A dog named Elle greets visitors at the door of a Victorian house near downtown Norman. Toys and books are strung across tables in the living room, framed by couches and kid-sized chairs. Nearby, a hallway is painted with dozens of handprints of different sizes and colors.
But this is not a typical home.
Each handprint was left by a child who had witnessed or experienced some form of domestic violence or sexual abuse. Nearly every inch of the wall is stamped with finger and palm prints. And when there was no space left in the hallway, large, blank canvases were hung in the kitchen to make room for more.
“We did fill it up in about a year and a half,” Anna Adkins said. “We see a lot of kids.”
Adkins works as operations director for Mary Abbott Children’s House, which provides forensic interviews and medical assessments for children who have been victims of abuse, neglect, or who may have witnessed a crime. It’s one of 21 such children’s advocacy centers in the state. The centers provide services to victims of the most heinous and shocking crimes; child physical and sexual abuse, witnesses to violence and brutal murders.
Abbott House sees around 1,000 kids a year, and demand for its services continues to grow. The number of clients served by the organization has more than doubled in the past decade, records show. But the federal funding that helps pay for the services has plummeted in recent years.
Federal funding from the Victims of Crime Act once covered Abbott House’s entire forensic interview program, with comfortable conversation rooms and three interviewers. Now the funds are only enough to cover the salary for one. Abbott House’s VOCA funding has shrunk by 40% since 2018, forcing the nonprofit to lean heavily on private donations and limited state funds.
Created by Congress in 1984, the Victims of Crime Act established the Crime Victims Fund, which is the largest federal funding source for crime victim services. Money for the program comes from criminal fines collected through federal convictions, rather than from tax dollars.
The VOCA fund has always been unpredictable, said Jaime Yahner, executive director of the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators. Federal funding for victim-service organizations peaked between 2018 and 2019 after the Volkswagen company agreed to pay over $4.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties in 2017 for cheating on emissions tests required by the Environmental Protection Agency. It was the only time Yahner can remember victim-service organizations having sufficient funding; Forensic interview rooms were renovated, wraparound services increased, legal assistance was bolstered.
“Everywhere I went, it was looking how victim services should look,” Yahner recalls.
But funding has dwindled as federal prosecutions of white-collar crimes have fallen to historic lows in recent years. The declines come as the Trump Administration has also cut hundreds of millions of dollars in other federal funding for some crime-victim services.
Abbott House wasn’t the only organization to take a hit.
The amount of VOCA funding for Oklahoma’s victim-serving organizations declined from a little over $29 million in 2018 to just $10.3 million in 2025, resulting in over 5,000 fewer victims served, according to data from the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council, which distributes federal VOCA funding to organizations in the state.
Funding cuts forced some victim-service organizations to reduce staff and services to stay afloat. Other providers say staff caseloads have doubled, if not tripled, as they work to help more people with fewer resources.
“We shouldn’t have to work so hard to make sure that kids — families — are getting these services,” Adkins said.
Every second counts
The victims of domestic violence who visit the Palomar family justice center in Oklahoma City often arrive with nothing but the clothes on their backs, many with young children in tow. The day after President’s Day, over 50 people dropped into the shelter in search of help.
“You’re talking about some of the most vulnerable people in our communities,” said Anden Bull, chief programs officer for Palomar.
As a family justice center, Palomar assists clients with legal services like protective orders and child custody arrangements, and provides for basic food and shelter needs.
Time is critical when abuse is involved, Bull said. The Department of Human Services and courts typically have time limits for substantiating a case, she said. And emergency protective orders have to go before a judge by the afternoon, or vulnerable clients will have to wait until the following morning, Bull said.
“Every second counts when there’s someone out there actively trying to search for you or trying to track you,” Bull said. “It’s not just a piece of paper. We’re talking about people’s safety and people’s lives.”
It’s just a weird thing for us in the victim-serving agency, in our world, to hope for crime to happen so we can have some money.
— Carrie Little, executive director of Children’s Advocacy Centers of Oklahoma
But dwindling money and staff have pushed wait times longer.
Palomar serves between 5,000 and 6,000 clients a year. The nonprofit doesn’t receive state funding. VOCA used to be Palomar’s largest federal funding source — now it’s the smallest.
