UK Government’s new ‘Enough’ campaign: Educating young people about healthy relationships and consent

In March 2022 the Government launched the ‘Enough.’ Campaign. The campaign, which will run over several years aims to highlight forms of violence against women and girls, and actions that anyone can take to challenge perpetrators of abuse. The campaign will also educate young people about healthy relationships and consent, to ensure that victims can recognise abuse and seek support.

Forms of violence represented in the campaign include coercive control, street harassment, unwanted touching, workplace harassment, revenge porn, and cyber flashing. While the campaign focuses on women and girls, because these types of abuse disproportionately affect them, the campaign recognises that anyone can be a victim of abuse.

In recent years Perpetuity Research has been helping police force areas to understand the needs of people who are victimised by these kinds of crimes by carrying out sexual violence needs assessments and domestic abuse research. In addition, in 2021 we carried out research to look at how the Covid-19 pandemic was impacting on survivors of sexual violence and the services who support them, to help the area meet survivors needs during this unprecedented period and solidify their learning from the experience. 

As part of our work we looked at the types of crimes that sexual violence survivors had experienced, including three new offence categories, included as part of the ‘Enough’ Campaign, our research showed that 20% of survivors reported experiencing ‘threats to share intimate images’, almost 11% reported experiencing ‘revenge porn’ and 5.6% reported ‘up-skirting’. 

Survivors also reported that some of these behaviours were normalised.

‘When I was a teenager there was regular upskirting in nightclubs and it felt that you had to put up with it.’

This brief snapshot, in amongst our much broader research in regards to the experiences of survivors of sexual violence and domestic abuse highlights the need for the ‘Enough’ campaign.