What would actually make the £14m Accelerator work?

I recently wrote to Jess Asato MP, after she invited me to share my thoughts on the new £14m VAWG Prevention Accelerator.

I spent over eight years working to prevent child sexual abuse, including through the NSPCC's Together for Childhood programme. Before that, I spent over 15 years in commissioning, buying services, or as I now think of them, the pieces of a system. Both taught me a lot about prevention and about system change.

What I learned, from people with lived and living experience and from community members, is that prevention is only possible once we break the taboo around talking about child sexual abuse. It's a public health problem, an epidemic, yet it's never had the coverage of problems that feel more "socially acceptable" to talk about, in the way Covid did. In Plymouth, public health campaigns that raised awareness, particularly through paid social media, had a profound effect, with more people accessing support like Stop It Now.

That's why child sexual abuse prevention needs to sit clearly within the Accelerator. The Freedom from Violence and Abuse strategy itself shows that children are the victims in 40% of all sexual offences, and that people sexually abused as children are over 13 times more likely to experience rape in adulthood. Preventing child sexual abuse is preventing violence against women and girls.

The £14m is welcome, and we have to start somewhere. With the Accelerator launching next spring, there's a real opportunity to shape how it's spent. Here's what I think would make the difference.

Build evidence from three sources, not one

The Accelerator's focus on evaluation is a real strength. But academic research on its own won't cover the whole prevention matrix, Smallbone's model of preventing abuse by working with children, people who may cause harm, the communities around them, and the places where abuse happens, at every level from primary through to tertiary. That takes practice wisdom and lived experience alongside the research, not instead of it.

Take a system approach, not just a grassroots one

Grassroots initiatives are vital, but any activity needs cooperation across the whole system. Commitment from the top matters, both to agree how the different parts connect and to build the conditions that let them work together: trust, relationships, a shared language. It's also what makes the work last. Prevention and system change take years, longer than most funding cycles. Without a plan from the start for how successful work gets embedded and continues, even good projects end when the money does.

Coordinate the pieces, don't just fund them

One activity on its own will only ever have limited impact. A coordinated set of activities in a place achieves far more, but only with real coordination behind it. That means someone resourced to hold the whole picture, connect the different parts, and keep everyone working towards the same aims.

Put the responsibility on adults, not children

Keeping children safe is the responsibility of adults. Any activity aimed at children should be done with them, not to them, through participatory, youth-work-led approaches. That's what builds a child's confidence to trust their own instincts, speak up, and get help earlier, not the other way round.

Support parents and carers to actively prevent, not just react

Prevention starts long before anyone notices something is wrong. Parents and carers are a child's first and most powerful teachers of what healthy relationships and consent look like, through what they model day to day as much as what they say. Equipping them to have those everyday conversations with confidence is prevention at its earliest, not a response once something's already gone wrong.

There's also too much weight on disclosure, waiting for a child to find the words and the courage to tell. What we need more of is discovery, adults around a child who are confident to notice, ask and act before harm happens, not just after. Supporting parents does more than protect children too: where a parent or carer is living in an unhealthy or abusive relationship themselves, that same contact is a chance to reach them with support. Almost none of this appears in the Freedom from Violence and Abuse strategy, which mentions equipping parents but makes no real commitment to their role in actively preventing sexual abuse.

Address the root of harm, not just its aftermath

That means working with the people who cause harm, or may cause it, and not shying away from that because of how the public might react. Education and a shared commitment to no more sexual abuse helps people understand the need for this work, and support it, even where they can't take an active part themselves.

Fund the gap in the middle: secondary prevention

The strategy has laid real foundations at primary level, through the RSHE overhaul, healthy relationships education and online safety. Significant investment is also going into enforcement after harm has already happened. The space in between is where I see the biggest gap: support for adults worried about their own sexual thoughts or behaviour towards children, and helping parents, carers and communities recognise and act on early warning signs. The Accelerator could make a real difference here.

What this looks like in Plymouth

We're already seeing this first-hand through Project Guardrail. It's currently a concept, with two feasibility studies completed, for a community-based secondary prevention service for adult men not known to the criminal justice system who have an enduring sexual attraction to children. Those studies estimate that somewhere between 2,700 and 4,500 men in Plymouth alone may be in this position. It isn't work that community members would have prioritised on their own, but by working alongside them we're building acceptance of both the need and the approach. Circles South West are about to launch a community readiness study as the third phase of feasibility, with the University of Plymouth.

Why I keep coming back to the whole picture

In my work I use a framework I developed from this experience, The System Picture Framework. It looks at a system as more than its pieces: the shared vision, the agreed ways of working, the conditions that make cooperation possible, and the lived experience everything else rests on. I mention it here only because it captures what I've seen. Strategies and funding usually tell us what to do, but not the why or the how. If the Accelerator funds pieces alone, its impact will stay small. If it tests activity across the whole picture, the way Together for Childhood set out to do, it has a far better chance of lasting.