Gender-based violence awareness campaign launched

Derby City Council, Derby County Community Trust and Safe and Sound have launched an awareness campaign to rally communities across the city to prevent, tackle and challenge violence against women and girls in public places.

Together with Derby Community Action, they have launched the Safe Derby campaign, which aims to signal Derby’s zero tolerance to, and a city free from, gender-based violence, abuse, harassment and exploitation.

The campaign is backed by the Home Office’s Safer Streets funding stream – secured through The Office of Derbyshire Police and Crime Commissioner.

A series of workshops, training, events and new initiatives will be organised in the coming weeks with further activity then planned on key dates later in the year.

Tracy Harrison, chief executive of Safe and Sound, the Derby-base charity which supports children, young people and families across Derbyshire who are affected by child exploitation, said: “From our experience as a specialist child exploitation charity, young girls are particularly vulnerable to online grooming, sexual exploitation, trafficking, modern slavery, radicalisation and increasingly grooming by drugs gangs running County Lines.

“We were, therefore, keen to be part of Safe Derby which has three key strands of prevention, awareness and action and be involved in the wider campaign to bring violence against women and girls to the top of the agenda.”