Shelters squeezed harder as domestic abuse survivors seek help in record numbers: Report

Caroline Kubzansky, Chicago Tribune on Apr 15, 2026

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CHICAGO — Illinoisans trying to escape domestic violence sought help in record numbers in 2025, according to a new report from the organization that runs the state’s domestic violence assistance hotline.

Almost 70,000 people from all over the state seeking assistance with shelter, emotional support, legal help and other services contacted the hotline last year, advocates said at a Wednesday news conference. That’s a 17% jump from 2024 and a 181% increase since 2019.

The majority of the contacts to the hotline come from Chicago and its suburbs, the report stated, and calls to the hotline from Chicago itself doubled from pre-pandemic levels in 2025. Despite ten-year lows of overall violent crime last year, the city saw a 20% increase in its domestic homicide tally from 2024, according to the city’s violence reduction dashboard,

But advocates with The Network: Advocating Against Domestic Violence, which runs the hotline, cautioned that the higher number of contacts doesn’t necessarily reflect a similarly skyrocketing rate of domestic violence. What it does indicate, they said, is greater awareness of resources available to abuse survivors.

“People are responding to knowing there are resources with asking for help,” the Network’s Policy, Advocacy, and Research Manager Shelby Hoffman Binder said. “When survivors are seeking help… we need to have a service environment that is well resourced enough to meet that need.”

The resource that remains at the highest premium is shelter space, particularly in Chicago.

Exploding demand for shelter among people trying to escape domestic violence has been an issue for years now: According to the Network’s 2023 report, there was no availability among Chicago’s estimated 97-bed supply for survivors of domestic violence for about a third of that year. In 2025, the number of people seeking shelter climbed higher still to 20,623 requests, but supply remained static — leaving all of those beds occupied for about half of the year. That demand continued to climb in 2024 and hit new highs in 2025, when the hotline took 20,632 contacts where a person was seeking a shelter bed or crib.

The shortage was less pronounced in the city’s suburbs, the report stated, although there were still 71 days out of last year where none of the area’s 163 available beds or cribs were available.

Data & Research Associate Emoonah McClerklin noted that lower bed availability on its own jacks up calls to the hotline as people seek shelter assistance over and over, and can limit people trying to escape abusive situations at a point that is often one of the most dangerous in the process of leaving a violent relationship.

“They not only stay in danger, but they also grow discouraged with the service environment and they are less likely to ask for help again,” she said.

Beyond immediate demand for shelter beds, transit, crisis intervention and other services available locally, McClerklin, Hoffman Binder and their colleagues noted that changing winds out of Washington, D.C., had and would continue to have effects on people fleeing domestic violence, and force them to adapt new strategies in response.

For one, they cited the presence of U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents at Cook County courthouses as recently as April 2. Some of those sightings were at the domestic violence courthouse at 555 W. Harrison Ave., prompting one state senator to remark that agents’ activity in those buildings “sends a really sick message that your pain will be used against you.”

And under the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the Trump administration’s economic policy package passed by Congress in July, thousands of immigrants — including survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence victims — are expected to start losing access to federal food assistance programs like SNAP.

Those types of services weren’t listed in the top 10 most common requests from this year’s hotline report, advocates said. But they anticipated that those needs would only continue to climb.

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