By Tara Woodlee, President/CEO, Break the Silence Against Domestic Violence
Domestic violence stats, for years, those of us working in domestic violence advocacy have repeated a statistic that almost everyone in this field knows by heart: 1 in 3 women will experience intimate partner violence.
I’ve said it from stages. I’ve used it in interviews. We’ve put it on graphics. We’ve used it to help people understand that domestic violence isn’t rare and that the survivor sitting beside you may be someone you would never expect.
Now, a new national study is giving us a very different number.
Researchers with Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute and the University of California San Diego conducted the first national U.S. National Study on Violence Experiences Across the Lifespan, or USVEX. They surveyed 2,720 adults across all 50 states, and their findings are staggering.
Sixty-one percent of women reported experiencing intimate partner violence during their lifetime.
That’s not 1 in 3.
That’s more than 6 in 10 women.
The same study found that nearly one in five women—19%—reported experiencing potentially lethal intimate partner violence, including behaviors such as strangulation, beating, burning, or violence involving a weapon. Across the entire adult population, 52% reported experiencing physical violence during their lifetime and 49% reported sexual violence.
Those numbers are shocking.
But after spending the last 14 years doing this work, I have to tell you something.
They aren’t shocking to me.
I’ve Been Watching the Hands Go Up for 14 Years
Traveling across this country speaking about domestic violence. I have spoken to survivors and advocates, but I’ve also spoken to ordinary groups of women who didn’t come together because of domestic violence. They came together for something else entirely.
And watched the same thing happen over and over again.
Put 100 women in a room and begin talking honestly about what intimate partner violence actually looks like—not only the violence that sends someone to the hospital, but the control, threats, intimidation, sexual violence, stalking and other behaviors women have experienced behind closed doors—and ask who has experienced it.
The hands start going up.
In my experience, it has consistently been half the room or more.
I’ve watched it happen enough times that the old 1-in-3 statistic has never completely matched what I have seen with my own eyes.
That’s anecdotal experience, of course. A room where I happen to be speaking isn’t a scientific sample, and I would never pretend that it is.
But when a nationally representative study now reports that 61% of women have experienced intimate partner violence, I don’t find myself asking, How could the number possibly be that high?
I find myself thinking, This looks a whole lot more like the women I’ve been meeting for 14 years.
Did Domestic Violence Double? No. But Maybe We Weren’t Seeing All of It.
We need to be responsible with these numbers.
This new research means we can say domestic violence has nearly doubled from 1 in 3 to more than 6 in 10. We’re comparing statistics produced using different studies, questions, definitions and methodologies.
What it should make us ask is something much more important:
How much have we been missing?
One of the things I find particularly important about USVEX is how researchers collected the information. Rather than depending solely on crimes reported to law enforcement or cases that entered a service system, researchers asked people directly about experiences of violence.
Dr. Anita Raj, executive director of Newcomb Institute and one of the report’s leaders, put it plainly: our understanding of violence has relied too heavily on crime reports, leaving many experiences invisible. The researchers designed this study to capture experiences that may never reach law enforcement or service providers.
Anyone who works with survivors should immediately understand why that matters.
We know how much domestic violence is never reported, know survivors don’t always call police, many women don’t immediately identify what happened to them as abuse, coercive control can exist for years without producing a police report.
And we know sexual violence inside intimate relationships has historically been especially difficult for survivors to identify, disclose and report.
For generations, women were taught that what happened sexually inside a marriage was private. Marital rape was historically exempted from rape laws in the United States, and although those exemptions were eventually eliminated, legal recognition doesn’t automatically erase generations of beliefs about what a husband is supposedly entitled to from his wife.
How many women experienced sexual violence from a husband or partner and never called it rape?
How many still don’t?
Many women answering older surveys would have said “no” if asked whether they’d been raped, but might answer very differently if asked specifically whether a partner ever forced sex, continued after they said no, threatened them until they complied, or engaged in sexual activity when they couldn’t consent?
Sometimes the question we ask determines what we’re able to see.
Maybe Survivors Weren’t the Exception. Maybe They Were Everywhere.
This is the part of the new research I want people to sit with.
If 61% of women report experiencing intimate partner violence during their lifetimes, we have to stop talking about domestic violence as though it happens to some small, separate population of women.
It is happening to our teachers, nurses, executives, stay-at-home mothers, pastors’ wives, attorneys, college students, grandmothers, daughters and friends.
It’s happening in wealthy homes and poor homes, women with advanced degrees and women struggling to finish school. It’s happening to women who appear incredibly strong and women who are barely holding themselves together.
And many of them will never walk into a domestic violence organization.
They’ll go to work, take children to school, sit beside them at church, laugh at dinner, and answer ” I’M FINE”
That’s something advocates have understood for a very long time.
The study is also a reminder that violence doesn’t exist separately from everything else happening in someone’s life. Researchers found striking associations with economic instability. Adults who had experienced an eviction in the previous year were seven times as likely to report recent physical violence and nearly five times as likely to report intimate partner violence. People experiencing homelessness also reported dramatically higher levels of violence.
For survivors, that connection makes sense. Leaving an abusive relationship isn’t simply a matter of walking through a door. Housing, money, employment, transportation, childcare and safety are often tangled together.
The Number That May Trouble Me Most
As significant as 61% is, there’s another finding I don’t want buried underneath it.
Nineteen percent of women reported potentially lethal intimate partner violence.
Nearly 1 in 5 women.
When you’ve spent years working in domestic violence, you understand what words like “potentially lethal” mean.
These aren’t simply bad relationships.
These are experiences researchers categorized as including beating, burning, strangulation, or violence involving a knife or gun.
Almost one-fifth of women reported experiencing something in that category from an intimate partner.
That number should stop us in our tracks.
I Don’t Think Women Suddenly Became More Abused. I Think We’re Getting Better at Asking.
Maybe future research will refine these numbers. That’s what research is supposed to do. This study also establishes a new national baseline that researchers can use to track changes over time rather than pretending one survey can answer every question forever.
But after 14 years of listening to survivors, I keep coming back to something much simpler.
Maybe women have been telling us how widespread this is all along.
Advocates have been seeing it in shelters, support groups, hotline calls, social media messages, churches, workplaces and auditoriums for years.
Maybe the problem wasn’t that the women weren’t there.
Our measurements weren’t always finding them.
That’s why this study matters to me.
Not because I want a bigger statistic.
Believe me, I wish the number were smaller.
I wish after 14 years of doing this work I could tell you that fewer women are raising their hands, our support lines were quieter, fewer survivors recognized themselves when we describe coercive control, stalking, strangulation, financial abuse or sexual violence within relationships.
But that isn’t what I’ve seen.
So when researchers tell me 61%, I’m shocked by the enormity of what that number represents.
But I’m not surprised by the women behind it.
I’ve been meeting them for 14 years.
And maybe now, finally, our statistics are beginning to see more of them too.
Break The Silence Against Domestic Violence provides survivor-focused support and resources.
Support Line: 1-855-BTS-1777
Hours: 9 a.m.–9 p.m. CST, 7 days a week
Break The Silence Against Domestic Violence
National Domestic Violence Hotline
Call: 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
Text: START to 88788
Online chat: The National Domestic Violence Hotline
Source note for the published blog: The U.S. National Study on Violence Experiences Across the Lifespan (USVEX) was led by Tulane University’s Newcomb Institute and the University of California San Diego. The nationally representative survey included 2,720 adults across all 50 states and was administered by NORC at the University of Chicago between October and December 2025.
