How Does Virginia Know What It Knows About Sexual and Domestic Violence? Meet VAdata.

Six Posts of Data. One System Behind All of It.

Over the course of this series, we have shared a lot of numbers. 27,898 survivors served. 309,922 hours of crisis response and advocacy. 664 unmet requests for emergency shelter. A 54% drop in federal VOCA funding. Firearms involved in 44% of domestic violence cases where weapon use was assessed. Two-thirds of hotline callers whose first experience of violence happened before age 18.

Each of those figures came from the same place: VAdata.

VAdata is a secure, web-based system maintained by the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance and used by more than 70 Sexual and Domestic Violence Agencies. When an advocate documents a hotline call, records hours spent with a survivor in a courtroom, notes the tactics a perpetrator used, or logs a prevention workshop delivered at a middle school, that information enters VAdata. When a survivor fills out a feedback survey about the services they received — what helped, what changed, what they would have done without support — that enters VAdata, too.

The result, aggregated from hundreds of advocates and dozens of agencies over the course of a year, became this report.

Why Survivor Voices Are Part of the Data

It would be easy to think of VAdata as merely a counting tool, a way to tally services and generate statistics. While VAdata does, indeed, serve that function, it’s also used for so much more. VAdata records what survivors themselves say about their experiences, and those voices are not a supplement to the data. In fact, they are some of the most important data in the system.

When 97% of survivors say they would recommend their local agency to a friend, or when a survivor writes that “these services are keeping me alive,” or that without help they would have “crumbled in front of the judge” — those responses are captured in VAdata alongside service counts and trend tables. They are how Virginia’s agencies determine whether the work is actually reaching people as it needs to. They are how the field identifies gaps, adjusts practices, and makes the case to funders and policymakers that this work changes lives in ways that numbers alone cannot fully convey.

A statistic alongside a survivor’s own words makes a different and stronger argument than either could on its own.

What Virginia Can Do Because of VAdata

Without VAdata, Virginia’s SDVAs would each have their own records housed in their own formats, tracking their own definitions of service delivery, with no common methodology. At one point, this was the case. A legislator asking how many survivors were turned away from shelter last year would get a different answer depending on which agency they contacted. A funder asking whether hotline contacts are rising or falling would have no reliable basis for comparison. An advocate arguing that VOCA funding cuts are reducing services would be speaking from experience that their data may or may not support.

With VAdata, all those questions have specific, statewide, defensible answers drawn from consistent data collected the same way by each participating agency.

That is what allowed Virginia’s advocates to document, precisely, that 664 survivors were turned away from shelter in 2025, a 63% increase since 2021. That is what put local data behind the push to close the “boyfriend loophole”: not a national study, but Virginia’s own agencies documenting Virginia’s own survivors facing firearm threats in Virginia’s own communities. That is what allowed us to say, with confidence, that 66% of people who contacted hotlines in 2025 first experienced violence before age 18, a finding that shapes how the entire prevention field thinks about where and when to intervene.

Specificity moves policy, and VAdata is where Virginia’s specificity comes from.

What Makes VAdata Unusual and Worth Protecting

Most states do not have a system comparable to VAdata that captures data about both sexual and domestic violence experiences. Some states do have a database that agencies use to capture information about services provided to survivors, but those systems are almost never managed by advocacy agencies themselves. Instead, survivor service agencies often navigate a patchwork of reporting requirements, inconsistent data definitions, and limited infrastructure for statewide data collection and analysis. As a result, advocates in those states are often forced to demonstrate community need and program impact without the consistent, reliable data needed to effectively support their case.

Virginia has been a leader in this area, with VAdata developed through the collaborative efforts of local advocates, funding partners, and coalition staff over the past 25 years. This longstanding partnership has shaped a statewide system designed to meet the evolving needs of agencies and the survivors they serve. The annual Survivor Advocacy in Virginia report is a direct result of our efforts in universal data collection. The five-year trend lines in this report showing a 13% decline in advocacy services, a 9% decline in hotline contacts, and a 16% decline in emergency shelter stays are meaningful precisely because the methodology has stayed consistent thanks to the VAdata system.

That consistency is the result of the ongoing commitment of two groups whose work often happens behind the scenes: the Action Alliance staff who develop, maintain, and continually improve the VAdata system, and the advocates across Virginia who diligently enter data despite the many demands of serving survivors each and every day. Every number in this report represents a moment when an advocate chose to make their work visible and countable, and a professional commitment to the belief that what happens in one shelter, one hotline call, one hospital room in one county matters to the broader picture of what sexual and domestic violence looks like across the Commonwealth.

That commitment is not a given. It is something Virginia’s movement has built and sustained over time, and it is worth protecting with the same urgency as the direct services VAdata captures.

A Note on How This Series Was Built

The Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report draws on data collected in VAdata between January 1 and December 31, 2025, contributed by more than 70 agencies serving survivors across all corners of the state. Additional reports, including quarterly data that tracks service trends throughout the year, are available at vsdvalliance.org/statistics-and-data/.

To learn more about VAdata or explore its public-facing resources, visit www.vadata.org.

Read the Full Report

• 📄 Download the full Survivor Advocacy in Virginia 2025 report (PDF)
• 📄 Read the official press release (PDF)
• 📊 Access additional data reports
• 🔗 Learn more about VAdata

This is the seventh and final 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 6: prevention.

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.

Support the Work Behind the Work

VAdata is infrastructure, and like all infrastructure, it requires sustained investment to function. When you become a member or donate to the Action Alliance, you help ensure that Virginia’s movement to end sexual and domestic violence has the tools it needs to document the work, make the case, and keep working to effect positive change in Virginia.

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