Domestic Violence Awareness Month Expert Interview & Advocacy Guide

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“About 10 percent of people who experience violence and victimization will actually go seek formal services.”

Bethany Backes, PhD, MSW, MPH, Associate Professor and Director of the Violence Against Women Faculty Cluster, University of Central Florida

The statistics for domestic violence in the United States are staggering. Each year, more than 10 million people in this country experience domestic violence. One in three women and one in four men have been physically abused by an intimate partner.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, domestic violence is defined as “the willful intimidation, physical assault, battery, sexual assault, and/or other abusive behavior as part of a systematic pattern of power and control perpetrated by one intimate partner against another.”

Also called intimate partner violence, domestic violence has more than just physical consequences. Victims have a higher rate of depression and suicidal behavior. Collectively, victims lose eight million days of paid work each year, and 21 to 60 percent lose their jobs because of the abuse.

Even fewer survivors are seeking help than those numbers suggest. Federal funding cuts and shifting policy have made some agencies pull back on the populations they can openly serve, and Dr. Backes says that’s pushing already-vulnerable survivors further from services rather than closer to them.

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month (DVAM). While domestic violence may seem like an obvious issue, it really isn’t. People’s understanding of what constitutes domestic violence varies, which can lead to many serious issues being overlooked. DVAM was first recognized in 1987 and was federally designated by Congress in 1989. It is celebrated by federal, state, and local agencies, as well as non-profits and NGOs, who work with victims.

Counselors, psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists, and the general public can use the month of October to educate themselves on domestic violence issues as well as help increase the visibility of this ongoing crisis. Continue reading to take the first step in learning more.

Meet the Expert: Bethany Backes, PhD, MSW, MPH

Dr. Bethany Backes is a nationally recognized expert on violence against women and an associate professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where she directs the interdisciplinary Violence Against Women Faculty Cluster.

Prior to academia, she spent a decade at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), leading the agency’s Violence Against Women research portfolio and overseeing national studies on sexual assault forensics, domestic violence homicide, and criminal justice responses to intimate partner violence.

Dr. Backes holds a PhD in social work from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and a master’s in social work and a master’s in public health, both from the University of Michigan. Her current research centers on survivor help-seeking and interventions that improve survivor safety, including a Department of Justice-funded study on domestic violence transitional housing and a multi-year study on domestic violence lethality during the pretrial period. She serves on the editorial boards of Violence Against Women and the Journal of Family Violence.

Dr. Backes spoke to CounselingSchools.com in 2026.

Dr. Krista Chronister is a professor and researcher at the University of Oregon in the College of Education. She earned her doctorate at the University of Oregon in counseling psychology and is a state-licensed psychologist in Oregon. Her research primarily centers on how partner violence in both adults and adolescents influences future career development and the economic impacts that it carries.

Since 2005, Dr. Chronister has published seven papers about her research in domestic violence. In 2013, she published research on a new intervention method called ACCESS, a community-centric approach. ACCESS is now utilized nationally, both in English and Spanish.

She spoke to CounselingSchools.com in 2021.

2026 Update: How Funding Cuts and Survivor Autonomy Are Reshaping the Field

Since this piece was first published in 2021, the funding and policy landscape for domestic violence services has shifted considerably. Dr. Bethany Backes spoke with CounselingSchools.com in 2026 about how federal cuts are straining services, what’s genuinely improved in how the field treats survivors, and what actually helps during October.

How Federal Funding Cuts Are Straining Services

A lot of domestic violence funding has been diverted or cut by federal and state policy in the past few years. “I only lost a little bit of grant funding, but I know several colleagues who had their whole project shut down because they looked at LGBTQ populations or other words that were in their grant proposals,” says Dr. Backes.

The service landscape depends heavily on federal dollars, so a freeze or redirection at that level reverberates fast. Dr. Backes has seen agencies told to scrub their websites of any reference to the populations they serve. “You need to take down any reference to immigrants on your website, or to this population on your website,” she says, describing the conditions attached to some federal funds.

