Domestic violence isn’t just an adult issue. Or a private matter. It is not a “victimless crime,” though it is often a “family issue.” Statistics compiled on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice and the F.B.I. suggest that about 1.5 million incidents of family violence¹ take place across the country each year². Of that number, roughly 85 percent involve the victimization of women by “intimate partners.”³ Though these incidents have begun to spill more and more often into the public eye, domestic violence remains a crime that occurs primarily in the home, often in the presence of children.

Children are often the collateral damage of domestic violence. “The maltreatment of children and violence against women often go hand in hand”, U.S. Justice Department researchers note.⁴ What that means for children across the country is that often they are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Roughly four out of every 10 female victims of “intimate partner violence” live in “households with children under age 12.”⁵ According to law enforcement officials, “[a]s many as half a million children may be encountered by police during domestic violence arrests.”⁶

Domestic violence remains a serious social problem in Chicago. “If the story of domestic violence in Chicago were told in numbers, this is what it would look like: In 2006, a total of 204,729 domestic violence - related calls were recorded across the City of Chicago.”⁷ That means there were about 561 calls for help a day that year. Despite these calls, 21 domestic violence-related murders of “intimate partners” and six child abuse-related murders were recorded that year.⁸ City of Chicago officials note that 15 fewer adults and three fewer children were killed in domestic violence-related incidents in 2006 than during the year before. But domestic violence remains a serious threat to the overall health of women and children.

At Rainbow House, we mend families. Since 1982, Rainbow House has provided critical intervention, compassionate care, legal assistance, therapeutic solutions, educational outreach and consistent, seamless support to women and children across the City of Chicago whose lives have been shattered by domestic violence. For more than a quarter of a century, we have been committed to the goal of reducing incidence of domestic violence and the devastating, often traumatic, impact that goes with it.