have an event before Christmas, but, for a variety of reasons, it has been postponed. However, it is our intention to have another event before the beginning of the summer. We are taking a dual approach of having information-sharing between the councils as well as our close liaison with them.

Ms French: As part of the momentum funding up to the end of March, we have asked the councils to hold shared learning and showcase events in each area for the local change fund projects. That is to enable more awareness of the kinds of projects that community groups can run in order to expand the projects and to increase collaboration among the community organisations on addressing the issue. TEO representatives are attending the shared learning events and engaging directly with the community through them. They are also hearing the feedback that comes back and forth between the communities and the councils. We have also engaged directly with some of the larger community groups that may have a project in a number of different council areas to see that in practice.

Ms Murphy: In that cross-council approach, is there a specific vehicle for sharing best practice? Is it shared through TEO and then disseminated down to each council, or are councils actively talking to each other in that space?

Ms Fee: Again, it is a bit of both. The shared learning event is the main vehicle at this point. However, if we were aware that one council was doing something that another one would benefit from, because they are on the same path, we would put them in contact. We have observed a great willingness from councils to share the learning, and we want to avoid any reinvention of the wheel. There will be commonalities in a lot of what the councils do, albeit tailored to local interests and needs; within that, we want to make sure that the basics are shared.

Ms French: There has already been a significant amount of sharing of resources between councils. The shared learning event in June that Geraldine referenced was a great opportunity for council staff to meet each other. A lot of the staff know each other anyway, but it was about knowing who was working specifically on EVAWG, because it was a new area. The councils showcased the resources that they had developed with the momentum funding in the first round, and those have since been shared among the councils so that they can learn from them and reuse and tailor them to their use. As Geraldine said, the willingness to do that and to share resources between councils has been fantastic.

Ms Murphy: Very good. Chair, I have one more question.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): No problem. Go ahead, please.

Ms Murphy: I am delighted that there will be ongoing work with DAERA, the RCN and NIRWN on the community-led review. I also sit on the AERA Committee. DAERA is developing a rural policy framework. Has EVAWG, within TEO, fed into that framework to date?

Ms Fee: Not in this iteration of that, but we collaborate closely with DAERA, so I am confident that DAERA officials take EVAWG issues into account. When we started this work, we were surprised at how many touchpoints we had with DAERA in it. DAERA has been particularly collaborative, so I am confident that EVAWG will be taken account of in that context.

Mr Somerville: I agree. DAERA was involved as well when we approached the two groups on what the outcomes were meant to be and the specification. It was heavily involved from the start. It made us aware of that future policy, so I have no doubt that it will be fed in and that there will be further opportunities for us to do that more formally.

Ms Murphy: It is a fantastic opportunity not only for DAERA or you but for the whole policy area of EVAWG. That will be a new policy framework. It has not been updated since 2016, and it will set the future trajectory of policy for rural communities and, in this instance, for rural women. Therefore, it is vital that it is included in it. Thank you very much.

Mrs Cameron: Thank you all for your attendance at Committee. From my previous role, I know how much work has been invested in the programme and how important it is. It has been very much bought into by local government and across the board. Awareness is at an all-time high, but, unfortunately, we do not yet see the benefits, seemingly, in reduced numbers, including those stats that you gave us from the life and times survey. Were they taken in the last year? Is that right?

Ms Fee: They are from 2024.

Mrs Cameron: That is a red flag to me. For where we are in time, you would think that we would be much further ahead with more sensible thought.

I wonder about future-proofing EVAWG. Is there any discussion of or looking at where things might change? I think of the impact that social media has on young people in particular and of the smartphone-free childhood movement that is happening, which, I think, is really positive. It could well be a good tool, and that is also true of any potential social media ban for under-16s. Are we looking at any of those things? Are we doing research on where young people get the violent, negative, misogynistic thoughts? Clearly, social media and the internet will have a big impact on that. Are we looking at the potential for that to reduce or change? Is there somewhere different that you want to go?

Ms Fee: There are about 10 questions in that. [Laughter.]

I will start at the beginning. There has always been a recognition that what we are talking about here as change will take some time. However, that does not mean that we cannot measure progress as we go along. Neighbouring jurisdictions are on their second and third iterations of similar strategies, so we need to think about it being that type of time frame before you see a reduction in the population-level indicators.

The framework is set in such a way that it will evolve, because we know that continuous challenges arise, for example, as you pointed out, through technology and technology-enabled abuse. The methodology that we have established is the idea of embedding the issue in sectors, so that sectors will develop an action plan and, therefore, keep that action plan under review and feed it as it goes along. That is the basic premise underpinning the strategic framework.

We scan the horizon for emerging threats. A recent example is what happened with Grok and our liaison with the Department of Justice and the Home Office on the measures taken to address it.