Palomar’s 48 partner agencies are similarly affected by diminishing VOCA funds.
One partner agency is Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, a nonprofit law firm providing free legal services to low-income clients and domestic violence survivors. Like Palomar, Legal Aid has lost over 73% of its VOCA funds since 2018.
Attorneys and staff are taking on higher caseloads while Legal Aid’s executive director searches for funding to fill the gap, but donations are down across the board. Fewer people are served by Legal Aid using VOCA funds now compared to 2018, said Rochette Wurth, deputy director for Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma. Wurth said VOCA funds supported about 21 Legal Aid attorneys in 2018. Now the federal grant money is only enough to fund about six attorneys.
The situation is even more dire in rural Oklahoma, where there are often fewer resources and funding opportunities.
Payne County Youth Services, which provides shelter and other services to youth in north-central Oklahoma, experienced an 80% reduction in VOCA funds from $407,051 in 2018 to $78,691 in 2024. The organization previously used the funding for counseling and shelter for victims of crime, outreach programs and to pay the salaries of two additional counselors. Funding cuts meant they now can only afford counseling services among their laundry list of needs, said Janet Fultz, the nonprofit’s executive director.
It was another 40% reduction in VOCA funds in 2025, slightly higher than the 30% cut they were expecting and had budgeted for, Fultz said.
Meanwhile, the needs of clients are increasing and becoming more expensive. Fultz estimates the percentage of cases Payne County Youth Services sees involving high-risk situations like suicidality and self-harm has increased to around 65% of all cases. Fultz is scrambling to fill the gap. She’s sometimes up until 3 a.m., sending emails in search of additional funding.
“Mental health has never been adequately funded,” Fultz said. “When reductions happen, it just exacerbates that situation.”
Stabilizing the fund
Carrie Little, executive director of Children’s Advocacy Centers of Oklahoma, gets emotional talking about the work of centers that support survivors of abuse. Dwindling funds are making it harder to serve vulnerable clients, she said.
Center directors and other victim-service organizations spend countless hours searching and applying for funding to support operations and retain staff. But there’s nothing they can do to stop federal funds from drying up.
There’s been a turnover of more than half the executive directors and CEOs across Oklahoma’s Children Advocacy Centers in the last five years, according to Little. The stress of navigating budgets had become too much, they said in exit interviews.
“They can’t figure out how to make ends meet,” Little said. “They don’t know if their funding is going to be cut or the same.”
Sixty-three fewer organizations in Oklahoma received VOCA funding in 2025 than in 2018. And most organizations that received funding over that period experienced a cut.
The Oklahoma District Attorneys Council is the state agency in charge of distributing federal VOCA funds to service organizations.
Brian Hendrix, director of victim services for the District Attorneys Council, said though funding reductions are inevitable, the council aims to minimize cuts for organizations that have few — if any — alternative funding streams. Applications are carefully reviewed to determine how critical VOCA funding is to an organization’s overall operations, in addition to being scored on objectives and outcomes.
The District Attorneys Council plans to make funding more reliable by sending a set, average amount to service organizations each year so groups know how much money to expect, even while federal funding fluctuates.
A handful of states have implemented measures to help with the broadening VOCA gap, according to the National Children’s Alliance. The Oklahoma legislature decides whether to appropriate additional state funding to other victim-serving organizations.
Oklahoma did create the Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services Revolving Fund in 2024, which provides an additional $10 million in grants from the Attorney General’s Office to some service providers.
But that funding only goes to Attorney General-certified programs. Other organizations that experienced a VOCA funding cut don’t see any of those state funds, including Palomar.
On the federal level, advocates and policymakers are pushing for the Crime Victims Fund Stabilization Act, which was reintroduced in 2025 to steady the fund. The bipartisan measure would add a new source of revenue by requiring some monetary penalties collected from settlements in cases of fraud and false claims against the federal government to be deposited into the VOCA fund until fiscal year 2029.
The measure would be a significant step toward stabilizing the VOCA fund, Little said.
Still, “It’s just a weird thing for us in the victim-serving agency, in our world, to hope for crime to happen so we can have some money,” Little said.
“It shouldn’t be this hard.”
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