Where Does the Money Go? The DV Services Industry, What Doesn't Work, and Who Pays for It

There is a quiet industry built around domestic violence in America. It has federal funding streams, state allocations, county contracts, nonprofit grant cycles, and a revolving door of mandated services that generate revenue regardless of whether they produce safety. It employs administrators, counselors, coordinators, evaluators, and program directors. It writes annual reports that document outputs — hours of service delivered, clients served, classes completed — while largely avoiding the harder question of outcomes: are survivors safer? Are abusers changing? Is the money doing what it claims to do?

Kill the Precedent asks that question directly. And the answer, documented across decades of research, is: not nearly as much as the funding levels suggest it should.

This is not primarily a post about bad actors — though bad actors exist and will be named. It is primarily a post about a system that was designed with genuine intent, staffed by many people who are genuinely trying to help, and structured in a way that consistently fails to deliver the outcomes it promises — while the people it was designed to serve get ordered into programs that don't work and left without the resources that would actually change their lives.

The Funding Landscape — What Congress Appropriated and Where It Went

In fiscal year 2025, Congress appropriated $713 million to the Office on Violence Against Women — the primary federal funding mechanism for domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking services. By the end of that fiscal year, only $472 million had been distributed. More than $200 million sat unspent. An additional $36 million went to finance the management of the OVW office itself.

During the same period, domestic violence programs across the country were turning away survivors every single day. The National Network to End Domestic Violence's annual census consistently finds tens of thousands of adults and children receiving services in a single day — while programs report being unable to meet all requests due to capacity and funding constraints. The money appropriated to address that gap sat in federal accounts unobligated while survivors were told there was no room.

The STOP (Services, Training, Officers, and Prosecutors) formula grant — one of VAWA's primary mechanisms — allocates funding as follows: 25% to law enforcement, 25% to prosecutors, 30% to victim services nonprofits, 5% to courts, and 15% to discretionary purposes including underserved populations. In a funding stream nominally dedicated to helping victims, only 30 cents of every dollar is required to reach nonprofit victim services — and of that 30%, 10% must go to culturally specific organizations, leaving approximately 20% for general victim services organizations. The other 70% flows through law enforcement, prosecution, and court systems.

Batterer Intervention Programs: Forty Years of "Insufficient Evidence"

Since the early 1980s, courts across the country have been ordering men convicted of domestic violence into Batterer Intervention Programs — structured group programs designed to change the attitudes and behaviors associated with intimate partner violence. The Duluth Model, developed in 1981, became the dominant framework. By the 1990s, BIPs had become standard court sentencing in most jurisdictions. Today they are ordered in virtually every domestic violence case that enters the criminal or family court system.

After forty years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on these programs, the Campbell Collaboration — the gold standard of systematic evidence review — published its finding: "Insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of court-mandated interventions for men convicted of domestic violence."

Not "moderately effective." Not "effective in certain populations." Insufficient evidence. Forty years. Hundreds of millions of dollars. And the most rigorous systematic review available cannot confirm these programs work.

The research literature is damning on a specific point: referral of a batterer to a BIP is one of the strongest predictors that a woman will leave shelter and return to the batterer. The program signals to the survivor — and often to the court — that the problem is being addressed, that change is happening, that it is safe to return. Advocates are justifiably concerned that batterer programs hold out a promise of hope which may become a vehicle for injury. The programs designed to stop abuse may, in some measurable proportion of cases, be facilitating its continuation by producing false safety signals.

Services Ordered of Survivors — The Wrong Direction

Here is one of the most consequential ironies in domestic violence response: the person in a domestic violence case most likely to be ordered into mandatory services is frequently the survivor, not the abuser.

Survivors are ordered into parenting classes — to demonstrate adequate parenting skills that the abuse and its consequences have disrupted. They are ordered into individual counseling — to address the trauma responses that are being coded as instability rather than injury. They are ordered into anger management — because their reactive responses to ongoing threat look, to an untrained observer, like a behavioral problem rather than a survival response. They are ordered into substance use treatment — because self-medication of untreated PTSD from abuse is treated as a character failure rather than an untreated wound.

Each of these services costs money. Some of that cost falls on the survivor directly. Some of it is covered by county contracts. All of it consumes the survivor's time — time they could be spending rebuilding economically, securing housing, or being present for their children. The compliance clock runs. The service plan grows. And the measure of the survivor's fitness is increasingly their ability to complete a checklist of programs rather than their actual safety, stability, or capacity to parent.

Riverside County: A Case Study in Where the Money Goes

Riverside County, California — administered through the Department of Public Social Services — offers an instructive case study in how domestic violence and child welfare funding operates at the county level. Riverside DPSS administers federal and state funding across child welfare, public assistance, and domestic violence services. It is also the county where Kill the Precedent's founder has direct, documented experience navigating the gap between what the system claims to offer and what it actually provides.

