Of the 70,136 people who contacted Virginia’s sexual and domestic violence hotlines in 2025, 66% reported that their earliest experience of violence occurred before the age of 18. That statistic illuminates something prevention advocates have long understood: the conditions that allow violence to happen take root early, and addressing them requires sustained, intentional work that starts long before a crisis ever occurs. In 2025, 20 Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies implemented 536 prevention strategies across Virginia — reaching schools, community centers, workplaces, and organizations with programs designed to change the attitudes, norms, and behaviors that make violence possible. This work is not a reaction to last year’s numbers. It is part of a long-term commitment to the understanding that crisis response and prevention are two equally essential halves of the same mission. This is the sixth post in our series on the Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report.
Prevention and Advocacy Are Both Essential to End Violence
When most people think about Virginia’s Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies, they think about advocates supporting survivors on hotlines, in shelters, and beside them in courtrooms and emergency rooms. That crisis response work is essential, and it is documented throughout this series on the Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report. (see links to other blogs in the series below)
Crisis advocacy work is invaluable, but just as important to the movement to end sexual and domestic violence is programming that garners far less attention: prevention.
Prevention and advocacy represent a continuum of support and change. Advocates help survivors heal today. Preventionists work to create a tomorrow without violence. Both are necessary. And the 2025 data make a compelling case for why neither can afford to be underfunded or overlooked.
What the Data Tell Us About When Violence Begins
Of the 70,136 people who contacted Virginia’s hotlines in 2025, 66% reported that their earliest experience of violence occurred before the age of 18.
That statistic carries a significant implication: the conditions that allow violence to happen — the attitudes, the norms, the behaviors that enable coercion and control — are not forming in adulthood. They are forming early. They go unchallenged. And over time, they escalate.
With two-thirds of survivors first encountering violence before they finished high school, reaching people when they’re in childhood or adolescence is essential. As such, prevention work that starts in schools, that reaches young people before harmful attitudes and norms take root, is not a supplemental program. It’s a public health imperative.
What Virginia’s Prevention Work Looked Like in 2025
In 2025, 20 Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies implemented 536 prevention strategies across Virginia in a variety of settings and with a wide range of groups.
Where prevention is happening
Nearly 4 out of 5 prevention strategies (79.9%) took place in schools or community-based agencies. These are the places where young people are and the places where the data tells us prevention efforts need to be. The 536 strategies were implemented across 591 total settings, including:
- 292 schools (47 elementary, 117 middle, 103 high school, 25 college/university)
- 109 community centers (such as Boys and Girls Clubs)
- 89 other settings
- 28 local or state businesses or organizations
- 26 neighborhood or geographic areas
- 26 governmental agencies
- 21 churches or other religious institutions
What prevention strategies look like
Prevention strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Virginia’s preventionists use a public health framework that recognizes that violence occurs across multiple levels of society and requires working at all of them.
In 2025:
- 88% of strategies operated at the individual and relationship level, including:
- Multisession educational programs (54% of all strategies), reaching 12,327 people across 1,866 sessions
- Training professionals and stakeholders (19%)
- Single-session educational presentations (18%)
- Public awareness campaigns (13%)
- 12% of strategies operated at the community and societal level, including:
- Coalition building and community mobilization (8%)
- Policy change efforts (more than 1%)
- Media campaigns, social norms change, and changes to the physical environment (each approximately 1%)
The imbalance between individual/relationship-level and community/societal-level strategies reflects real constraints in funding and capacity, not a lack of understanding about what comprehensive prevention requires. Changing culture means changing systems, norms, and environments — and as resources and reporting infrastructure grow, so will Virginia’s ability to expand and document this work.
What Prevention Strategies Address
Research has identified the risk factors that make violence more likely and the protective factors that help prevent it. Virginia’s SDVAs work to address both.
