Violence reaches substantially more Americans than police reports alone can show, according to a UC San Diego-led survey that asked adults directly about physical assault, sexual violence and abuse by an intimate partner. Of 2,720 respondents, 52 percent reported physical violence at some point in life and 49 percent reported sexual violence, making exposure a population-health issue as well as a criminal-justice measure.
The U.S. Violence Experiences survey, known as USVEX, was conducted from October through December 2025 in English and Spanish. Researchers used a nationally representative sample recruited by NORC at the University of Chicago across all 50 states. That design reaches experiences that may never enter a police database, emergency-room record or service-provider caseload, but it relies on people accurately understanding and reporting events that can be difficult to disclose.
The gender differences were especially sharp for intimate-partner violence. Sixty-one percent of women and 45 percent of men reported such violence during their lives. Nineteen percent of women described potentially lethal intimate-partner violence, compared with 3 percent of men. The survey also found exposure rising through adolescence and young adulthood, periods when relationships, housing and financial independence are changing at once.
Economic instability tracked closely with recent harm. Respondents who had been evicted during the previous year were seven times as likely to report recent physical violence, three times as likely to report sexual violence and nearly five times as likely to report intimate-partner violence. Those who experienced homelessness had roughly five times the prevalence of physical violence, more than three times the prevalence of sexual violence and four times the prevalence of intimate-partner violence.
Those ratios describe associations in one survey; they do not prove that an eviction caused an assault or that violence produced the housing loss. Both may arise from overlapping pressures, and the direction can run both ways. The study's value is in showing how often those conditions appear together, giving housing programs, health systems and violence-prevention services a reason to coordinate rather than treat each problem as an isolated referral.
Recent exposure was also associated with depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and substance use. The release does not turn those links into diagnoses for any individual. It instead maps a pattern at national scale, where a respondent's answer to a violence question may help explain health needs that are otherwise recorded under a different category.
Jakana Thomas of UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy and Anita Raj of Tulane University's Newcomb Institute led the project, which the Blue Shield of California Foundation funded. The survey was national, not a San Diego County estimate. Local agencies therefore cannot apply its percentages directly to the county population without local measurement, though the instrument offers a way to ask comparable questions.
The central methodological choice is also the report's central warning. Crime statistics count incidents that become known to authorities; USVEX counts experiences people disclose to researchers. Neither source is complete, and they answer different questions. Read together, they suggest that the visible caseload is only part of the burden and that prevention policy needs evidence from homes and relationships that formal systems often never record.