Our impact: Criminal Law

Our priorities

We believe that women who experience violence and abuse should be able to access a justice system that is fair, trauma-informed and responsive to their needs, as well as effective in addressing VAWG and the social injustice that underpins it.

Too many survivors continue to face barriers when they report abuse, participate in criminal proceedings or seek support. Women can encounter delays, harmful myths and stereotypes, intrusive requests for personal information and processes that fail to recognise the realities of coercive control and trauma.

Working alongside women with lived experience, we utilise the insights from our advice services, education work and policy engagement to identify where change is needed and advocate for a criminal justice system that works better for all women.

Rights of Women’s current recommendations to Government include:

→ Improved access to early legal advice and specialist support

→ Improved recognition of coercive control and the realities of abuse

→ Better identification and support of victim-survivors who have been criminalised

→ Consistent use of trauma-informed approaches across the criminal justice system

→ Stronger implementation and accountability mechanisms for the Victims’ Code

→ Greater protections for survivors’ privacy and dignity

→ Criminal justice reforms that advance equality and do not create new barriers for minoritised women

→ Delivery of evidence-based reform of the criminal justice system to improve outcomes for survivors of sexual violence and domestic abuse while safeguarding the important constitutional right to trial by jury.

Advice

Every year our lawyers support more than 350 women through our Criminal Law services.

Women who call us are often navigating complex police investigations and court processes in cases concerning sexual violence, harassment, stalking and/or domestic abuse.

Our specialist women lawyers provide free, trauma-informed legal advice and casework that assists women to:

• Know and enforce their rights within the criminal justice system
• Make informed decisions about reporting and engagement with criminal proceedings
• Access specialist support and advocacy services
• Navigate criminal justice processes with confidence
• Understand disclosure, evidence and court procedures
• Challenge decisions and practices that undermine their rights and safety, including cases where the police or Criminal Prosecution Service decline to prosecute their abuser

Through this work, women are supported to engage with their rights and make decisions about their future with confidence.

We also provide specialist legal support through wider partnership projects that improve survivors’ access to criminal justice information and support. An example is the FLOWS Answers service, which extends access to specialist legal support by providing survivors of domestic abuse with tailored written legal advice. The service helps women understand their legal options, make informed decisions and access justice at a time and in a format that works for them, while also creating safer and more flexible routes to expert legal information.

You can find out more about our criminal law advice services and opening times here.

The demand for free, specialist legal advice for survivors far outweighs its availability, and this contributes to the scale and severity of VAWG.

At Rights of Women, we lead, contribute to and participate in coordinated advice delivery, evaluation and learning projects to help demonstrate the value of advice and develop stronger networks and referral pathways that support women survivors at the earliest opportunity.

Stories of impact

Improving the Victims’ Code

The Victims’ Code is a rights framework designed to ensure that victims of crime receive information, support, protection and opportunities to participate throughout the criminal justice process.

Rights of Women  works to ensure these rights are not only set out on paper but realised in practice for all survivors. We are committed to supporting long-term system change so that this essential framework can deliver transformative improvements in access to justice. 

Drawing on evidence from our frontline legal services, we have consistently highlighted the gap between the rights contained in the Victims’ Code and women’s everyday experiences of the criminal justice system, especially for minoritised survivors and survivors who have been criminalised. Survivors frequently report poor communication, limited efforts to raise awareness of their rights, barriers to accessing support and difficulties obtaining redress when rights are not upheld. These breaches of the Code exacerbate the trauma that survivors experience and leads to re-victimisation by the system that they thought would support them.

In 2019, we made a detailed submission to the Government’s consultation on revising the Victims’ Code. Whilst some positive changes followed, they have not gone far enough to improve accountability or ensure that victims’ rights are consistently delivered in practice. We know from the women who contact our advice lines that significant gaps remain, and these are most keenly felt by women from minoritised communities.

Many women who experience violence and abuse come into contact with the criminal justice system not only as victims but also as suspects or defendants. It is essential to ensure that criminalised victim-survivors, particularly Black and minoritised migrant women, are recognised as survivors and able to access the rights, protections and support they need.

Drawing on evidence from our frontline services and consultation work with women with lived experience, we have highlighted how victim-survivors are too often misidentified as perpetrators, particularly in cases involving coercive control, counter-allegations and complex experiences of abuse.

In 2026, Rights of Women worked alongside Hibiscus and women with lived experience to submit detailed evidence to the Ministry of Justice’s review of the Victims’ Code, calling for reforms that better recognise the experiences of criminalised victim-survivors and address barriers faced by Black and minoritised migrant women. The submission was additionally supported by the Latin American Women’s Rights Service (LAWRS), Ashiana and Asha.