More generally in relation to the threats of social media, the Safeguarding Board for Northern Ireland was one of our co-design partners, and we collaborate with it and the Department of Justice on the online safety strategy for children. We also collaborate closely with Ofcom and are involved with Ofcom in the consultation to develop its guidance to tech companies on the prevention of violence against women and girls. An awful lot of the real legislative measures to deal with it are reserved. Through the five-jurisdiction working group, which is an officials' group across the neighbouring jurisdictions, we are considering whether we need to establish a small working group to look at emerging issues online because of its reserved nature and in order to learn from each other.

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is bringing forward the social media ban, and we will promote it with our stakeholders. We are very interested in how that will move forward. We have just got the initial results of a piece of research that we commissioned on what young men and boys in Northern Ireland think, and that will be important. We are aware of other research that the Safeguarding Board and Ulster University commissioned on technology-assisted child sexual abuse. All that is brought together through the structures that we have set up, and we will continue to look at it. We also support the work that Ofcom does on media literacy, and we will work with any of the local change fund projects and regional change fund projects.

I will bring Fin in because she has an example of work that is being done in a sports club to counter social media messages.

Ms French: What we hear from the community is that the online stuff will not go away, and that it is important to bring the conversations into real life and for them to be had with a trusted adult. People need the language and the confidence to have those conversations. The Fair Game initiative is a six-week course, which takes place for about an hour before a training session starts. It is for young boys, but there will be a new programme for young girls. The boys are brought in and fed pizza, and a safe space is created. The group start off talking about identities and what that means to them. It creates a safe space where young men can open up and talk. They then talk about whether comments from influencers that they follow on TikTok are facts and about their impact. It is a safe space in which to challenge and to have real-life conversations with trusted adults. That is just one example of what the change fund does. It allows the whole of society, young and old, to become informed consumers of social media, so that they can see that some things are not real and are not facts, and that not everything that an influencer says is to be believed.

Mr Somerville: To build on what Fin said, there are other projects ongoing, such as the Power to Change campaign and the All Equal All Safe resource, which young people developed. It is a 10-pack resource, and one of the packs is on social media. That is coming directly from young people — it is what they would like to discuss and learn about. There are real ways in which we can use the programmes and activities that we have to start to look at the issues that young people face in the online world. That is in addition to the online safety strategy that Geraldine mentioned, which will come out with a new action plan in 2027.

Ms Fee: I should add that we, along with the Department of Education (DE), are setting up the healthy relationships forum, which is designed to look at how we encourage young people, from a very early age right through to about the age of 25, to understand what a healthy relationship is and to have the tools to deal with one. I imagine that online will be a major factor in that. The idea of that forum is to bring in the experts. DE already sponsors the Safer Schools app and gives parents and young people information about how to be safe online. Online is definitely a huge challenge, but we seek to learn from what other jurisdictions do, collaborate with others as needed and get in at the grassroots with young people.

Mrs Cameron: Thank you, all.

Mr Gaston: In the most recent budget debates, I highlighted the fact that £6·77 million has been allocated to ending violence against women and girls. I welcome every penny of that and believe that we should invest to stop this scourge on society. That said, I want to ensure that the money is spent wisely. You said that £5 million has gone to councils. Let us set aside that element and concentrate on the money that TEO has spent. Does the money that the police spend come from TEO or from the Justice budget?

Ms Fee: Are you referring to what the police spend on the Power to Change campaign or to their spending more generally?

Mr Gaston: It is a flagship policy. Does what the police spend on it include money levered in from TEO's one-point-something million?

Ms Fee: Yes. We made a contribution to the Power to Change campaign, and we work collaboratively with the police on that. We made a financial contribution in phase 1, and we will do so again in phase 2. We also contribute through officials' time and resource.

Mr Gaston: When members of the Youth Assembly were before the Committee, they were very clear, and I agree with them, that, to tackle the problem, we need to get into schools and reach children at an early age. Has TEO given any of that £1 million to the Department of Education, or does DE have to fund that work from its own budget?

Ms Fee: As yet, there is no healthy relationships forum action plan. We will have to look at how the actions coming out of that are funded. We have provided money to the Department of Education to part-fund a specific, dedicated post to enable the healthy relationships forum to move forward. We collaborate with the Education Authority on its youth panels and have made a contribution to that work. However, not every collaboration costs money. We are collaborating with the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA), DOH, DOJ and DE on an education symposium, which will be held on 24 March. That will bring together a lot of school leaders, governors and pupils to look at what needs to be done in education.

Mr Gaston: We are two years into the programme. Do you still believe that TEO is the best Department to head up the policy?

