You Can Take Action Today to Help Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Violence
By Esta Soler, FUTURES
June 5, 2025
When Futures Without Violence opened its doors more than 35 years ago, domestic violence was seen as a private, family matter and, in most places, there were few if any shelters or supports.
We joined with survivors and other advocates to change that, over time creating an infrastructure that transformed our country in profound ways, providing urgently needed services and funding prevention that offers the promise of stopping violence before it starts.
The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act and the Violence Against Women Act put the full force of our federal government into efforts to help survivors and stop domestic and dating violence, sexual assault and stalking. Those laws fund services for survivors and their children; support the National Domestic Violence Hotline; bring health care providers, schools, and others into this work; and more. In the years since these laws were enacted, domestic violence against adult women declined by more than 60 percent.
Continuing this progress – making our families, communities, and country safer and stronger – requires continued funding for the programs those laws support.
We will NOT go backward. We’re working every day to continue that funding.
And today, June 5, we are asking you to help. Please join the thousands of people across the country who are participating in a national day of action to raise awareness about the urgent need to protect and increase federal funding for services for domestic violence and sexual assault survivors.
The need is urgent. In a single day last September, the more than 1,700 programs that participated in the National Network to End Domestic Violence’s annual Domestic Violence Counts report:
- Served 79,088 adult victims of domestic violence and their children,
- Answered 26,109 hotline contacts, and
- Educated 16,464 members of their communities.
But another 14,095 requests for help went unmet due to a lack of resources!
Each of those unmet requests could be a survivor with children unable to leave an abusive relationship, at risk for further violence and without vital support needed to recover and heal.
With lives on the line, Congress should act to protect domestic violence and sexual assault funding.
On this national day of action, please contact your members of Congress and urge them to protect domestic and sexual violence funding. Don’t know who your elected officials are? You can look them up here, then call them through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 to say:
- Federal grants are essential to the infrastructure that supports more than five million adult and child survivors annually—providing emergency shelter, legal advocacy, trauma counseling, and other lifesaving services.
- Without federal funding, critical services will vanish—programs will be forced to lay off staff, reduce capacity, or shut down entirely, leaving survivors without support in their time of greatest need.
Let’s ensure that all domestic and sexual violence programs will have the resources to help every survivor who reaches out.
