What Decades of Data Are Telling Us—and the Anomaly of COVID
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and for the rest of this month I want to talk about domestic violence from a few different angles—what the numbers show us, how abuse has changed over time, why so much of it is never reported, why so many people who really have been abused aren’t believed when they finally speak up, what can happen when someone tries to leave, and what help can actually look like when getting out feels impossible.
Before getting into some of the more personal and complicated parts of it, I wanted to start with the numbers.
Domestic violence has been studied for decades, but the statistics are not always as straightforward as they look. Police reports, hotline calls, victimization surveys, shelter use, arrests, hospital data, and domestic-violence-related homicides can all tell us something—but they are not necessarily measuring the same thing.
That leaves a bigger question:
Has domestic violence actually changed over the last few decades, or have the ways we recognize it, report it, respond to it, and measure it changed too?
And then COVID happened.
For a period of time, people were suddenly isolated inside their homes. Schools and workplaces closed, normal routines disappeared, and many victims lost some of the few opportunities they had to safely get away from what was happening at home.
In some places, calls for help increased. In others, they went down.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the violence went down with them.
And that is exactly why I want to start Domestic Violence Awareness Month here: with what the numbers can tell us, what they can’t tell us, and what happens when silence gets mistaken for safety.
“He was a weak man. The sort who needed to crush a woman in order to feel powerful.”
— John Mark Green
Domestic Violence Is More Than Physical Violence
When people hear domestic violence, I think a lot of us immediately picture physical violence—hitting, punching, kicking, strangulation, or injuries that someone else can actually see.
But abuse can look like a lot more than that.
It can include physical violence, sexual abuse or coercion, emotional and psychological abuse, threats and intimidation, financial control, stalking, harassment, isolation, technological monitoring, and other behaviors designed to control another person. Someone may control access to money, monitor a phone or location, threaten children or pets, prevent someone from working, destroy property, humiliate them, or make them afraid of what will happen if they don’t do what the other person wants.
Some abusive relationships involve frequent physical violence. Others may involve years of fear, control, manipulation, and intimidation before physical violence ever happens—or without physical violence happening at all.
The exact legal definition of domestic violence can also vary depending on where someone lives and the relationship between the people involved.
But one thing is important throughout this article:
Abuse is much broader than bruises.
“A narcissist’s weapon of choice is often verbal – slander, lies, playing the victim in flipped tales of who was the victim and who was the abuser, gossip, rage, verbal abuse and intentional infliction of emotional pain. It is a systemic dismantling of another person’s relationships, reputation, emotional, physical and spiritual health, life and very soul.”
— Gail Meyers
What Do We Actually Mean by “Domestic Violence Statistics”?
Before looking at the numbers over time, it’s important to remember that there isn’t one single statistic that captures all domestic violence.
Police reports, hotline calls, shelters, courts, hospitals, and national victimization surveys all measure different pieces of the problem. Some studies specifically measure intimate partner violence, while others include additional family relationships. Some measure criminal physical violence, while broader surveys may also ask about sexual violence, stalking, psychological aggression, or coercive control.
That means two legitimate studies can produce very different numbers without either one necessarily being wrong.
And this part is personal for me.
I am living proof that this is very real.
Growing up, domestic violence also seemed pretty common in my hometown. I didn’t fully understand until I was an adult just how toxic a lot of my childhood actually was, because when you’re raised around something, you don’t necessarily know that what you’re seeing isn’t normal.
I think a lot of people who grow up around violence, manipulation, control, and dysfunction probably experience some version of that. You don’t always recognize it for what it is while you’re living in it.
Earlier, I estimated that maybe 2% of the domestic violence in my household was ever formally reported—and even that felt generous. But the more I actually think back through my childhood and adulthood, I honestly can’t think of a single instance where the abuse itself was formally reported. Maybe something was documented somewhere that I didn’t know about, but I can’t personally remember one.
I’ve also never been surveyed about any of it.
Obviously, national surveys use representative samples to estimate what is happening across a much larger population, so people do not have to be individually surveyed for experiences like theirs to be statistically represented. But my actual experiences have never been directly recorded as one of those data points.
And I know I cannot possibly be the only person like that.
That is one of the reasons I personally believe the true amount of domestic abuse is significantly underreported. The CDC itself acknowledges that victims may be unable or unwilling to disclose violence in surveys because of shame, embarrassment, fear of the perpetrator, fear of being overheard, or emotional distress, which can contribute to underestimates.
Reported domestic violence is not necessarily the same thing as the amount of domestic violence actually occurring.
“If the numbers we see in domestic violence were applied to terrorism or gang violence, the entire country would be up in arms, and it would be the lead story on the news every night.”
