To listen to the National Domestic Violence Hotline is to witness how a confluence of stressors — high prices, a lack of affordable housing, easy access to firearms and drugs, the ubiquity of technology — can leave a person vulnerable to another’s cruelty and manipulation.

Spikes in calls often align with highly publicized events: natural disasters, recession, quarantine during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, a celebrity’s acknowledgment of being a survivor of domestic abuse.

But in recent years, staff at the hotline said more of the spikes could be traced in part to crucial court rulings, as people press for answers about the impact of the decisions or how they have factored into the violence they have experienced at home.

Already, the number of calls that mention forced unprotected sex or a partner sabotaging birth control — as by puncturing condoms or hiding pills — have nearly doubled in the first year since the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, according to an analysis of calls and surveys done by the hotline. And calls mentioning firearms rose 40 percent after an appeals court in New Orleans last February struck down a federal law blocking people subject to a domestic violence protection order from owning a gun.

Staff members had been focused on the outcomes of two cases resting with the nation’s highest court, involving gun access and the availability of a commonly used abortion pill. On Friday, the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling, saying that the government may prohibit people subject to restraining orders from having guns.

But even before the courts took up the gun case, the hotline, understaffed and underfunded, struggled to keep pace with an escalating number of calls over the years. The legal battles have underscored the pervasiveness of domestic violence and the strains on existing support for survivors.

“That makes me sad that we need lives to be in jeopardy for this to become a national conversation around domestic violence, because it shouldn’t take a Supreme Court case,” said Katie Ray-Jones, the chief executive of the hotline.

To capture a snapshot of the experiences of domestic violence survivors, The New York Times observed some of the calls and messages the hotline received in one day. The Times agreed to only disclose certain nonidentifying details and limited excerpts from the conversations to protect the safety of those who consented to speaking with a reporter present.

Congress approved creation of a national hotline dedicated to domestic violence in 1994, including it in the landmark Violence Against Women Act. Founded two years later in Texas, the hotline now receives as many as 3,000 calls and messages a day. Everyone is kept anonymous, with the only formal record describing basic demographic and circumstantial categories, often leaving other details unclear.

They are typically women, but their ages, ethnicities and locations vary, as do the circumstances of their relationships. In a single day, those contacting the hotline included a 51-year-old Latina in California; an Asian mother, 38; and a white woman asking how to quietly document her partner’s physical abuse.

Sometimes it is a question of finding housing during a nationwide shortage or seeking protection after leaving. Other times, it is about wrestling with the emotional contradictions of still having love for someone who makes you feel alone.

Working under pseudonyms remotely or at its headquarters in Austin, Texas, staff respondents spend as much as an hour at a time on calls and messages sent through a digital chat that arrive from across the country, at any time of day.

They pose sensitive but probing questions to uncover how a relationship has spiraled into deceit or danger, before connecting the survivor to support nearby. Many of the 158 staff respondents are women and survivors themselves.

They cannot directly offer legal or medical advice, but give encouragement or recommendations.

On a recent morning, a young Black woman from the South called in, describing the relationship she had recently escaped: “I still sometimes have dreams of that night — hearing the glass shatter and seeing stars.”

Around the same time, another woman wrote from New England, expressing uncertainty. “Is this gaslighting? Is this why I feel like I have no idea what is real and what isn’t?”

The rise in calls reflects an increased willingness to confront domestic violence, as survivors have publicly shared their experiences and lawmakers have moved to improve support.

It also reflects a deeper understanding of what abuse can be: monitoring someone through their devices, keeping a person financially dependent, twisting emotions to isolate someone from their loved ones.

“Domestic violence is very complex, and I felt like at different stages in my life, the people around me kept trying to simplify it,” said Jose Tobias, 29, who has worked at the hotline for nearly two years. A soft-spoken Mexican immigrant who once enrolled in Catholic seminary, he turned to the hotline in part to more directly counter what he sees as the weaponization of faith and other, more nebulous, forms of abuse.

“It’s never the same, so the solution is never the same,” he added.

Conversations at the hotline take on a new urgency once a caller confirms an instance of strangulation or the presence of a weapon. Research shows that millions of women have been threatened with a gun by an intimate partner.

“If he does have access to the weapon, that can increase the lethality a lot,” Mr. Tobias told one woman, who was unsure whether her former partner had access to a gun.

To a tearful father, who recounted how his daughter’s abuser had access to a gun and already had physically assaulted her, he outlined the heightened risk: “We’ve seen this person weaponize his body. We could see him take it” further.

And while gun rights groups highlight the experiences of survivors who arm themselves as a means of self-defense and their constitutional right to own a firearm, many domestic violence groups say the presence of a gun exacerbates the psychological trauma of being threatened with one.

If the Supreme Court had upheld the ruling by the appeals court, it would have rolled back a federal law that makes it a felony to possess a gun while under a domestic violence order.

In the three states covered by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the increase in calls mentioning a firearm was even more significant after the lower court ruling, the hotline said: 47 percent in Texas, 59 percent in Mississippi and 63 percent in Louisiana. And given how difficult it can be to ensure that any person subject to an order no longer has access to a gun, domestic violence groups fear losing a crucial means of ensuring the safety of survivors.

“One way or another, the survivors are going to be affected — it’s just about to what extent,” Mr. Tobias said.

Staff members have also struggled with a swiftly moving landscape on abortion laws, as reports of forced acts like unprotected sex have flooded their lines and as the prospect of further limits on abortion access and reproductive care looms.

In an analysis of nearly 3,500 responses to a survey conducted last fall, the hotline found that nearly a quarter of respondents were pressured into becoming pregnant, 20 percent were forcibly prevented from using birth control and nearly 10 percent faced threats of violence over seeking an abortion.

