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As millions of Americans gather around their televisions for the February 8 Super Bowl, celebrating athletic excellence, competition, and community, another, far darker pattern will unfold: a spike in domestic violence.
This is not speculation. One peer-reviewed study found that male-on-female violence increases by more than 10 percent following unexpected NFL losses, especially in states where sports betting is prevalent. Year after year, Super Bowl Sunday is one of the most dangerous days to be at home with an abusive partner.
Any honest discussion of football and domestic violence must also grapple with the NFL’s own history. Databases tracking player arrests show that domestic violence accounts for nearly half of all violent crime arrests in the league—far above its prevalence in the general population. These are public indicators of how deeply normalized violence against women remains in a sport that celebrates physical domination and aggression.
This matters not because football causes abuse, but because the NFL is one of the most powerful cultural institutions in the country. When a league that commands billions of dollars and national devotion struggles to take domestic violence seriously within its own ranks, it reinforces the same dangerous message echoed in courtrooms and police departments nationwide: that abuse is tolerable.
As a lawyer who represents survivors of domestic violence and their children, I see the consequences of this collective failure. We continue to tell ourselves comforting myths. That abuse is caused by anger or alcohol. That it’s about “losing control.” That if a victim were truly in danger, the system would step in.
None of that is true. Police officers routinely minimize domestic violence calls, treating them as nuisances rather than emergencies. Judges in family court—still operating under the dangerous presumption that children always need two parents—frequently award shared custody to fathers accused of abuse.
Sporting events like the Super Bowl don’t cause abuse—they expose it. For some abusers, the Super Bowl provides a socially sanctioned moment where entitlement, aggression, and grievance collide. Instead of minimizing the spikes in domestic violence, we should be proactively increasing funding for domestic violence shelters and services in anticipation of known danger periods like the Super Bowl.
Yet funding for the primary federal program dedicated to shelter and crisis services, the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, has remained largely flat in recent years, even as requests for help from victims have risen. At the same time, the federal Crime Victims Fund—a major source of support for domestic violence programs—has declined sharply, forcing states and local governments to scramble to fill widening gaps.
The consequences are measurable and devastating. On a single day in 2024, more than 14,000 requests for domestic violence services went unmet nationwide because programs lacked the resources to provide help. More than half of those unmet requests were for emergency shelter—the most basic protection for someone fleeing violence. Shelters are turning survivors away not because the danger isn’t real, but because there is no space left for them.
If this were any other predictable public safety crisis—a natural disaster, a mass gathering, a holiday known for drunk driving fatalities—resources would be pre-positioned. Instead, we allow domestic violence programs to operate in a constant state of scarcity, even during moments when the risk is well-documented and entirely foreseeable.
We also must train law enforcement and judges to recognize coercive control, not just visible bruises. We must suspend the reflexive push toward shared custody of children when there is evidence of abuse, and we should remove firearms swiftly and effectively when protective orders are issued. And, finally, we must stop treating domestic violence as a private tragedy instead of a public health crisis.
The Super Bowl is often described as a mirror of American culture. If that’s true, then what it reflects back at us is not just our love of sport, but our longstanding indifference to violence that happens in the home—especially when it happens to women and children.
When the final whistle blows this Sunday, millions will cheer or grieve a loss on the field. But for too many families, the real danger will be just beginning.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.