Our recommendations included:

• Better identification of victim-survivors experiencing coercive control.
• Improved recognition of women who have been wrongly criminalised.
• Stronger safeguards against the misidentification of victims as perpetrators.
• Greater access to specialist advocacy and support.
• More effective implementation of victims’ rights for Black and minoritised migrant women.

Alongside this joint submission, we also made our own detailed submission focused on the wider legal, policy and technical aspects of the consultation, ensuring that Government received both specialist legal analysis and direct evidence from women with lived experience.

By bringing women’s lived experiences directly into policy discussions, we continue to challenge assumptions within the criminal justice system and advocate for a more equitable and trauma-informed approach to victim-survivors of VAWG.

Our joint submission and additional submission are available on our website

Protecting the right to trial by jury

In 2025, proposals contained within the Courts and Tribunals Bill sought to remove  access to jury trial for some offences.

Rights of Women led the response from the Violence Against Women and Girls sector, ensuring that the experiences of women survivors, particularly Black and minoritised women, were heard in the national debate.

While the proposals were presented as improving efficiency and addressing backlogs in the criminal justice system, Rights of Women was concerned that the improvements would be minimal while undermining a significant safeguard on state power and failing to recognise the complex realities of women’s experiences.

Our work highlighted how many women encounter the criminal justice system not only as victims but also as defendants as a result of their being criminalised for allegations and behaviour that directly relate to the abuse they have experienced. Black and minoritised women are disproportionately affected by criminalisation and systemic inequalities, meaning reforms that weaken procedural safeguards can have particularly harmful consequences for minoritised communities.

Working alongside partner organisations and with support from JUSTICE, we coordinated a high-profile joint letter from across the VAWG sector, engaging parliamentarians and securing national attention for the concerns of the sector about and its objections to the co-option of the VAWG sector as supporters of the measures Our letter and concerns were specifically referenced a number of times in the Courts and Tribunals Bill Public Bill Committee, and in the examination of the Minister when she gave evidence on the Bill.

Throughout this work, we argued that improving justice outcomes for survivors should not require the erosion of fundamental rights and that reforms must take account of the realities faced by women who are both victim-survivors of abuse and experiencing criminalisation by the state.

You can read our newspiece first responding to the proposals in December 2025, as well as  our later newspiece from March 2026  and our sector letter to government.

Keep Counselling Confidential

For years, survivors have faced requests to disclose highly sensitive records relating to counselling and other therapeutic support during criminal investigations and proceedings, creating fear that seeking support prior to or during a criminal investigation could result in their privacy being fundamentally undermined and threaten their ability to access justice.

The Keep Counselling Confidential campaign successfully secured significant policy change and was recognised nationally when it won the Sheila McKechnie Campaign of the Year Award in 2025.

Rights of Women worked alongside survivors and specialist organisations to challenge practices that undermined counselling confidentiality and risked deterring women from accessing support while representing a fundamental misunderstading of the ways in which counselling is used by survivors.

The campaign helped increase public and professional understanding of the importance of counselling confidentiality and contributed to reforms designed to improve protections for survivors participating in criminal proceedings.

Read our newspieces about the campaign win in April 2024 here and receiving the award here.

Independent legal advice for survivors of sexual violence

Survivors of rape and sexual violence have long faced disproportionate and intrusive requests for highly personal information without access to independent legal advice about their rights.

Following sustained campaigning across the sector, the Government has committed to rolling out Independent Legal Advice (ILA) for survivors across England and Wales.

This is one example of the many ways in which the interests of the prosecution are often in direct conflict with the rights of the survivor, and Rights of Women has worked alongside partner organisations to advocate for greater legal support and procedural fairness for survivors whose interests are sidelined during a criminal investigation and/or prosecution.

The national rollout follows a successful pilot programme and represents an important shift towards recognising that survivors require independent legal advice at key points in the criminal justice process.

Challenging  survivors’ experiences of violence being used against them in court

Many survivors are concerned that previous experiences of violence, and any related criminal justice response, will be used to undermine their credibility, and this can be a barrier to seeking justice.

Following a joint campaign ‘Bad Experiences, Not Bad Character’ led by Centre for Women’s Justice, Rape Crisis, EVAW and Rights of Women, the Government committed to introducing protections to restrict the use of so-called “victim bad character” evidence.

The campaign challenged practices that attempted to undermine the credibility of survivors by using previous disclosures of sexual violence and other traumatic personal experiences.

The Government’s commitment to legislative reform represents an important acknowledgment that criminal trials must avoid reinforcing harmful myths and stereotypes about survivors and acknowledge the prevalence of VAWG in our society.