The Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) of Hertfordshire wants to carry out a study of 'extreme misogyny' in the county, which has been described as an 'emerging threat' as the force tries to clamp down on violence against women and girls.

PCC Jonathan Ash-Edwards met with district councillors at a Police and Crime Panel on Thursday, November 21, as he discussed the six priorities of his Police and Crime Plan.

Rhiannon Sawyer, the PCC's head of strategy, said the plan's fourth priority area – disrupting high harm criminality to protect vulnerable people – was the largest of the six priority areas in the report.

She said: "This is where violence very much sits, and violence against women and girls sits, also child protection. So we don't really need to make the case for this, but part of it is a national strategic policing requirement – violence against women and girls, and child protection."

Gathering statistics of violence against women and girls is "not straightforward" according to Hertfordshire's chief constable Charlie Hall, who in July described how crimes are allocated under Home Office crime categories – none of which specifically set out a violence against women and girls category.

They may instead be recorded as violent crimes, harassment offences and public order offences, among others.

Last month, Hertfordshire Police was told it must improve the way it records incidents of rape in its PEEL inspection by watchdog HMICFRS (Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services), which found it hadn't recorded 14 rape crimes correctly.

Ms Sawyer said: "There's obviously local issues as we know with recording against specific crimes which sits under violence against women and girls.

"Rape, as it is nationally, is spoken about in the media all of the time and it came up quite at the forefront of our PEEL report, so it's something that we really, really want to target through the plan.

"Within violence against women and girls, there's obviously domestic abuse, rape, stalking, and there's also the extreme misogyny which seems to be an emerging threat, especially for young people who are obviously impressionable, in school, and sharing information. So we want to tackle that in the plan.

"We want to look to do a potential study in Hertfordshire; what is the scale and nature of the threat of extreme misogyny here in Hertfordshire? Is it only affecting young people, or is it affecting adults as well?

"We want to do a piece on tech-enabled abuse in relation to violence against women and girls, particularly domestic abuse here in Hertfordshire – so, where stalking or domestic abuse is done online or where it's part of the abuse.

"Actually, if you look at the National Domestic Homicide Review analysis, specifically in young people – where there is online tech-enabled abuse, the threat of homicide escalates very quickly, in only a matter of weeks, from the beginning of the harassment and stalking through to homicide.

"We also know that over the next four years, the nature of tech-enabled abuse is going to change and we need to get ahead of it, so we want to be forthright in the plan to tackle tech-enabled abuse.

"Child to adult parent violent abuse (CAPVA) where children, or adolescent children, abuse their parents – commonly, boys hitting their mums. We already fund programmes around CAPVA… it is an emerging threat and it is not an insignificant amount of the referrals we get at the Chrysalis Centre for under-18s, so we want to continue the work around CAPVA.

"Moving on to rape, there's two key areas here. There's our PEEL report and then there's Operation Soteria which is the national piece of work around rape, which has been going on for around five or six years, applied in The Met to begin with but now rolled out to all forces. Those are two key areas where we've got loads of evidence-based learning and we want to make sure we've got actions in the plan to hold police to account on how swiftly they're meeting the recommendations from both PEEL and Operation Soteria as well.

"There's two pieces on missing children. We want to make sure that non-white children, so black or Asian, are given the same child protection response and risk assessment as their white counterparts when they go missing. That's from national learning and there's been a national report into black and Asian children who are graded lower risk when they're missing, and we want to make that that's not the case here in Hertfordshire.

"We want to do hidden missing work as well, so those children whose parents aren't reporting them missing through neglect, we want to bring that to the surface. That might mean actually that missing episodes go up in Hertfordshire, but actually it's because we're making sure that those children are getting that child protection response.

"We also know here in Hertfordshire that under-18 boys are at huge risk of personal robbery, so we want to do a piece around that. We want to make sure that Hertfordshire is a safe place for boys growing up. And then we want to do work around child sexual exploitation and also the wider protective orders across the entire piece, so that's not just your DA (domestic abuse) protective orders but your core ones – your CPOs (civil protection order), your slavery risk orders and every other order than police can use in the public protection arena to keep children and vulnerable adults safe."

Ms Sawyer described her summary as an "in-depth" look what may be in the fourth section of the Police and Crime Plan, which revolves around disrupting high harm criminality to protect vulnerable people.

She added: "It's the biggest area but it's probably, especially for me, it's the most important area."