The headlines this month have been unrelenting: women reportedly killed by husbands, boyfriends, the fathers of their children.
In the shadow of these high-profile incidents, experts and public officials said, are countless others where victims’ pain often goes unnoticed and unaddressed, especially in the nation’s capital, where federal data shows women are more likely to experience domestic violence than any state in the country.
It’s what prompted Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro to announce new legislation Friday aimed at curtailing domestic violence in the city.
The Protecting Victims Amendment Act of 2026 would establish stronger penalties for repeat offenders, enhance punishments for perpetrators who knowingly assault a pregnant woman, or commit a violent act in the presence of a child. If enacted into law the bill would also allow judges more power to enforce stay-away orders and jail abusers who pose an active threat while a criminal case is working its way through the criminal justice system.
“All crime is unacceptable, and all violence is unacceptable,” Bowser said Friday. “But there is something particularly devastating about violence between people inflicted by people closest to them.”
The city has seen a drop of around 50 percent in homicides compared with this time last year, according to data from D.C. police. But domestic violence cases are driving a notable uptick in cases of assault with a deadly weapon, police said, and account for a quarter of all homicides the District has seen so far this year.
Police in the District have recently responded to several violent incidents that they said were domestic in nature.
On Wednesday, a man and a woman were shot in the Anacostia neighborhood of D.C. by the woman’s ex-boyfriend, who then took his own life, police said. In February, Rayven Edwards, 34, was killed in her Glover Park home by her 3-year-old son’s father, who then took the toddler to stay with a relative, before killing himself after a police pursuit and crash in Southeast Washington, police said.
Bowser said her office is working with the D.C. Council to get a hearing on the bill and “get a sense” of “how quickly this can move.”
Pirro said her office is “on track” to file 360 felony strangulation charges in the District before the end of the year. A person who tries to strangle their partner in a violent assault is seven times as likely to kill their partner in a future domestic incident, according to a 2009 studypublished in the National Library of Medicine.
“At some point we have to take a stand as a society and say, we’re not going to accept this anymore,” Pirro said at the news conference. “It stuns me that in the District of Columbia that there is not a separate crime when a child witnesses the extreme violence that occurs between parents that may lead up to a homicide. … This is learned behavior. The home becomes a place where that learned behavior spills out onto the streets.”
For survivors like Sharon Wise, every little step toward making D.C. safer for those who have been harmed by their partners is significant.
Wise grew up in an abusive home in Chicago and moved to the District in the mid-1990s with a violent partner who ultimately put her in the hospital after throwing her off a second-floor balcony. She said it wasn’t until a social worker at the hospital connected her with the My Sister’s Place domestic violence shelter that she thought to seek support.
Now an artist and an advocate, Wise speaks openly about what it means to be a survivor and have “a membership card” to a club no one asks to be in.
“I couldn’t leave him because I was new in town and I didn’t know anyone and I had my 9-year-old son with me. I had no support,” Wise said. “For me it was all about how do I protect this relationship with this abuser?”
Advocates with D.C. Safe, a nonprofit that coordinates emergency victim services in response to requests from federal and local agencies, said the volume of calls for assistance has stayed relatively steady since the peak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when they doubled in the first two weeks of lockdown.
What’s changed, they said, is the intensity of violence behind the calls.
“We’re seeing a lot more survivors who have been shot or stabbed,” said Kylie Hogan, the nonprofit’s director of systems advocacy who also oversees its call center. “I think the drop in crime overall has really opened the curtains for people to see the severity of what we’re dealing with when it comes to domestic assaults.”
Interim D.C. police chief Jeffery W. Carroll said Friday that the agency has redoubled its outreach in communities where domestic violence is trending up. Domestic assaults are driving an uptick in assaults with a deadly weapon across huge swaths of the city’s Northeast, Southeast and Southwest areas. In the 6th District, which includes parts of Southeast and Northeast Washington, domestic assaults with a deadly weapon have increased by 186 percent compared with last year, police said, and make up nearly 90 percent of all such assaults in that part of the city.
“A lot of people don’t report domestic violence until it rises to a certain level,” Carroll said. “So usually it’s something that has played out over a period of time. … So a lot of times for that person to even take the first step of calling 911 or reaching out for assistance, it’s a big deal.”
Some domestic violence cases across the country in recent weeks have cast a brighter spotlight on the issue. This month, a vice mayor in Florida was shot and killed by her husband. Two mothers were shot in Shreveport, Louisiana, by their ex, who killed eight of their children in a rampage before taking his own life.
Then, there was the death of Cerina Fairfax, who was shot by her husband, former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, amid escalating tensions surrounding their divorce proceedings.
The case underscored how domestic violence can happen even in the quiet suburbs of Northern Virginia.
In Fairfax County, where the murder-suicide took place while their teenage children were in the house, half of the six homicides committed in the county so far this year were domestic in nature, according to police reports.
Experts point to massive amounts of job loss in the region — D.C. has had the highest unemploymentrate in the country for months, according to federal data. Intensifying federal immigration enforcement that has contributed to a climate of fear and stress in immigrant communities has also been a factor, with prevalence of guns in the city making matters worse for those already living with abuse.
Kelly Sampson, senior policy counsel at Brady United, a grassroots organization fighting to prevent gun violence, said that while many people associate gun violence with mass shootings, it is “extremely common” in intimate partner violence.
“That is a true picture of what gun violence looks like every single day,” she said. “Bringing a firearm to your home makes it much more likely that you or someone in your home will be harmed by the firearm.”
In Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, Maryland’s two most populous counties, domestic-related homicides are going down.
So far this year, neither jurisdiction has investigated any domestic-related homicides, according to data from each department. Yearly statistics compiled by the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence show that in 2024, the most recent year for which data totals were available, an estimated 63 percent of the domestic violence homicides involved a gun.
Victims also died by stabbings, a car, blunt trauma and strangulation. That same year, “leaving the relationship” was identified as a factor in 41 percent of the homicides, “highlighting the heightened danger survivors face during separation,” the group said.
“The headlines we’ve seen bring attention to domestic violence, but they fade, and the impact on a victim’s family doesn’t,” said Lisa B. Winjum, the executive director of My Sister’s Place.
In D.C., Wise said, officials should go beyond punitive measures that target abusers. She said public officials need to integrate proactive approaches to educate young people and offer mental health support for those who have already witnessed domestic abuse at home.
Wise, now 63, recalled seeing her father attack her mother when she was just 4 years old, and feeling a responsibility even then to step in.
“Growing up in an environment where your caregiver is also the abuser, the monster, the bogeyman, it can give you a really unhealthy sense of what safe actually feels like, what a healthy relationship actually is,” Wise said.
It’s a struggle that has continued her whole life, she said. During the pandemic, Wise struck up a romantic relationship with a friend who had been staying with her amid the rampant job loss that accompanied the coronavirus outbreak. Soon, she said, he began to threaten and manipulate her. As the relationship grew more abusive, she found herself slipping back into old patterns.
“I didn’t tell anybody because I was so embarrassed. I have a master’s degree now. I’m living on my own. I pay my credit cards on time. I was sitting on the board of My Sister’s Place. How can I tell someone that I need help? Again?” Wise said.
Eventually, she said, she told a friend on the board and was able to escape the abuse and the relationship.
“How many generations are going to inherit this membership card to the survivor’s club?” Wise said. “Even after all these cases, all these women killed, the thing is, this could happen again tomorrow.”
Dan Morse and Juan Benn Jr. contributed to this report.
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