Ms Fee: Yes. We have a strategic, coordinating and driving role that is about leveraging action from other Departments and councils. One problem has been that, prior to the strategic framework, violence against women and girls was often seen as either a women's issue or a justice issue, so it tended to be siloed. However, the issue needs to be worked through by every Department and recognised in all their policies, from Translink's transport policy to those for DAERA vets going to farms to test for bovine TB. The examples are legion, and TEO has a solid, coordinating role.

Mr Gaston: I will give you an example of lived experience. Last night, I heard from a distraught mother about a safeguarding incident at a bus station in Armagh prior to Christmas. A year 8 pupil signalled to a group of girls, of whom two were in year 8 and one was in year 11, that he was going to rape and kill one of them. The school rightly suspended that child. The police were involved. The police then diverted the case to the Youth Justice Agency, and that child underwent a six-week programme. That male child will be taken back into the school, where he sat beside the person he made the threats to. If TEO is the best vehicle to deliver this programme, can you talk me through how it can make an impact so that that will never happen again? My concern is that the board of governors have taken the decision to bring that child back in and have not taken into consideration the thoughts of the victims — the three young girls — who have been emotionally distressed and anxious and have not wanted to go back to school. The school has agreed that it will bring that child back with a one-to-one. Can money come out of TEO to support the victims to get counselling or to ensure that the rest of the pupils in that school will be safe when that year 8 male child, who is a newcomer, comes back into the school? I am looking for outcomes. I am looking to see how TEO money is changing this.

Ms Fee: There are a few things in that. I cannot comment on the specific case. As I said at the outset, the strategic framework is one within which all Departments operate. Their existing policy remits and responsibilities, including funding and any criminal justice sanctions, however those are dealt with by the Youth Justice Agency, are not displaced, but that is not to say that they are not informed by the direction of travel and the principles that have been set down in the strategic framework or any collaborative work. I have quite a small pot of baseline funding, and the majority of the funding that we provide is sent out through councils to grassroots community groups or through the regional change fund in order to fund EVAWG expert organisations to continue to run programmes that are being shown to have effect. Some of that work will be done with schools, some of it will be done in the workplace and some of it will be done in prisons. For example, White Ribbon does a Listen, Learn, Lead programme in schools. That is how our funding is disbursed. We do not provide funding directly for services. The focus of our work is on prevention and on raising awareness and giving people the tools and ability to identify VAWG and deal with it.

I referenced the healthy relationships forum. The intention is to work with the education sector — education providers and school principals — to make it aware of issues surrounding VAWG. Those education providers, with the Education Department, EA, CCEA and the Education and Training Inspectorate (ETI), will look at how that is translated into their environment. I hope that that will happen at a couple of levels: that principals will understand the impact of VAWG; and that the Department of Education will review their policies for when incidents occur, and that all of that will be informed by VAWG best practice.

Mr Gaston: This money is supposed to prevent violence against women and girls. In a case such as the one that I outlined, where a crime has been committed and there has been a safeguarding concern, what help can the Executive Office give to victims to ensure that they feel safe going to school? If a request came in to TEO for the school to have the year 8 pupil who made those gestures homeschooled, would TEO support that? That case clearly falls under the flagship policy. If the flagship policy is to mean anything — we are spending £6·77 million next year — there has to be some outcome. There has to be some value for money where a victim with lived experience in all this can get the help and support that they deserve.

Ms Fee: That would be delivered through the Department of Education and the Education Authority, which are the education experts. Our role is to work with them to look at the issues and inform best practice.

Mr Gaston: How much have you given to the Education Department — to the EA?

Ms Fee: I do not have a figure for how much we given to EA for the youth panels; we can write to you with that. We are collaborating with EA on establishing the youth panels. The whole point of this, however, is not necessarily that new money is needed; it is about applying an EVAWG lens to everything that is done. That is important. Our principles are that what happens should be trauma-informed and victim-centric, and it is about how those principles manifest themselves in a specific issue. Other work is ongoing with schools. Fin, did you want to come in?

Mr Gaston: A decision was taken to reintroduce that pupil into the school without the school talking to the parents of the three girls involved or the victims themselves: surely that is not a trauma-informed approach.

Ms Fee: As I said, I cannot comment on the action taken by a particular school in a particular instance. The principles of the strategic framework are that we take a trauma-informed approach to everything that we do. That is certainly what we will promote through the healthy relationships forum.

Mr Gaston: You mentioned protecting the migrant community. A family involved believes that that child is being protected over the victims because he is a newcomer child.

I will move on to councils. You have given plenty of percentages: 86% positive; 86% increased awareness; 98% increased knowledge — all good stuff. You said that some of the data is in but that some is still outstanding from the councils, so what are those figures based on?

Ms Fee: As I said, they were figures at a point in time from the surveys that we had at that point. They are a snapshot.

Mr Gaston: Is that 100% of the surveys, at that point in time, from councils about outcomes from the money that they had given to projects?

