A mother swinging her small child by the hands in a park at sunset.

Nationwide · United States

You saw it first.
You are not imagining it.

When a father is hurting his children — or hurting you — and the court is not listening, you get told you are exaggerating, unstable, or vindictive. You are usually none of those things. You are usually early.

What to do first Find help near you

What the record shows

It is not rare. It is not hidden. It is uncounted.

Two of these numbers come from the federal government’s own reporting. The third does not — because no federal agency collects it. Someone had to build it by reading the news, one case at a time.

89%

of confirmed child abuse victims in the United States were harmed by one or both of their own parents. The danger is almost never a stranger.

1 in 4

women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner. When a father is violent toward a mother, the children are in the same house.

980+

children killed by a parent since 2008 in cases where divorce, separation or custody was part of the story. Nobody official keeps this list.

89%: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Child Maltreatment 2023, ch. 3 — “89.0 percent of victims are maltreated by one or both parents.” acf.gov. 1 in 4: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, 2023/2024 Data Brief (2026) — 22.5% of women report physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime. cdc.gov. 980+: Center for Judicial Excellence, U.S. Child Homicide Data, compiled from news coverage since 2008. CJE describes it as a sampling rather than a complete count, because no government agency tracks these deaths nationally — which is the point. centerforjudicialexcellence.org.

Start here

Five things that matter more than anything else.

None of this is legal advice and none of it is a substitute for a lawyer or an advocate. It is the groundwork that the people who do this for a living wish every mother had already laid before she walked into a courtroom.

Write it down tonight, and keep writing it down.

Date, time, who was there, what was said, what you saw. Write what your children told you in their own words, in quotation marks, the same day they said it. Photograph injuries with something in frame that shows scale and keep the original file, not a screenshot.

A note written the night it happened carries weight that your memory of it will not carry two years from now. This is the single highest-value thing you can start doing today, and it costs nothing.

Report it to the people whose job it is to write it down.

Every state gives you legal immunity for reporting suspected child abuse in good faith to child protective services or the police. Statements you make in your own court filings are covered by absolute privilege. Those are real, strong protections, and they are there for you to use.

Those reports also do something your own notes cannot. They create a dated, official record that exists outside your house and outside his reach. One report can look like one bad night. Several, across years, is a pattern — and the pattern is what anyone looking back at the record will see.

Keep your records somewhere he has never had access to.

Not the shared cloud account. Not the family computer. Not the phone on his plan. A trusted person’s house, a new email account opened on a device he has never touched, a safe deposit box in your name.

Assume that anything on a device he has handled, paid for, or set up can be read. If he seems to know things he should not know, that is usually why.

Find a lawyer who has handled abuse inside a custody case.

Not simply a family lawyer. You want someone who has argued an abuse allegation against a claim of parental alienation — the argument that you are turning the children against their father, which is the most common response to an abuse report in custody court — and who knows how the judges in your county tend to treat it.

Ask your state’s domestic violence coalition and your local legal aid office for names. Both are free to call, and both keep lists. If you cannot afford counsel, ask every one of them about pro bono and low-bono programs — they exist and they are under-used.

Plan before you act, with someone trained to plan.

The period right after a woman leaves is the most dangerous one. Safety planning is a real, structured thing — housing, money, documents, the school, the route, the phone — and advocates do it with you, free, over the phone, without you giving a name.

The 24-hour line is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. You do not have to have decided anything to call them.

A mother and a small child walking hand in hand along a path at the edge of a green field.

Keep this in view

An ordinary afternoon is the whole objective.

Not winning. Not being proved right. An afternoon where nobody is listening for a car in the driveway.

Custody litigation is built to make you argue about everything except that. The motions that go nowhere. The hearings rescheduled the week you finally saved for a lawyer. The discovery requests that cost you a month’s pay to answer. That is a tactic, and it has a name — litigation abuse.

It works because it is exhausting, and because from the outside it looks like an ordinary busy case.

It is also the one kind of abuse that happens entirely in public. Every filing is dated. Every hearing is on a calendar. A pattern that would be invisible inside a house is, in a courthouse, a record anyone can count.

You are not a difficult person. You are a person in a difficult process.

Find help

People who answer, around the clock, for free.

You do not need to give a name. You do not need to have decided to leave. You can call to ask what your options are and nothing else.

National Domestic Violence Hotline24/7, free, confidential, in more than 200 languages. Safety planning, local referrals, and advocates who do this all day.
1-800-799-7233Text START to 88788
Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline24/7 crisis counsellors. Note what they say about themselves: it is a support line, not a reporting line, and not connected to 911.
1-800-422-4453
WomensLaw.orgPlain-language, state-by-state legal information on custody, restraining orders, parental kidnapping and litigation abuse, plus a free email hotline. The best legal resource in this field, and not ours.
womenslaw.org
StrongHearts Native Helpline · Deaf Hotline · 988StrongHearts is for Native and Alaska Native survivors. The Deaf Hotline is answered by Deaf advocates over videophone. 988 is for a mental health crisis.
844-762-8483855-812-1001988

Being straight with you

What we are, and what we are not.

We are not a hotline.

There is no phone line here and no intake form. Putting a button on this page that led nowhere would be worse than having none. The numbers above are answered by people trained for exactly this.

We collect nothing about you.

No analytics, no advertising pixels, no fonts or scripts loaded from anyone else, and nothing stored on your device unless you deliberately sign in to the private staff area. There is no record of your visit here to subpoena, because we never made one.

Nothing on this site is legal advice, and reading it does not create a relationship with a lawyer. For your own situation, talk to an attorney licensed in your state.

You saw it first.You are not imagining it.