Women’s specialist services are how Europe’s laws reach the women they are meant to protect.
The revised Victims’ Rights Directive, adopted on 17 June 2026 and in force since 20 July 2026, consolidates the general EU framework for all victims of crime, and Member States must transpose it by 2 July 2028. It is a welcome framework, and it recognises that some victims have specific needs that general provision alone cannot meet. It also arrives alongside two instruments that bind the EU specifically on violence against women and girls (VAWG): the Istanbul Convention and Directive (EU) 2024/1385, due for transposition a year earlier, by 14 June 2027. These frameworks are designed to work together, but they risk pulling against each other if each is implemented in isolation. The clearest danger is that general and generic victim support, valuable as it is for victims of all crimes, comes to be treated as sufficient for victims of VAWG, and that recognition, referrals and funding drift away from women’s specialist services.
That drift would not be an organisational rearrangement. It would be a loss of entitlement. What a woman receives when she discloses depends on who is in front of her: whether they are trained to recognise gendered violence, whether they can move at her pace rather than the pace of a court file, whether they will refer her onwards if they cannot help. General and generic services remain essential first points of contact, but they cannot substitute for the response only women’s specialist services provide, any more than general medical care can substitute for specialist care. Women’s specialist services are also the ones who monitor violence at the national level, adapt to its new forms, and sound the alarm first, as they did during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The new EU Strategy on Victims’ Rights cannot create binding duties, but it can steer how the hard law now in place is put into practice. Only by stating clearly that general and generic victim support complements rather than replaces specialist services, and by holding implementation to Istanbul Convention standards, can the Strategy deliver the coherence it sets out to achieve.
Download: WAVE input to the Call for Evidence on the EU Strategy on Victims’ Rights (PDF)
