Tackling violence against women and girls is one of my absolute top priorities - it’s something I have worked on for years, and something I now unfortunately hear about far too often as MP.

Before entering Parliament, I led a women’s equality charity, and since being elected, I have continued to push for stronger protections and better support for women and girls.

Last year, I was proud to host an International Women’s Day event in aid of Cyfannol Women’s Aid, supporting the incredible work they do to help women and families locally.

As a former member of the Women and Equalities Committee in Parliament, I have heard directly from women and girls across the UK about the realities they face, from harassment to violence.

That is why I welcome the Government’s new strategy to halve violence against women and girls over the next ten years. It marks a real turning point. This new approach focuses on prevention, tougher enforcement, and better support for victims – helping to protect the next generation of girls and steer young boys away from harmful misogynistic influences.

The strategy includes dedicated rape and sexual offence teams in every police force, criminalising strangulation in pornography, stronger domestic abuse protection orders with tougher restrictions on perpetrators and reforming the Child Maintenance Service to prevent the CMS being used as a form of economic abuse - measures which recognise that violence against women and girls takes many forms, both offline and online.

I particularly welcome the banning of so-called “nudification” tools. These are tools that use generative AI to take existing photos of women and girls and create fake, explicit images of them. While serving on the Women and Equalities Committee, I heard evidence from women and girls whose lives had been torn apart by fake, sexually explicit images. It’s absolutely devastating for victims and causes long-lasting harm.

It is deeply disturbing that this technology has been used to humiliate and threaten women, and even more shocking that tools like Elon Musk’s platform X’s AI system, Grok, are being used to create sexually explicit images of underage girls.

It’s sickening, and I strongly welcome that the UK Government has called this out and demanded action to remove this feature. Violence against women and girls is not inevitable.

With the right action, we can build a safer, fairer society for everyone.

Moving forward, I will continue to do everything I can - in Parliament and here in Monmouthshire - to support the Government’s VAWG strategy and ensure they go even further to protect women and girls.