Risk factors addressed by Virginia’s prevention strategies in 2025 include:
- The belief that violence and coercion are accepted and effective means to an end (addressed by 75% of strategies)
- Absence of role models who promote healthy relationships (67%)
- Lack of social development skills (51%)
- Belief in rigid, stereotyped gender roles (39%)
- Community norms that protect family or peer group “privacy” regardless of harm (32%)
Protective factors strengthened by Virginia’s prevention strategies include:
- Skills to experience healthy sexuality and engage in healthy relationships (77%)
- Role models who teach positive interpersonal relationship skills (43%)
- Personal belief in gender equality, attitudes, and behaviors consistent with that belief (41%)
- Personal commitment to caring, equality, and social justice (40%)
The Case for Investing in Prevention
Crisis response will always be necessary. As long as violence occurs, survivors will need advocates who can help them navigate the aftermath safely. But a community that invests only in crisis response is a community that has accepted violence as inevitable.
It is not.
The attitudes, norms, and behaviors that enable coercion and violence in close relationships are not fixed features of human nature. They can be challenged with intentional, connected, and continuous prevention programming that starts early and continues across the lifespan. The 536 strategies documented in this report are evidence that Virginia’s advocates and preventionists are doing exactly that work — in schools, in community centers, in workplaces, in faith communities.
What they need is the investment to expand it. Virginia invests significantly less in prevention than in crisis response, and prevention funding has been squeezed by the same VOCA cuts that have reduced crisis services. Building a Virginia where fewer survivors ever need a hotline or a shelter bed requires treating prevention as the essential infrastructure it is, not as a supplement to crisis response, but as a necessary partner.
A Closing Note on What This Report Series Has Documented
Over six posts, we have moved through the full picture the Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report paints:
- The scale of lifesaving work Virginia’s advocates delivered in 2025
- The funding crisis that threatens their ability to keep delivering it
- The remarkable outcomes survivors achieve when they can access services
- The patterns of perpetration that prevention and response must address
- The lethal danger when firearms enter the picture
- And now, the prevention work underway to change the conditions that allow violence to happen
This work is being done by professionals across Virginia who show up every day, not because the system is working, but because survivors need them to. They deserve the resources, the recognition, and the policy environment that match the scale and importance of what they do.
Read the Full Report
- Download the full Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report (PDF)
- Read the official press release (PDF)
What percentage of Virginia survivors first experienced violence before age 18? Of the 70,136 people who contacted Virginia’s sexual and domestic violence hotlines in 2025, 66% reported that their earliest experience of violence occurred before age 18.
How many prevention strategies did Virginia’s SDVAs implement in 2025? 20 Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies implemented 536 prevention strategies across Virginia in 2025, reaching 591 total settings.
What does primary prevention of sexual and domestic violence look like? Primary prevention works to stop violence before it happens by building healthy relationship skills, shifting harmful attitudes and norms about gender and power, creating environments where violence is not tolerated, and establishing laws and policies that promote equity.
Where are Virginia’s prevention programs being implemented? In 2025, nearly 4 in 5 prevention strategies (79.9%) occurred in schools or community-based agencies. Schools accounted for 292 settings, with programs at the elementary, middle, high school, and college levels.
How many people did Virginia’s multisession prevention programs reach in 2025? Multisession educational programs — the most common type of prevention strategy — reached 12,327 people across 1,866 sessions in 2025.
Why does prevention focus so heavily on young people? Because 66% of survivors who contacted Virginia’s hotlines in 2025 reported that their earliest experience of violence occurred before age 18. The attitudes and norms that enable violence develop early; reaching young people before harmful patterns take hold is the most effective point of intervention
Where can survivors in Virginia find help? Call the Virginia Statewide Sexual and Domestic Violence Hotline at 800.838.8238, text 804.793.9999, or chat at vadata.org. Free, confidential, 24/7/365.
This is the sixth post in our series on the Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report. Read Post 1: the full report overview, Post 2: what survivors say about the impact of services, Post 3: the funding crisis, Post 4: what we know about the perpetration of violence, Post 5: firearms and intimate partner violence, and Post 7: VAdata.
You Deserve Safety and Support
Virginia Statewide Sexual and Domestic Violence Hotline Call: 800.838.8238 | Text: 804.793.9999 | Chat: www.vadata.org/chat Free. Confidential. 24 hours a day. 7 days a week. 365 days a year.
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