Trump’s comments highlight our failures on domestic violence

Defending his decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., President Trump remarked on Monday that domestic violence — “things that take place in the home” — is gratuitously called a crime.

“If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime,” he continued. Unbeknownst to Trump, only days before his comments minimizing domestic violence as “little fights,” Toraya Reid, the sister of NBA player Naz Reid, had been murdered in cold blood by her boyfriend. The timing was almost uncanny — a chilling illustration of what happens when violence in the home is dismissed.

This deadly American attitude of indifference toward women and children has persisted for decades.

Toraya is only the most recent face of domestic violence. Between May and August of this year, dozens of domestic violence fatalities have been reported across the country, mostly at the hands of abusive men killing their partners and/or children. In many of the cases, the perpetrators were known to the police, and to family and criminal courts, and the victims’ repeated requests for protective orders and assistance from the judicial system were never taken seriously.

Unlike Trump’s comments, most of these cases will never make headlines. But the few that do tell a chilling story of a system that consistently fails survivors, even when they follow every prescribed step to seek help.

These fatalities over the last few months aren’t isolated tragedies. They represent the predictable outcome of a society that treats domestic violence as a private matter rather than the public health crisis it truly is. Family courts routinely award shared custody to fathers accused of domestic violence approximately 70 percent of the time.

Police officers often treat domestic violence calls as nuisances rather than emergencies. Judges minimize credible testimony about abuse, focusing instead on maintaining “friendly co-parenting” relationships that can prove fatal. Even where these statutes have so-called carve-outs for domestic violence, they are not effectively carried out by judges.

The statistics are stark. Intimate partner violence affects more than 12 million people per year. Every day in America, three women die at the hands of intimate partners. A woman is assaulted by an intimate partner every nine seconds. One in four women will experience severe intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Domestic violence remains a crisis in every community in this country, yet our response to it is anemic.

Federal and state funding for domestic violence services has been slashed repeatedly in recent years, leaving survivors with nowhere to turn. On any given day in the U.S., over 13,000 requests for victim services go unmet due to a lack of funding. Of those unmet requests, 54 percent are for safe housing — the most basic need for those fleeing violence.

In my work directing the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School, I see daily how our legal system betrays victims. The most dangerous failure occurs in family courts, where judges, operating under the presumption that children need both parents, routinely force survivors to maintain contact with their abusers through shared custody arrangements.

This isn’t just problematic — it’s lethal. Since 2008, more than 900 children involved in contested custody cases have been murdered, mostly by fathers who had previously abused their mothers. The courts gave these killers exactly what they needed: access to their victims.

Research confirms what advocates have long known: abusers seek custody at twice the rate of non-abusive parents — not out of love, but as a means to maintain power and control. Yet our family courts continue to operate under the dangerous fiction that once parents separate, abusers transform into healthy co-parents.

Even when laws exist to protect survivors, enforcement remains woefully inadequate. When a gun is present in a home with domestic violence, a woman is five times more likely to be killed. Roughly 25 million US adults have experienced firearm abuse by an intimate partner. Yet despite federal laws prohibiting domestic violence offenders from possessing firearms, enforcement is largely left to an “honor system” that relies on abusers to voluntarily surrender their weapons. The result is predictable: women obtain the protection they’re told will keep them safe, only to discover it’s a piece of paper against a loaded gun.

Trump’s comments about domestic violence being “a little fight” reveal more than his personal misogyny and ignorance — they expose our national failure to treat intimate partner violence with the seriousness it demands. But his administration’s rhetoric is not the root cause of this crisis. The problem runs far deeper, embedded in institutions that have had decades to get this right and have consistently chosen not to.

Real change requires more than condemning presidential rhetoric. It demands massive increases in federal funding for domestic violence services, particularly emergency housing. Family court judges should be given mandatory, comprehensive training on coercive control and the risks of shared custody in abuse cases. And stronger protocols for seizing firearms when protective orders are issued can save lives.

This week marks the 31st anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act, which aimed to transform how America responds to gender-based violence. More than three decades later, there’s more work to do. It’s long past time to match our legislative promises with the resources and institutional changes necessary to make them real.

Until we do, Trump’s callous dismissal of domestic violence will continue to reflect not just his own indifference, but our nation’s deadly failure to protect women and children from the violence that kills them every single day.

Dale Margolin Cecka is an assistant professor of law and director of the Family Violence Litigation Clinic at Albany Law School.