EMPOWER: The East Midlands Partnership on Violence Against Women and Girls
The EMPOWER Partnership is an ESRC funded multi-agency research group based at the School of Criminology, focussed on generating a collaborative agenda to effectively address violence against women and girls (VAWG). National policies highlight the urgent need for effective responses to VAWG, and the East Midlands has witnessed increases in both sexual and domestic violence since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. This holistic partnership, which spans criminal justice, health, academic researchers, and community and third sector responses to VAWG, is aimed at developing a collaborative response and shared agenda to tackle VAWG both in the East Midlands and nationally.
Led by Dr Emma Sleath, with support from Dr Matt Tonkin and Dr Lucy Neville and a team from the School of Criminology, EMPOWER has four main objectives:
- Partnership building: To build a regional alliance of key agencies and voices of survivors to effectively work together under the umbrella of EMPOWER.
- Co-creation and co-design: To enable the active participation of stakeholders to generate key questions that need to be answered to effectively intervene in VAWG.
- Sustainability: To deliver a long-term research strategy and sustainability plan for EMPOWER that facilitates change in addressing VAWG locally, regionally, and nationally.
- Research capacity building: To develop the ‘research-ready’ capacity of stakeholders to engage in research that addresses VAWG.
This work is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number: ES/X002985/1].