— Representative Mark Green
What Domestic Violence Has Looked Like Over the Last Few Decades
With those limitations in mind, there is still some genuinely good news in the data.
Some forms of serious, nonfatal intimate partner violence really have declined substantially since the 1990s.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics uses the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks people about crimes whether or not they were reported to police. From 1994 to 2010, the rate of intimate partner violence fell about 64%, from 9.8 victimizations per 1,000 people age 12 or older to 3.6 per 1,000. Most of the decline occurred earlier in the period, while the rate became much more stable after about 2001.
Using the broader category of domestic violence, which also includes certain family relationships, BJS found a similar pattern. The rate fell about 63%, from 13.5 victimizations per 1,000 people in 1994 to 5.0 in 2012.
I was actually surprised by how dramatic that decline was because domestic violence still seems like something I hear about constantly.
But I don’t think the answer is that the statistics are simply wrong.
I think the answer is much more complicated.
These numbers measure particular forms of nonfatal criminal victimization. They don’t mean every form of emotional abuse, coercive control, financial abuse, stalking, manipulation, gaslighting, or technological abuse declined by 60%.
And this is another place where the numbers confused me at first.
If domestic violence has supposedly fallen so dramatically, how can we also say that more than one in three women experience certain forms of intimate partner violence during their lifetime?
The answer is that those statistics are answering very different questions.
A yearly victimization rate measures victimization during a particular period. A lifetime prevalence statistic asks whether someone has experienced qualifying abuse at any point across potentially decades of life. The CDC measure is also broader, including contact sexual violence, physical violence, and stalking.
So a lower annual rate can still accumulate into a disturbingly large percentage of people experiencing violence at least once during their lifetime.
That doesn’t mean I suddenly think the numbers capture everything perfectly.
It means the “one in three” statistic and the much lower annual rates aren’t actually contradicting one another. They’re measuring different things.
How to read this chart: The historical Bureau of Justice Statistics figures measure nonfatal victimizations per 1,000 people age 12 or older. They include crimes reported and not reported to police. “Domestic violence” and “intimate partner violence” are not identical categories, and this chart does not measure every form of domestic abuse.
“Women did not have a name for the tyranny of private life. It was difficult to recognize that a well-established democracy in the public sphere could coexist with conditions of primitive autocracy or advanced dictatorship in the home.”
— Judith Herman, M.D.
Then COVID Happened
And then 2020 gave us one of the clearest examples of why domestic-violence statistics can become incredibly complicated.
When workplaces, schools, churches, restaurants, doctors’ offices, and much of everyday life shut down, millions of people suddenly spent far more time at home.
For someone living in an abusive household, that didn’t only take away opportunities to ask for help.
It could take away their opportunities to simply get out of that situation for a few hours.
Before COVID, going to work, taking the kids to school, seeing family, going to church, attending an appointment, or even running errands might have provided a temporary break from what was happening at home. It didn’t necessarily mean someone was ready or able to leave permanently, but at least there could be periods of separation.
Then suddenly, many of those places disappeared.
Schools closed. Workplaces closed. Social activities stopped. People were ordered to stay home as part of government public-health restrictions.
And if home was already the place where you were least safe, “stay home” could essentially mean “stay in hell.”
Someone might now be around the person controlling or hurting them nearly 24 hours a day, with fewer chances to make a private phone call, talk to a coworker, see a family member, tell a teacher or doctor, or even have enough time alone to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do.
Research on five major U.S. cities found that domestic-violence-related police calls increased during stay-at-home orders in Chicago, Phoenix, New York City, and Los Angeles, while decreasing in Philadelphia. The differences between cities were significant enough to show why there isn’t one simple COVID domestic-violence statistic.
And even within the same city, different measurements could tell different stories. A separate Chicago study found that official domestic-violence police reports decreased during the stay-at-home period and that resource availability also decreased. Researchers noted that fewer police reports could mean less violence—or greater underreporting.
That sounds contradictory until you remember:
Sometimes fewer reports may genuinely mean fewer incidents.
Sometimes fewer reports may mean fewer opportunities to report them.
COVID showed us just how difficult it can be to tell the difference.
“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
— Judith Herman, M.D.
Domestic Violence Has Changed With the World, Too
The basic dynamics behind abuse—power, control, intimidation, fear, and manipulation—aren’t new.
But the world around them has changed.
Twenty or thirty years ago, stalking might have meant repeatedly driving past someone’s house, following them, or showing up at their workplace. Today, someone can track another person’s location through a phone, vehicle, shared account, GPS device, app, spyware, security camera, or smart-home technology.