The effect compounds an existing problem since most survivors never seek formal help. “About 10 percent of people who experience violence and victimization will actually go seek formal services,” Dr. Backes says. Survivors who are already more vulnerable, she explains, become even less likely to reach out if they’re unsure whether they’ll be served or fear being penalized further for asking.

A Decade of Progress: Trauma-Informed, Survivor-Centered Care

Dr. Backes points to a real shift away from the old “why doesn’t she just leave” framing. “We’re much better now at meeting the survivor where they’re at, where we say survivors know what’s safest for them,” she says. “They know what their needs are right now.”

That shift extends to how the field treats trauma history. Survivors of domestic violence often have also experienced sexual violence, stalking, or childhood trauma, and treating those experiences separately misses the full picture. “I think we’re much better at looking at the history of trauma of that person to be able to meet those needs,” Dr. Backes explains, “where traditionally we very much treated people in silos.”

Coordinating Care: Advocates, Legal Aid, and the Paperwork of Rebuilding a Life

Where services exist, advocates function like case managers increasingly, pulling together SNAP benefits, housing, and legal help so survivors aren’t left to navigate every system alone. “The advocate can really kind of coordinate these things, almost more like a case manager,” Dr. Backes says.

Legal support remains one of the biggest gaps, especially past the initial protective order. Divorce, custody, and immigration cases such as T and U visas (specific visa categories for survivors of crime and trafficking) take months or years, and low-cost legal help hasn’t kept pace with demand. “We just don’t have enough low-cost or free legal assistance on the ground, and our civil legal aid is also underfunded,” she says.

Dr. Backes also points to a detail that’s easy to overlook: survivors often leave without any documentation. “One of the common things was, ‘I don’t have my ID. I had to leave everything at the house,'” she says. Replacing a birth certificate, license, and Social Security card can take weeks, delaying a survivor’s ability to get a job or apply for benefits at the moment they need it most.

What Actually Moves the Needle During Awareness Month

Donation drives help, but only when they’re built around what agencies actually request. “Actually looking at the list of what agencies need, as opposed to saying, ‘oh, I have all the stuff in my house, I’m going to drop that off,'” is what makes a difference, Dr. Backes says. Shelters typically need basics like clean underwear and bras in a range of sizes, not whatever happens to be sitting in a closet.

Community education matters too, even the parts that can feel performative. But Dr. Backes says the single biggest thing ordinary people can do is how they respond when someone discloses abuse to them: “If someone discloses to you their experience of violence and your first reaction is not the most positive or supportive, they’re most likely going to stop there,” she explains. “They’re probably not going to tell anyone else.” Believing survivors the first time they speak up, she says, is often what determines whether they seek any further help at all.

Advice for Those Entering the Field

Dr. Backes tells students headed into counseling or social work to clarify their own motivations first, especially if they’re drawn to the work by personal experience. “It can’t be about you anymore,” she says. Staying client-centered means recognizing that what worked for you may not work for the person in front of you.

“You cannot be helpful to someone else if you’re burned out or you’re experiencing vicarious trauma,” she adds. She also reminds students that their degree doesn’t lock them into one path for life: “Your degree is versatile. You can recreate yourself and have five different jobs over the course of your life, all in different ways, all working with the same population.”

Rethinking How We Talk to Young People About Healthy Relationships

Dr. Backes’s own research has shifted more toward primary prevention, meaning work that happens before violence occurs, and she says schools are behind. States like Florida still offer little sex education or consent education, even as behaviors like peer monitoring get normalized among teens as a form of stalking. “We really need to be talking to our young people more,” she says. “We normalize a lot of this behavior in youth.”

In her classes, Dr. Backes reads students a passage from Twilight without telling them the source, then asks them to identify the abusive behavior. “Let’s think about what abuse we’re seeing here,” she tells them. Students are consistently stunned to recognize stalking and controlling behavior they’d absorbed as romantic.

