The new 2025 United States Violence Experiences Survey lands like a door kicked open. Fifty-two percent of American adults report physical violence in their lifetimes. Forty-nine percent report sexual violence. Among women, the sexual-violence rate reaches 68 percent. Sixty-one percent of women and 45 percent of men report intimate partner violence. One in five women has survived intimate partner violence severe enough to kill her: beating, burning, strangulation, a knife, a gun.
These are not statistics floating above the country. They are bodies behind locked doors. They are throats that close when the key turns. They are women learning the sound of a particular footstep in the hall.
Anita Raj, executive director of Tulane’s Newcomb Institute and a co-author of the survey, said crime reports capture only a fraction of what happens. “We also don’t want to find out about it at that point because if we’re finding out at that point, the risk for fatality has now gone up.” Her co-author, University of California, San Diego political scientist Jakana Thomas, called for “a broader strategy that also addresses economic hardship, mental health and other forms of social inequality associated with violence.”
The survey reached 2,720 adults in all 50 states between October and December 2025. NORC at the University of Chicago administered it in English and Spanish. It asked what people report having lived through, not only what police recorded, what hospitals coded, or what survived another person’s decision not to believe them.
Three days before its release, a woman, her daughter, her son, and his girlfriend were stabbed to death in Houma, Louisiana. A six-year-old was wounded. The man arrested had reportedly fathered a child with one of the victims. Louisiana’s health department had warned two years earlier that intimate partner violence was “a significant public health concern” in the state. The Louisiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence has noted that Louisiana’s rate of women murdered by men has historically exceeded the national average.
You are not a man who lost control. You are a man who used a blade to silence four people and a child’s body was in the way. You had a child with one of them. You held the knife anyway. You do not get the word “tragedy.” You do not get the word “incident.” You are a man who killed the people closest to him and wounded the smallest one in the room. That is not a breakdown. That is a choice you made with your hands, and your hands will not be clean of it.
The pattern is not mysterious. Adults evicted in the previous year were seven times more likely to report recent physical violence, three times more likely to report recent sexual violence, and nearly five times more likely to report recent intimate partner violence. The inability to meet basic needs is not a character flaw. It is a room with no second door.
The federal answer has been withdrawal. The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence, documented that the Trump administration had terminated, redirected, or delayed more than $1 billion in federal grants tied to gun-violence prevention, public safety, mental health, and related work. The same administration that speaks of law and order has cut into the hands trying to stop the bleeding.
Donald, you do not get to call the wound a threat while removing the bandages.
The survey’s findings are grim and specific. Five percent of adults experienced physical violence in the past year. Three percent reported physical abuse without a weapon. Seven percent experienced sexual violence in the past year, and the study notes that sexual harassment accounted for much of that violence. Among women who experienced physical violence in the past year, 48 percent reported anxiety or depression. Among men, 26 percent did. Among those who experienced sexual violence, 42 percent of women and 39 percent of men reported anxiety or depression. Four percent of women and 10 percent of men who experienced recent sexual violence reported suicidality.
Only 10 percent of women and 17 percent of men who experienced physical violence filed a formal complaint.
The silence is not empty. It is built.
Much of the violence happens at home. Sixty-nine percent of women’s physical violence occurs there. For men, the survey reports 34 percent for physical violence and 64 percent for sexual violence in the relevant location measures. Strangers account for most sexual violence against men, at 66 percent, while strangers account for most sexual violence against women in public spaces, at 55 percent. The locations are intimate. The perpetrators are often known. The reporting is rare. The help is scarce.
A complaint is not a wound healed. A number is not a locked door opened. A report is not the woman who is still listening for the key.
I will not let the official fraction become the whole truth. The fraction that gets captured is the fraction that gets addressed. The rest is left to fester, to repeat, to escalate. The body keeps the record when the institution declines to.
Main Street Independent has already documented the upward drift in domestic-violence killings even as overall homicides fall. The trend lines point in opposite directions because violence behind closed doors does not respond to the same deterrence that works on the street. It answers to economic security, mental-health care, housing stability, and the presence of someone who will believe a woman when she says she is afraid.
Those are not abstractions. Housing instability places the body under a ceiling it may lose. Mental-health neglect turns sleep into a watch post. Economic precarity makes departure a luxury. The hand reaches for the phone. The hand stops. The throat closes. The person who could have helped is waiting for a cleaner report.
The study is not a surprise. It is a confirmation of what survivors have always known and what policymakers have repeatedly chosen not to see. Half the country is bleeding, and the people in charge have made a habit of walking past.
Donald, your mouth is dry now. Your throat catches on the next swallow. The pressure sits behind your sternum. You are reading the word fatality as if it were a policy term. It is not. It is a body that did not come home. It is a six-year-old carried out wounded. It is a woman whose danger became legible only after the knife had finished speaking.
You can call the survey advocacy. You can call it a funding document. You can question its reach, its categories, its policy conclusions. You cannot call the bodies a talking point and then remove the people trying to count them.
The numbers will keep arriving because the violence keeps arriving. The study will keep confirming what power keeps postponing. Half the country is bleeding, and the people in charge have made a habit of walking past.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 911. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE. In the United Kingdom, call 0808 2000 247. In Australia, call 1800 737 732. Those numbers are not a theory. They are staffed because real people need help before the report, before the press release, before the fatality.
The rest of the apparatus can wait. The door cannot.