Crime & Policing Act 2026: Key Domestic Abuse & VAWG Changes

Crime and Policing Act 2026 came into law on April 29. It supports the government’s Safer Streets Mission to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls in a decade and rebuild public confidence in policing and the criminal justice system. Key measures relevant to Domestic Abuse are:

Tackling serious violence against women and girls:

• Strengthening how offenders are managed in the community. Introduces                          enhanced notification requirements on registered sex offenders. This includes stopping offenders changing their names where there is a risk of sexual harm 

• Giving victims of stalking the right to know the identity of the perpetrator through new ‘Right to Know’ guidance. This means the identity of an online stalker will be disclosed to victims at the earliest opportunity

• Giving courts more powers to impose stalking protection orders directly when a defendant is convicted or acquitted. This will keep perpetrators away from victims and prevent further harm

• Introducing a new criminal offence of administering a harmful substance (including spiking)

• Criminalising pornography depicting strangulation or suffocation and so called ‘incest porn’

• Criminalising the making, adapting, supplying or offering to supply of so called ‘nudification tools’ which create non-consensual nude images from clothed photos.

• It strengthens the law around non-consensual intimate image abuse by creating new offences of ‘screenshotting’ an intimate image without consent. Courts can now order online platforms to delete such images within 48 hours

Protecting children and vulnerable adults – some of these measures are also relevant

• Introducing a new duty to report child sexual abuse

• Creating new offences of cuckooing (when a home is taken over for illegal activity) and child criminal exploitation

• Making grooming behaviour a statutory aggravating factor in sentencing

• Introducing a power to issue statutory guidance to tackle honour-based abuse

• There are 4 other measures which equip police with the powers they need to combat antisocial behaviour, crime and terrorism.
  

The Victims’ Commissioner for England and Wales, Claire Waxman OBE, said:  

“Strengthening and extending the use of stalking protection orders is an important step forward for victims. These orders are a vital tool in keeping people safe and in addressing stalkers’ behaviour; making them easier to obtain and accessible on conviction should help protection be put in place sooner. In stalking cases, speed is critical, and our overburdened court system can still slow access to protection. It is therefore encouraging that, during the passage of the Act, the Government has given assurances it will consider quicker, police-led safeguards, including Stalking Protection Notices.”