She’s also watched choking and strangulation become normalized in young adult media and online content, despite the danger. “Even the Kinsey Institute has said there’s no safe way to do that,” she notes. Her conclusion is the same one driving her prevention work broadly: schools need to start these conversations far earlier than they currently do. “We need to work with them younger, like from elementary school on, to really talk about consent, positive behavior, and healthy relationships.”

From the Archives: What Dr. Krista Chronister Shared in 2021

Why Domestic Violence Awareness Month Matters

“It is our assumption that we already know about domestic violence. That is, in fact, why we need awareness,” says Dr. Chronister. “Because if you look at the statistics of what communities understand that domestic violence is, how much they utilize services, and how much they’re aware of their rights under certain federal and state policies, the awareness is actually quite minimal and confused.”

The Los Angeles Police Department has compiled a list of why domestic violence victims may not reach out for help. Amongst the reasons are believing that authorities won’t help, cultural or religious constraints, as well as a belief that the victim deserved or earned the abuse. Increasing awareness around what exactly domestic abuse is can help address many of these hesitations.

Dr. Chronister also believes that many times it can even be as basic as not knowing what constitutes abuse: “I think that with each generation you cannot be too confident that people actually know what behaviors you’re talking about when you’re talking about intimate partner violence,” she says. “We often don’t even have a shared definition across communities, or even have services that meet those communities in the same effective way that we’ve generally assumed works.”

The Centers for Disease Control has identified domestic abuse as a serious public health concern. According to the CDC, “all forms of intimate partner violence are preventable. Strategies to promote healthy, respectful, and nonviolent relationships are an important part of prevention.” A critical first component to these strategies lies in general domestic violence awareness communication.

How Has Covid-19 Affected Domestic Violence

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a devastating effect on domestic violence. “We know that worldwide, including the United States, domestic violence rates, and the rates of reporting and seeking emergency shelter have skyrocketed,” says Dr. Chronister. “We also are very aware of how abusive partners have used Covid, and Covid mandates to abuse further. They have used mandates to not allow women to wear masks or threaten to create unsafe environments for their children in terms of Covid exposure.”

In fact, the increase in domestic violence has been called “a pandemic within a pandemic” by numerous publications and researchers. A study published in 2021 in the American Behavioral Scientist journal noted that “key public health strategies like social distancing, social isolation, and stay-at-home orders have slowed the spread of Covid-19, but have created ideal conditions for intimate partner violence to flourish.” This study surveyed 374 participants over ten weeks at the start of the pandemic and “the findings suggest that in pandemic disasters, the efforts to corral and contain the virus might inadvertently contribute to a dramatic rise in intimate partner violence.”

Covid-19 also created a whole new way for abusers to exert their control. Dr. Chronister shares that this can include “sharing with family, friends, and coworkers that their partner has Covid when they maybe do not, or revealing a Covid diagnosis and lying, saying that the partner is not taking good care. Abusers are using Covid as an excuse to further isolate women from resources and family and friends. So the tactics have increased, and the number of emergency reports that women need help has increased worldwide.”

The Importance of Addressing Career Concerns

The core of Dr. Chronister’s work is on survivors’ vocational and economic growth. “The women’s movement around ending domestic violence came from a very grassroots powerful history. And that history was really associated with the most severe physical violence and getting women and children out of their dangerous homes,” shares Dr. Chronister. “What up until about two decades ago we failed to study and acknowledge how domestic violence impacts women’s actual daily work and their career development over time.”

“What we weren’t talking about was the daily ability for victims to go to work and perform and earn money, be promoted, gain social connections, and social capital at work. What we are concerned with is the long-term impact on advancement in careers and dreams and fulfillment potential over time,” she says. “Careers are something of the privileged: those who have the safety, time, and resources to think about their dreams and to pursue them. We have not historically afforded women in our services that time and safety.”

