“We will lay out clearly what we mean by ‘violence against women and girls’, and police operational matters will be corralled… so that we are all singing from the same hymn sheet.”
— Jess Phillips MP, House of Commons
That sounds reassuring. Clear definitions. Joined-up thinking. Everyone singing together. Which is why, as a survivor linked to the Al-Fayed case, I was mildly surprised to discover that despite being repeatedly pointed towards the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) strategy, our case is not being meaningfully discussed in Parliament at all.
If VAWG is meant to define what the state treats as priority violence against women, surely this qualifies.
Hundreds of women.
Decades of abuse.
Sexual exploitation linked to work, power and institutional access.
Trafficking indicators described again and again by survivors.
Textbook VAWG, I thought.
Apparently not.
Confused, I decided to do what any sensible person would do: sit down and actually try to understand how the VAWG strategy works in practice.
I regret this decision.
Step one: it must be a VAWG case. Surely?
The Al-Fayed case involves sexual exploitation of women and girls over many years. It is gendered harm. It is sexual harm. It is patterned harm. It is harm enabled by power, status and institutions.
So naturally, I assumed it would fall under VAWG.
It does not.
Step two: what if the police classify it as sexual assault?
Despite multiple accounts containing clear trafficking indicators, the Metropolitan Police have publicly framed their investigation as historic sexual offences. Fine, I thought. Incorrect, but fine. Rape and sexual assault are obviously VAWG harms. That must trigger the VAWG framework.
Apparently not.
That classification routes the case into the Rape and Serious Sexual Offences (RASSO) pathway, where allegations are handled incident by incident. VAWG does not intervene. It does not require pattern recognition. It does not require scrutiny of the institution where the abuse occurred. It does not insist that hundreds of women reporting similar experiences might indicate something systemic.
So sexual violence against women can be a VAWG issue in theory – but not in any way that changes what actually happens.
Noted.
Step three: what if it’s trafficking?
At this point, I remembered that French authorities have applied the law correctly and opened an investigation into aggravated human trafficking linked to the same facts.
Surely trafficking for sexual exploitation of women must fall squarely within VAWG.
No again.
Trafficking sits in the modern slavery framework. Different silo. Different ownership. Different logic. No automatic route into VAWG. No requirement for Parliament to treat it as a VAWG failure.
A case can be trafficking and violence against women in reality, while being neither in practice.
Efficient.
Step four: workplace abuse?
This exploitation took place through jobs, promotions, dependency and institutional access. So perhaps workplace-based violence against women triggers VAWG.
Also no.
That is treated as an employment issue, an HR failure, or something for regulators to consider later – preferably quietly.
Step five: institutional accountability?
This involved a major British institution, multiple enablers, and decades of complaints. Surely that brings it within the VAWG system.
No. That sits elsewhere too. Civil law. Regulatory space. Corporate governance.
Not VAWG’s problem.
At this point, I began to notice a pattern.
The pattern VAWG cannot see
In practice, harm is dealt with through systems that barely connect:
• sexual offences are investigated as individual criminal incidents;
• trafficking is handled within modern slavery frameworks;
• workplace abuse is treated as an employment issue;
• institutional accountability sits in civil or regulatory space.
Each silo has its own thresholds and logic. What none of them owns is gendered exploitation that is patterned, workplace-linked and institutionally enabled.
VAWG sits above these silos as a strategy – but with no operational power to force them to join up. It does not compel police to aggregate cases, require trafficking screening, or mandate scrutiny of institutions when multiple women report similar harm.
This is not a failure of coordination.
It is a failure of design.
And if a system cannot recognise this case – this scale, this clarity, this volume of women – then it cannot plausibly claim to protect women in less visible settings either.
So what exactly makes something a VAWG priority?
At this point I became genuinely curious. What, precisely, makes something a VAWG matter that Parliament must prioritise?
Scale? Apparently not.
Duration? No.
Number of victims? Also no.
Institutional involvement? Still no.
And even if something is considered a VAWG issue – would that actually trigger action?
Well, no.
VAWG is not a legal category. It is not a crime type. It does not trigger investigations, safeguarding, escalation or accountability. It is a strategy. A policy. A set of aspirations.
Which is wonderful – unless you are a survivor.
No practical use
As a reformed lawyer who once worked on complex, multi-million-pound transactions, I am used to complicated frameworks. But I have never encountered one quite like this: a national strategy that speaks endlessly about urgency and seriousness while being structurally incapable of responding to one of the largest known patterns of exploitation of women in recent British history.
For survivors linked to the Al-Fayed case, the VAWG strategy is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.
And yet, in correspondence with survivors, Jess Phillips continues to point us to it. Karen Bradley, chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, has declined repeated offers by No One Above (a Fayed survivor collective) to provide lived-experience evidence, even while writing publicly to ministers to warn of “poor engagement and transparency with VAWG stakeholders” and of delays that risk sending the message that tackling violence against women may not, in fact, be a government priority.
I feel she may be onto something there.
A national emergency, apparently
Ministers have now declared violence against women and girls a “national emergency” and committed to halving it within a decade.
The ambition is clear.
There is little in the current architecture to suggest that target is achievable.
As I was drafting this, a Guardian headline appeared announcing that every police force in England and Wales will be required to establish specialist rape and sexual offences investigation units under the revised VAWG strategy.
Aha, I thought. This must be it.
And then I read on.
These units are strengthened RASSO teams. They are designed to investigate rape and serious sexual offences more effectively – not to recognise trafficking-linked exploitation, not to aggregate patterns across victims, and not to interrogate institutional or workplace enabling.
There is no new funding. Forces are expected to make this work from existing budgets.
So will these reforms change anything for the Fayed case?
No.
Because unless something requires the system to step back and see patterns, networks and enabling environments, the same women will still disappear between the same silos.
More specialists. Same architecture.
A modest proposal
If the VAWG strategy cannot recognise trafficking for sexual exploitation of women in workplaces and institutions – even when hundreds of women come forward – then we should be honest about what that means.
It means that if VAWG cannot protect women in this case, it cannot protect women in any similar environment anywhere in the country.
And if it is meant to cover this, but has no power to do anything about it, then perhaps we should stop pretending it offers protection and start describing it more accurately: as a policy comfort blanket that looks reassuring from a distance and does very little up close.
I would genuinely welcome an explanation. Perhaps Jess Phillips could clarify it. Because after reading the strategy carefully, I still cannot make head nor tail of how violence against women disappears so completely the moment it becomes institutional.
*Isabella is a Pseudonym. The author is a Fayed/Harrods survivor and a founding member of No One Above (NOA), a survivor-led collective formed by individuals with lived experience of abuse and exploitation connected to Fayed, focused on barriers to justice and accountability in cases of abuse. www.nooneabove.org.
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