Understanding the UK’s Policy Framework to Address Violence Experienced by Politicians

In recent years, there has seemingly been an increase in violence directed at elected representatives in ‘non-conflict’, democratic contexts – from the murders of two British MPs, the attempted insurrections in the USA and Germany, and a Dutch Minister stepping down due to threats. Feminist scholars have expanded our understanding of political violence to include a range of forms such as sexual harassment and online abuse, and established that that a gendered phenomenon of political violence exists across contexts (Krook and Restrepo Sanín, 2016; Bjarnegård, 2018; Herrick and Thomas, 2019; Håkansson, 2020; Krook, 2020; Collignon et al, 2022). Feminists have increasingly argued that intersectional approaches should be used to better understand this phenomenon (Bardall et al 2020; Kuperberg 2018, 2022). To address such violence in politics, several countries have developed specific policies, from criminal laws to parliamentary codes of conduct (Collier and Raney, 2018; Raney and Collier, 2021; Julios, 2022; Restrepo Sanín, 2021, 2022; Krook 2020). This paper expands the research agenda into how this complex problem is addressed in policy. This paper maps and analyses the specific policy framework to address violence experienced by UK Members of Parliament (MPs) in the last ten years. Violence, abuse, intimidation and harassment in public life has been politicised as a policy problem, with an increasing political focus on the experiences of women and online forms (Committee on Standards in Public Life, 2017; Phillips, 2023). Applying document analysis of over 40 policies and original interviews with MPs, the paper explores the extent to which these policies discursively reflect and practically implement understandings of gender, intersectionality and violence. This paper finds that the specific policy framework has evolved over time to be more expansive in its understandings of gender and violence, but with less attention to the intersectional realities of the phenomenon.