Technology can help deter violence against women

Shabana Mahmood has been home secretary for 100 days. In that time, she has moved with unusual speed to tighten the rules on immigration and asylum. Within days of her appointment, she had rewritten the guidelines on appeals against deportation under the Modern Slavery Act, prompting one civil servant to comment: “The speed of decision-making is something to get used to,” according to The Independent.

She has also acted decisively to abolish elected police and crime commissioners — an experiment from the coalition government that increased the manufacture of local politicians without significantly improving policing. And she is expected to reorganise the police into a smaller number of larger forces next month — a change that has taken so long only because the first draft was sent back as being “not radical enough”.

She told Sir Tony Blair at an event at his Institute for Global Change on Wednesday that in both her jobs in this government, in the justice department and at the Home Office, she faced a “crisis” from the start, which she sounded as if she relished: “There’s something very clarifying about a crisis.”

It is no surprise, therefore, that the pace of change is not slackening yet. Ms Mahmood is now promising the “largest crackdown in British history” on violence perpetrated against women and girls. This is a step towards fulfilling Labour’s promise at the election to halve violence against women within a decade, for which a detailed strategy document will be published in the coming days.

While The Independent welcomed the sentiment behind the manifesto promise, we expressed our reservations about the target: the promise to “halve” violence against women had the feeling of being plucked out of the air. We look forward to more specific metrics and some detailed plans about how to make progress towards them when the document is published.

In the meantime, we are worried about the possible gap between the home secretary’s rhetoric and her policies. She says: “This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency.” Yet her preview of the strategy document announces that all police forces are to have dedicated rape and sexual offence investigation teams by 2029.

If violence against women really is an emergency – and we would certainly agree that the need to act is urgent – a change four years away does not seem soon enough. Presumably, this timetable is related to the reorganisation of police forces. With fewer, larger forces, it becomes easier to guarantee dedicated units of this kind.

What is more promising, if Ms Mahmood can find enough forward-thinking public servants to help drive the pace of change, is the use of technology to deter, detect and punish offenders. Facial recognition technology raises concerns about civil liberties, but with safeguards in place offers such gains in making life safer for women and girls that it must be extended.

Ms Mahmood impressed the tech-minded Sir Tony with her talk about using tagging and geolocation as alternatives to prison; they can also be used to enforce the new Domestic Abuse Protection Orders that she proposes, requiring abusers to obey curfews, exclusion zones and notification requirements. Ms Mahmood has made an impressive start as home secretary. She needs to guard against the tendency to make everything an urgent priority, in which case nothing will be. And now she needs to match the speed of her decision-making with the speed of decision-implementing.