KENTUCKY — Earlier this spring, Gov. Andy Beshear (D) ceremoniously signed Senate Bill 271 into law.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month was launched nationwide in Oct. 1987, to connect and unite individuals and organizations working on domestic violence issues while raising awareness of those issues.

Republican State Senator Whitney Westerfield of Crofton filed Senate Bill 271, during this year’s 2022 General Assembly session. The legislation now requires the Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center in Louisville to compile data on domestic violence fatalities and occurrences of dating violence and abuse or domestic violence.

The bill also amends KRS 209A.120 to show when Kentucky State Police is to report data to the Criminal Justice Statistical Analysis Center and requires the reporting of suspected dating violence and abuse or domestic violence and abuse deaths to CJSAC.

“It was brought up that our state advocacy groups, Kentucky Coalition Against Domestic Violence, KCADV, KASAP - Kentucky Association of Sexual Assault Programs and their partner agencies and member agencies around the state. They were having to rely, as it was told to me on Google News Alerts, to identify data about when domestic violence leads to homicide, when it results in near death situations. And the long story short, we don’t have a good picture of just how much of this is going on. We know here in Kentucky that 1 in 3 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced some form of physical violence by their intimate partner. And you just mentioned about 20% in Kentucky. Our domestic violence hotlines take about 19,159 calls a day. That’s about 13-a minute and that’s a lot of crime going on. In fact, in 2018, according to KCADV, domestic violence charges offenses accounted for 20% of all violent crime in Kentucky. That’s an enormous share of our criminal population. We need to identify those data points, so that as policymakers, and as budget writers, we can identify where we need to be spending our resources and our time and what changes to the law we might need,” explains Sen. Westerfield.