Domestic violence touches far more lives than many people realize — and new data from North Carolina puts that reality into stark relief. A fresh analysis of state crime records shows that family violence is not only widespread, but stubbornly persistent even as overall violent crime trends downward.
A report from North Carolina’s Criminal Justice Analysis Center, drawing on data collected between 2020 and 2025, reveals that domestic violence was a factor in the majority of murders involving women and girls in the state. Across all violent crimes committed against individuals, roughly four in ten cases had a domestic violence component.
One of the report’s most striking findings is the contrast between general crime trends and family violence specifically. While violent crime in North Carolina has broadly declined since the pandemic, domestic and family violence cases have held steady — showing no similar drop.
Who Is Most Affected
The data identifies certain groups as disproportionately represented among victims. Adults between the ages of 25 and 34, women, and Black residents appeared most frequently in the victim records examined by researchers. These patterns point to where intervention and support services may be most urgently needed.
At the same time, the resources available to help those victims have been shrinking. The North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported that funding for victims’ services has fallen sharply in recent years, driven in large part by federal budget cuts. This year, the state received $41 million for victims’ services — less than half the amount it received in 2018.
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