Ms Fee: No. They are the responses of participants who responded to the surveys. That is how surveys work: a survey will go out, but not everybody will fill it in. We would have to look at response rates. We are committed to giving a report to the Executive. We have written to the Executive indicating that we will have a full year of data in June, and that, by September, we will provide a full report to the Executive on the first year of operation. The strategic framework was agreed in September 2024. It started to operate in January 2025. We are in only the first year of operation. There are gaps in the data: we have been clear about that. The intention is that, once we have a full year of data, we will provide a comprehensive report to the Executive. We have also committed to an independent mid-term review to check that what we are doing is on the right track.

There are difficulties in evaluating any preventative measures, as Dame Elish Angiolini recognised recently in her second report following the death of Sarah Everard, in that you are trying to prove a negative — you are trying to prove that something has not happened because of what you have done. We recognise that there are limited tools to do that with regard to participant awareness and participant action based on that. We evaluate that as we go along, and, if it is not providing us with sufficient data, we will flex and look at what else we can do.

Mr Gaston: If the outcomes are not to a certain standard, will you relook at how you allocate the money? There is £5 million going to councils, but, if councils are not producing positive —.

Ms Fee: Sorry: there is not £5 million going to councils; there is £5 million going to grants.

Mr Gaston: And then to councils?

Ms Fee: No, £2·2 million of that has gone out through the local change fund, and £2 million of it has gone to eight delivery partners, including NSPCC, Barnardo's, Nexus, Relate, White Ribbon, Women's Resource and Development Agency (WRDA) and Women's Aid. Some of that money has gone to them. It is administered through Belfast City Council (BCC), but it goes to the regional providers.

Mr Gaston: Some of the groups that Belfast City Council has supported support transgender women, which has been flagged with me as a concern. I have flagged the fact that the strategic framework was produced without the involvement of any gender critics. Now, we have a council openly admitting that some of the groups that it has funded include trans women. Is that a concern for you? This is about ending violence against women and girls.

Ms Fee: The focus of the strategic framework is on violence that has its roots in gender inequality. Any group that applies for funding has to show that it meets the preventative aims. We operate within a wider spectrum of equality and human rights legislation, responsibilities and duties.

Mr Gaston: Have you collected any data from the councils on what groups they support and how many of those groups may include transgender women?

Ms Fee: We do not collect data at that level. As part of the letter of offer, a council is required to get participants to indicate certain demographics, but we do not collect data at that level.

Mr Gaston: What demographics do you collect data on?

Ms French: "Men", "Women", "Neither" and "I would rather not say" are the categories that are relevant at the minute, but we also capture postcodes, ethnic background and other things. It is the standard demographics that are collected for any TEO programme.

Mr Gaston: Out of curiosity, you said, "Men", "Women" and "Neither". Is that correct? Did I hear that right?

Ms French: Those are the headings of the tick boxes on the form.

Mr Gaston: What group is "Neither"? Biology dictates that you are a man or a woman, so what is "Neither"?

Ms French: That was the recommendation from the statisticians.

Ms Fee: We follow NISRA guidance.

Mr Gaston: You cannot tell me what "Neither" is.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): They have explained it. People complete the forms themselves, so it is about how they identify. Those people fill in the feedback forms.

Ms Ní Chuilín: It usually has "Prefer not to say" and all that on the forms.

Mr Gaston: I have major concerns regarding the money that is being spent on this. As I said at the start of my contribution, I agree with our spending every penny that is being spent, but I am concerned about the outputs from it. I do not believe that councils, in every case, are the best vehicle for doing it. If TEO is leading on the strategy, it should approve the grants and get those to the grassroots so that we have more control, and so that we can collect the data instead of waiting on data coming from local councils. All the figures that you have given are positive, but, at the same time, when you start to drill down into those, you see that councils have not come back and groups have not come back. You talked about 98% of respondents reporting "increased knowledge". How many people is that?

Ms Fee: That is a fair point. Those are questions that we have asked. Those figures were given as a snapshot, early doors, of an initiative that has only been running since January 2025. What I have tried to stress is that, when we get the full data in, we will have to take that back through the programme board and the oversight board and up to the Executive. That can be reviewed. Not only that, we have committed to an independent mid-term review in order to make sure that we are on the right track. Council partners have been very effective in leveraging their networks, local needs and administrative arrangements. If TEO were to start to do that, there would be a significant cost involved. Central government does not have that reach into local communities. TEO sets the criteria against which the councils adjudicate on the grant applications. TEO officials help on the assessment panels. It is also TEO that adjudicates on the regional change fund.

The Chairperson (Ms Bradshaw): OK. Thank you very much for your contribution today. We really appreciate that and the work that you are doing to deliver the strategic framework. If there are other reports in the future, please send them through, and we will make sure that those are shared with all Committee members. Thank you for now.