Social media creates even more possibilities. Someone can repeatedly create new accounts after being blocked, monitor who a person talks to, access private messages, impersonate them, publicly humiliate them, threaten to distribute intimate images, or continue harassing them without ever physically showing up.
Gaslighting and manipulation aren’t new either, but I think we’ve become much better at recognizing and naming psychological abuse.
Someone may repeatedly deny things that happened, twist conversations, shift blame, minimize their behavior, use guilt or fear to control decisions, isolate someone from friends and family, or slowly convince them that they can’t trust their own judgment.
Over time, that can make someone question their memory, their perception of what is happening, and eventually even their ability to function without the other person.
I saw a lot of that growing up too.
There wasn’t just one person or one isolated situation in my household. There were multiple people and multiple abusive or extremely toxic situations. I can’t tell you exactly why the adults involved stayed when they did because I wasn’t inside their heads.
What I can tell you is that I watched a lot of manipulation, toxicity, control, and basically the whole “you can’t live without me” type of shit.
People may wait or stay for all kinds of reasons—fear, children, finances, manipulation, shame, not being believed, still loving the person, hoping they’ll change, or simply not having a safe opportunity to get away. Sometimes someone has been manipulated for so long that they genuinely don’t believe they can survive without the other person.
I’ll get much further into that next week.
Addiction can become intertwined with abuse too. Drugs and alcohol do not excuse domestic violence, but substance use can make an already abusive situation more complicated. It can become another thing used for manipulation, control, blame, or leverage, and survivors may also use substances as a way of coping with trauma.
There is another complication when we compare today with decades ago:
Society itself has changed.
Domestic violence—particularly violence against women in the home—was historically much more likely to be treated as a private family issue. During the 1960s, reliable incidence statistics were essentially nonexistent, research on wife abuse was extremely limited, and police and medical professionals were often reluctant to intervene in what were considered private matters between husbands and wives.
Today, domestic violence is far more publicly condemned, which is obviously progress.
But that doesn’t necessarily make abuse easy to see.
Someone who knows their behavior will be condemned has every reason to hide it, deny it, manipulate the victim, or make sure there are no witnesses.
And decades ago, we weren’t measuring domestic violence very well either.
So when we compare generations, the question isn’t only:
How much violence was happening?
It is also:
What did society recognize as abuse, what were victims willing or able to tell someone, and were we even asking the right questions?
And I think we already know the answer to that, considering how many people have been physically abused and how long it took society to start treating domestic violence like the serious problem it is.
“Stop telling yourself you can fix him. He’s been this way for a long, long time and he doesn’t intend to change. Don’t be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of his rage. Don’t play the martyr to his hate. You can never save someone by letting them destroy you. That’s not love, it’s relational suicide. Save yourself instead. Get out while there is still time.”
— John Mark Green
What the Numbers Look Like Now
The newest national data make one thing very clear:
This problem is nowhere close to gone.
The CDC’s 2023/2024 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey estimated that 34% of U.S. women—more than one in three—have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime. That represents nearly 43.5 million women.
For men, the estimate was 17%, or approximately 20.7 million men.
In just the 12 months before the survey, approximately 6.7 million women and 2.8 million men experienced at least one of those forms of intimate partner violence.
And those figures still don’t capture every abusive behavior.
The CDC measures psychological aggression separately. Nearly 38.6 million women and 27.3 million men reported experiencing psychological aggression by an intimate partner during their lifetime. In the preceding 12 months alone, the estimates were nearly 4.4 million women and 3.1 million men. The CDC definition includes expressive aggression as well as coercive control and entrapment.
There is another set of numbers that I think is especially difficult to ignore:
Homicide.
In February 2026, the FBI released an analysis of reported violent crimes involving domestic relationships from 2020 through 2024. During those five years, participating agencies reported 11,466 murder victims in incidents involving domestic relationships. The FBI’s domestic category is broader than romantic partners alone and includes certain family and household relationships.
And when we narrow the focus specifically to intimate partners, the gender difference becomes striking.
BJS found that in 2021, 34% of female murder victims were killed by an intimate partner, compared with about 6% of male murder victims.
So yes, some forms of nonfatal intimate partner violence have declined substantially since the 1990s.
But when more than one-third of women report experiencing intimate partner sexual violence, physical violence, and/or stalking at some point in their lives—and domestic relationships are still connected to thousands of murders—the sentence “domestic violence has gone down” requires a hell of a lot of context.
“Abuse grows from attitudes and values, not feelings. The roots are ownership, the trunk is entitlement, and the branches are control.”