As research has moved from universities to implementation, programs are working to address these concerns. For example, Sanctuary for Families, New York’s largest nonprofit for victims of domestic abuse, has implemented an Economic Empowerment Program (EEP) that is centered on career and technology training. Over 88 percent of participants graduate from this program and on average have wages 57 percent higher than the state minimum wage. The EEP specifically looks to keep victims out of low-paying jobs and trains them to find living-wage career-track jobs.

To Dr. Chronister, these higher-paying, career-oriented jobs are critical to keeping victims safe from their abusers: “When we told victims to find work so that they could get out of their abusive situation, we usually handed them classified ads. And those usually were lower education, lower-paying work opportunities with little room for advancement,” she says.

Often, these jobs are hard to keep or don’t provide enough to live independently. “We were encouraging them to find lower-paying jobs that actually perpetuated cycles of abuse. Because six months later, they don’t have a job that affords them the economic resources to stay away from their abusive partner,” she says.

How Counselors, Social Workers, Psychiatrists, and Psychologists Can Help

First and foremost, Dr. Chronister believes that “those who are working with these communities, who see the limitations of our current social service structures, have to be empowered to be advocates. We have to create space where they can speak up and help change the systems from the bottom to the top.” This is critical as there is a gap in the types of services that domestic violence victims need and the kinds of services being provided.

“I think what the pandemic has shown us is that our brick-and-mortar, individually based services where women and their families have to come to us to receive services don’t work,” she says. “They haven’t worked for a really long time for a lot of communities—and they certainly don’t work during a public health crisis like Covid-19.”

“Who it is not working for are those communities who have a higher stigma for seeking services such as counseling and social work services, who have a very high cultural value for privacy, who’ve experienced intense racism and discrimination from social services and are very hesitant to utilize them,” she says.

But new solutions are emerging that are working well for these populations. Dr. Chronister shares, “They’re network-oriented. With every contact that you have with a survivor, you can use practices to engage their other network members. And vice versa: with every contact you have with a network member, you’re using them, educating them, and building relationships with them to help them engage their survivor in services and help. These are very concrete network-based practices.”

While training for social service providers on network-based care for victims is essential, small changes can be implemented immediately to interactions to better serve their clients. It can actually be pretty simple to put this practice into action.

“If you have an individual survivor who calls the crisis line or calls for an appointment, do you invite their family members? When you have the individual survivor in the room who came for an emergency appointment, do you ask who in their life they trust and who is supportive of them? Do you offer to call them right now to talk to them together and create a safety plan?” asks Dr. Chronister. Each of these small questions can help victims feel safe and networked.

Resources For Domestic Violence Awareness Month

Here is a list of resources for counselors, therapists, social workers, and other mental health care providers to learn more about domestic violence and also as resources for any victims they serve. Many of these organizations provide direct services as well.

National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV): This advocacy organization has an extremely active public policy office that promotes legislation and policies to protect domestic violence victims. They also have extensive educational resources, hold an annual conference, and broadcast webinars on a variety of topics.
National Domestic Violence Hotline: This free service used to be just a 1-800 number but now includes phone support, online chat, and texting to victims of domestic violence. It is available 24/7 and is completely confidential. They also offer online resources such as how to identify abuse, make a safety plan, or reach out for help.
National Resource Center on Domestic Violence (NRCDV): The NRCDV is a “comprehensive source of information for those wanting to educate themselves and help others on the many issues related to domestic violence.” They work to improve community response to domestic violence incidents and prevention.

Kimmy Gustafson

Writer

At CounselingSchools.com, Kimmy Gustafson’s expertly crafted articles delve into the world of counseling and mental health, providing valuable insights and guidance to readers since 2020. In addition to feature pieces and interviews, she keeps the state licensing tables current. Kimmy has been a freelance writer for more than a decade, writing hundreds of articles on a wide variety of topics such as startups, nonprofits, healthcare, kiteboarding, the outdoors, and higher education. She is passionate about seeing the world and has traveled to over 27 countries. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon. When not working, she can be found outdoors, parenting, kiteboarding, or cooking.