What Riverside County's DPSS website offers survivors with open CPS cases is a referral: "If you have an open investigation or case with Riverside County Children's Services, ask your social worker about our free and confidential domestic violence services." The survivor navigating a dependency case — already under surveillance, already under threat of family separation, already managing a service plan — is directed to ask the same caseworker who holds power over their children for help accessing DV services. The conflict of interest embedded in that referral structure is not acknowledged. The survivor asking for DV help through their CPS caseworker is not in a confidential therapeutic relationship. They are in a monitored one.

Riverside County has the infrastructure of a Special Investigations Unit staffed by sworn peace officers investigating welfare fraud — a unit with POST certification, firearms training, and arrest authority. That level of institutional investment in investigating people who receive public benefits exists alongside a DV services referral model that routes survivors through their CPS workers. The investigative infrastructure and the support infrastructure are not built at comparable levels.

This pattern — robust enforcement infrastructure, thin direct services infrastructure, referral pathways that route survivors through the institutions that hold power over them — is not unique to Riverside County. It reflects the national distribution of how DV and child welfare funding gets spent when it reaches county administration.

Who Profits — and Who Doesn't

The question of who profits most from the domestic violence funding ecosystem is not comfortable, but it is necessary. The honest answer is: the infrastructure. The administration. The programs. The executives who run the nonprofits that receive the grants. The attorneys who handle the litigation. The evaluators who conduct the assessments. The counselors who provide the mandated services. All of these represent legitimate professional roles. None of them are the survivor who needed a first and last month's rent to leave safely and stay gone.

VAWA's STOP formula explicitly prohibits using grant funds for "offering perpetrators the option of entering pre-trial diversion programs or placing batterers in anger management programs" and prohibits "requiring mediation or counseling for couples as a systemic response to domestic violence." These are meaningful protections on paper. In practice, the enforcement of these conditions at the county level is inconsistent, and the pattern of ordering services of survivors rather than abusers continues in jurisdictions across the country regardless of federal guidance.

The People Who Are Being Failed — And Why That Matters More Than Is Said

There is a narrative about domestic violence survivors that runs through the culture and, more importantly, through the systems designed to help them. It is the narrative of the damaged woman. The broken person. The one who needs to be stabilized, managed, assessed for fitness, and slowly helped toward a baseline of functional adequacy.

This narrative is wrong. It is also the most consequential error the DV services system makes.

The research on who narcissists and coercive controllers target is consistent and striking. They do not target the weak, the shallow, the stupid, or the without-value. They target the opposite. They target people with unusually high empathy — who believe the best of others and extend trust that gets weaponized. They target the deeply loyal — who honor commitments under conditions that would break most people. They target the highly conscientious — who take their responsibilities seriously enough to absorb blame they don't deserve. They target the capable, the competent, the people with potential that an insecure, controlling person finds threatening and seeks to own rather than admire.

The survivor of coercive control is not a depleted person who needs to be built back up from nothing. She is a person of exceptional capacity whose resources have been systematically confiscated — whose empathy was exploited, whose loyalty was weaponized, whose competence was undermined so that someone with less of all of it could maintain control over her. She does not need to be rebuilt from scratch. She needs the resources that were taken from her returned, the trauma that was inflicted on her treated, and the institutional obstacles placed in her path removed.

A Direct Note to the Administrators Holding the Money

If you are a county administrator, a nonprofit executive, a program director, or a grant manager reading this — this is addressed directly to you.

The money flowing through your programs was appropriated by Congress and allocated by state and county governments specifically to protect and support people in crisis. The research on what works and what doesn't is available. The outcome data on batterer intervention programs has been available for decades. The evidence on what survivors actually need to achieve safety and stability — economic resources, legal protection, housing, trauma-informed therapeutic support — is not new or hidden.

Kill the Precedent proceeds on the assumption that most people administering these programs want them to work. That assumption is the basis of this post rather than a more accusatory one. But wanting programs to work is not sufficient. The programs that are not working need to be evaluated honestly, reformed or replaced based on evidence, and the money currently flowing through them needs to be redirected toward what the research says produces actual outcomes.

The people in charge of significant public funding have a fiduciary responsibility to the public and a moral responsibility to the survivors those funds are supposed to serve. Meeting that responsibility — in an era of budget pressure, political scrutiny, and increased public accountability — requires more than good intentions. It requires evidence-based practice, transparent outcome reporting, and the willingness to change what isn't working even when what isn't working has become institutionally comfortable.

Coming Next: What Actually Works

This post names the problem. Kill the Precedent's next post in this series will offer the alternative — a concrete, evidence-based, cost-effective vision for what DV services and prevention should actually look like. What the research says reduces recidivism. What survivor-led and survivor-centered programs look like in practice. What it costs to actually help someone start over versus what it costs to run them through a compliance checklist. And why investing in survivor empowerment rather than survivor management is not just more ethical — it is dramatically more cost-effective.

— Toni Bones, Founder — Kill the Precedent