While U.S. homicide rates have been plummeting, especially in the last year, one nefarious type of murder has been steadily increasing: domestic violence-related killings have been increasing throughout the country. Many are worried that the rise in these killings could be part of a larger trend of domestic violence. Even harder to identify is why these types of deaths are increasing.
‘Make national headlines’
There is no singular database for tracking domestic violence killings, but records from individual cities and states show a near-universal rise. In Chicago, homicides dropped by nearly half between 2021 and 2025, but domestic violence-related deaths in 2025 rose by 15%, according to Chicago Police Department statistics. In Kansas City, Missouri, overall homicides have fallen since 2023, but 2025 marked the “city’s second deadliest year for domestic violence since 2014,” said Jackson County, Missouri, officials in a press release.
Statewide domestic violence killings are also seeing a surge. In Nebraska, at least 30 people “were killed in domestic abuse incidents last year,” said Nebraska Public Media. Overall, there were “89 domestic abuse deaths recorded in Nebraska between July 2022, when tracking began, and December 2025,” with about 56% of the victims being female. In Massachusetts, there were 31 people killed in domestic violence incidents in 2024, according to a report from the state’s Domestic Violence Fatality Review Team, marking a 19% increase from the prior year.
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Sometimes these domestic violence killings “make national headlines,” said The Guardian. Notable cases this year include a shooting in which “eight children were killed and two women were injured in Shreveport, Louisiana,” or another instance “when several people were murdered in rural Oregon and in Billings, Montana.” Domestic violence deaths remain a “devastating and often fatal reality,” Vilma Uribe, the executive director of Massachusetts’ Governor’s Council to Address Sexual Assault, told GBH News.
‘Nearly impossible to pinpoint’
Officials and anti-domestic violence advocates have called for more resources to be pooled into preventing these killings. The “number one need articulated over and over again is housing, and number two is legal support,” Nikhita Ved, the chief programs officer for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told The Guardian. The hotline shows additional evidence of increasing domestic violence; in 2020, it “received nearly 637,000 calls. In 2025, it answered a million,” said The Guardian.
Even in states where overall crime has dropped, like Maine, concerns over domestic violence killings remain. “Very, very frequently, the victim of homicide has told someone in their life, ‘I’m afraid that my partner is going to kill me,’” Francine Stark, the executive director of the Maine Coalition to End Domestic Violence, told WGME-TV Portland. Many people “experience abuse and violence and never bring in the criminal system,” which can allow domestic violence crimes to go unpunished.
Though it is “nearly impossible to pinpoint a single cause for stubbornly high rates of domestic violence homicides,” the “resources to prevent such tragedies are well-known,” Ved told The Guardian. But concerns about funding have arisen during the Trump administration, as officials “cut hundreds of millions in grants from research institutions, and domestic violence prevention and response nonprofits that serve people of color, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities.” These types of cuts are “always devastating,” said Ved, because “this work, it’s always been underfunded.”
