National Taskforce for Tackling Misogyny Launched

On Sunday 20 September 2026, the UK government announced a National Taskforce for Tackling Misogyny, chaired by Minister for Women and Equalities Bridget Phillipson. It will bring together ministers, local leaders, academics and women’s organisations to ask a basic but urgent question: how do you challenge misogyny before it hardens into abuse, exclusion and fear? (gov.uk) The official language matters here. The announcement does not treat misogyny as something that only belongs in crime reports or social media scandals; it places the problem in communities, workplaces and online spaces. That suggests a wider test of whether everyday culture is making life smaller and less safe for women and girls. (gov.uk)

**What this means:** a taskforce is not a new criminal offence and it is not a magic fix. From the way the government describes it, this is a policy-working group: a place where ministers, councils and outside experts compare evidence, hear from women and girls, and decide what needs to change next. That reading comes from the structure set out in the announcement itself. (gov.uk) The first meeting will focus on young people, with later work planned on workplaces, digital spaces and social cohesion. That order matters because it suggests the government wants to start where attitudes are often learned, repeated and normalised most quickly. (gov.uk)

Before we talk policy, it is worth being careful with the numbers. The Office for National Statistics says about 1 million people aged 16 and over experienced sexual victimisation in England and Wales in the year ending March 2026. The latest stalking estimate currently published is about 1.4 million people for the year ending March 2025, and the latest domestic abuse estimate is about 3.8 million people for the same period, because newer stalking and domestic abuse survey estimates have not yet been released. (ons.gov.uk) Seen together, those figures help explain why ministers and campaigners are talking about prevention as well as prosecution. The government’s wider strategy says it wants to halve violence against women and girls by the year ending March 2034, which means changing attitudes earlier, not only responding after harm is done. (gov.uk)

The education thread runs all through this story. On 15 July 2025, the Department for Education published updated statutory RSHE guidance for schools in England. It says schools should help boys identify positive role models, challenge myths about women and relationships spread in the manosphere, and teach about incel culture, AI deepfakes and pornography’s links to misogyny; schools could start using it immediately and must follow it from September 2026. (gov.uk) That helps explain why women’s groups and youth organisations welcomed the new taskforce’s focus on young people. Everyone’s Invited says more than 53,000 survivors have shared experiences through its platform, while Girlguiding says girls report rising sexism and misogyny online, in public and at school. In other words, schools are not a side issue here; they are one of the main places where the response will either feel real or feel hollow. (gov.uk)

There is also a strong digital thread. The taskforce will later examine digital spaces, and that is not hard to understand. The government’s July 2025 school guidance linked misogyny to online myths, incel culture, deepfakes and pornography, while Everyone’s Invited argued this week that dangerous online spaces and AI have sped up the scale and speed of harm. (gov.uk) **What this means for you:** if you teach, study or work with young people, this is partly a media-literacy story. It is about how repeated exposure to hostile content can shape ideas about sex, consent and power, which is why the new school guidance treats online material as part of real-world safeguarding. That is an inference from the policy direction, but it fits the official guidance and the wider prevention package. (gov.uk)

This taskforce does not stand alone. It sits inside the government’s wider violence against women and girls strategy, published in December 2025, which set an ambition to halve violence against women and girls by the year ending March 2034. Since then, ministers have paired prevention messages with enforcement moves, including the ENOUGH campaign at Reading and Leeds in September 2026 and an accelerated plan for specialist rape and sexual offence teams in every police force in England and Wales by December 2027. (gov.uk) That bigger picture matters because it shows the state trying to work on several fronts at once: culture, education, policing and support. Whether that becomes joined-up practice is another question, and the End Violence Against Women Coalition has already signalled that real cross-department commitment will be needed if the taskforce is to mean more than good intentions. (gov.uk)

There is one more point worth holding on to. Equimundo, which is part of the new group, says misogynistic attitudes can change when men and boys are engaged as genuine allies, and that they are harmed too by the bullying and homophobia that often travel alongside misogyny. That does not blur the focus on women and girls; it helps explain why prevention work has to reach across whole communities. (gov.uk) The hard part starts now. A taskforce can gather evidence, listen better and keep pressure on departments, but success will be judged in classrooms, workplaces, streets and screens. If girls still feel unsafe, if women still shrink their lives to avoid abuse, or if online hate keeps spilling into everyday life, readers will be right to ask what changed. For now, the announcement gives us a clear test: will the government turn a strong diagnosis into everyday protection? (gov.uk)