— Lundy Bancroft
So, What Are the Numbers Really Telling Us?
After looking at all of this, I think two things can be true at exactly the same time.
We have made real progress.
The long-term decline in serious forms of nonfatal intimate partner violence appears to be meaningful. If fewer people are being physically assaulted by intimate partners than they were several decades ago, that matters.
But domestic abuse hasn’t disappeared.
It has also become more visible in ways it wasn’t before. Survivors can share their experiences publicly. Social media can put a case from across the country in front of us within hours. We recognize psychological manipulation, coercive control, financial abuse, stalking, gaslighting, and technological abuse in ways many people simply didn’t talk about decades ago.
And some of those behaviors have found entirely new tools.
COVID gave us an especially important reminder that even good statistics need context. A number might tell us how many police reports were filed, how many calls were made, or what a representative survey estimated.
It cannot automatically tell us everything happening behind closed doors.
And I think my own life is a pretty good example of that.
There was a lot happening throughout my childhood—and later in adulthood—that never became a police report, criminal charge, or survey response. In fact, thinking back on both my childhood and adulthood, I honestly can’t think of a single instance where the abuse itself was formally reported.
Maybe something was documented somewhere that I never knew about. But from what I personally remember and experienced, none of it became part of the statistics we normally point to when talking about domestic violence.
So yes, I believe the decline in serious physical violence is real.
I also believe there is still far more domestic abuse happening than any single statistic is ever going to show us.
Next week, I want to move away from the graphs and spend more time on something that is probably even more complicated:
Why victims don’t report—and why so many aren’t believed when they finally do.
People may wait because they’re afraid of retaliation, financially dependent, worried about their children, ashamed, manipulated, isolated, or convinced nobody will believe them. They may still love the person hurting them. They may hope things will change. They may leave and go back. Or they may not fully understand how abusive the situation was until years later.
And I also want to talk about why people are so often skeptical of victims when they do come forward—why delayed reporting, staying with an abuser, going back, inconsistent memories, lack of physical evidence, or continuing contact can all be used against someone instead of being understood in the context of abuse and trauma.
And why asking “Why didn’t you just leave?” or “Why didn’t you call the police?” is nowhere near as simple as it sounds.
Always read with care.
Healing’s a hell of a detour—but we don’t have to walk it alone.
Have a great week. Talk to you next time.
“Abuse thrives only in silence.”
— Leslie Morgan Steiner
Resources
National Domestic Violence Hotline — Free, confidential support is available 24/7. Call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), text START to 88788, or use online chat. The Hotline also warns that internet activity can be monitored and provides technology-safety information.
Northwest Arkansas Women’s Shelter — Free, confidential support, emergency shelter, safety planning, advocacy, legal assistance, and a 24/7 crisis hotline at 479-246-9999 or 1-800-775-9011.
Peace at Home Family Shelter — Northwest Arkansas shelter and survivor-support services. Its 24/7 hotline is 479-442-9811 or 1-877-442-9811.
Freedom Finder — Northwest Arkansas organization connecting people leaving abusive situations with practical resources. Call 479-306-2913.
If you are in immediate danger or facing a life-threatening emergency, call 911.
References & Further Reading
Bureau of Justice Statistics — Intimate Partner Violence, 1993–2010
Long-term NCVS analysis showing the historical decline in intimate partner violence. BJS report
Bureau of Justice Statistics — Nonfatal Domestic Violence, 2003–2012
Historical domestic-violence trends and definitions. BJS report
Bureau of Justice Statistics — Criminal Victimization, 2024
Current NCVS rates through 2024. BJS 2024 report
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — 2023/2024 Intimate Partner Violence Data Brief
Current national estimates of physical violence, sexual violence, stalking, psychological aggression, and coercive control. CDC data brief
Federal Bureau of Investigation — Domestic Relationships and Violent Crimes, 2020–2024
FBI analysis of reported violent crime involving domestic relationships. FBI report
Bureau of Justice Statistics — Female Murder Victims and Victim-Offender Relationship, 2021
Data on intimate-partner homicide. BJS homicide report
Domestic Violence Calls for Police Service in Five U.S. Cities During the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020
Research comparing domestic-violence police calls during stay-at-home orders. Read the study
Domestic Violence Police Reporting and Resources During the 2020 COVID-19 Stay-at-Home Order in Chicago, Illinois
Research on police reporting and resource availability during COVID. Read the study
National Library of Medicine — Domestic Violence in the 1970s
Historical context on domestic violence being treated as a private family matter and the lack of reliable statistics and services before major reforms. NLM historical article
Leave a Reply! I would love to hear your thoughts on todays topic!