And even as the Supreme Court last week maintained access to a commonly used abortion pill, it did not weigh in on the merits of medication abortion or rule out the possibility of other challenges. On the day of the ruling, hotline employees said calls mentioning interference in reproductive health increased about 75 percent from what had been a daily average of about seven calls this month.

“Thank goodness that I was able to have an abortion because my life — I would not be sitting here,” said Hannah Tucker, 33, an employee with a shock of green hair and an array of colorful tattoos, adding: “I can’t fathom being attached to that person.”

The outcome of the two cases does not eliminate the financial and physical barriers that ensure a person stays in an abusive relationship. It will not change ingrained cultural and societal stigma about leaving, or the fact that certain communities are already more at risk.

And the hotline has only the resources to answer about 53 percent of its calls and messages. Ms. Jones and other staff estimated that it would take at least $20 million a year to fully staff the hotline.

“Domestic violence does not discriminate,” said Josie Slawik, 74. “Domestic violence affects everybody — no matter what race you are, how much money you have, you don’t have, it happens.”

She still remembers what it felt like in 1978, as she fled, her rib broken and two young daughters in tow, to a shelter in El Paso. With a warm personality, bright red curls and gold eye shadow shimmering around her eyes, she was there when the hotline took its first call in 1996.

Like others, she said she still had the capacity to be moved by hope and by horror.

“He was punching me in the stomach when I was pregnant,” a woman told her by phone. She soon hung up, saying she needed to return to work.

Ms. Slawik paused, removing her headset.

“I’m going to take a reset — that was hard for me,” Ms. Slawik said, her voice soft. “This movement has come a long way, but we have a ways to go.”

The US Supreme Court has upheld restrictions on the use of firearms by individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders, in a closely watched case that has weighed in on the balance between gun rights and public safety.

In an 8-1 decision, the high court’s majority on Friday argued that barring individuals who threaten others’ safety from keeping firearms does not violate the US constitution’s Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms.

“Since the founding, our Nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” John Roberts, the court’s chief justice, wrote in the majority opinion.

The ruling stems from a case involving an individual who was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic violence restraining order, in violation of US federal law.

CNN
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The Supreme Court upheld a federal law Friday that bars guns for domestic abusers, rejecting an argument pressed by gun rights groups that the prohibition violated the Second Amendment.

The 8-1 decision lands as the nation continues to grapple with gun violence and mass shootings. A roiling political debate over firearms has left Washington unable to pass new gun laws. State and federal prohibitions that have been on the books for years, meanwhile, have increasingly faced scrutiny from courts.

The decision could help shore up similar federal gun regulations that have been challenged since the Supreme Court vastly expanded gun rights in 2022. That ruling caused substantial confusion for lower court judges reviewing Second Amendment lawsuits.

Chief Justice John Roberts, in the majority opinion, responded to the idea that the high court’s previous decisions have locked judges into specific laws that were on the books at the time of the Second Amendment’s enactment, Roberts said that some lower courts have “misunderstood the methodology of our recent Second Amendment cases.”

“Our tradition of firearm regulation allows the government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others,” Roberts wrote.

“The Court’s ruling today leaves intact a specific federal criminal prohibition on gun possession by those subject to domestic violence-related restraining orders,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “But there are dozens of other federal and state gun regulations that have been challenged since the court’s 2022 ruling in the Bruen case. The harder cases, like whether Congress can prohibit all felons, or all drug offenders, from possessing firearms, are still to come.”

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the 2022 in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen opinion, filed a lone dissent.

“The Court and Government do not point to a single historical law revoking a citizen’s Second Amendment right based on possible interpersonal violence,” Thomas wrote. “Yet, in the interest of ensuring the Government can regulate one subset of society, today’s decision puts at risk the Second Amendment rights of many more.”

At issue is a 1994 law that bars people who are the subject of domestic violence restraining orders from possessing guns. A Texas man, Zackey Rahimi, was convicted for violating that law following a series of shootings, including one in which police said he fired into the air at a Whataburger restaurant after a friend’s credit card was declined.

Rahimi’s lawyers claimed that the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decision two years ago meant that the law on domestic violence orders could not be squared with the Constitution. A 6-3 majority in Bruen, in the opinion by Thomas, ruled that gun regulations must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

The defense attorneys argued that the founding generation never responded to domestic violence by banning the possession of weapons and, because of that, the government couldn’t do so now. The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals embraced that argument, concluding that a gun ban for people involved in domestic disputes was an “outlier that our ancestors would never have accepted.”

But the Biden administration and domestic violence victims groups noted there were founding-era laws that prohibited dangerous Americans from possessing guns. In other words, they said, when viewed more generally, there were laws that could meet the court’s new history-based test.

Women who are subject to domestic abuse are five times more likely to die at the hands of their abuser if there is a gun in the home, victims groups told the Supreme Court.

During oral arguments in November, a majority of the court appeared poised to uphold the law – but several conservative justices had signaled they might be willing to do so only on narrow grounds. That may be in part because a series of related legal challenges are already queued up for the court, including a question of whether non-violent felons can be denied access to firearms.

One of the prohibitions in question has ties to President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, who was convicted on June 11 of violating a law that bars possession of a gun by a person who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” Biden is expected to appeal.

The 5th Circuit last year, in a separate case, ruled that the prohibition on drug users is unconstitutional.

Justice Samuel Alito was not present for a second day in row as the justices handed down opinions in the Supreme Court’s courtroom.

The court has not responded to questions about his absence.

This story is breaking and will be updated.