Red Flag Campaign | How the Virginia Family Violence & Sexual Assault Hotline Can Help

Hotlines

National Domestic Violence Hotline
Hotline advocates are available for victims and anyone calling on their behalf to provide crisis intervention, safety planning, information and referrals to agencies in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Assistance is available in English and Spanish with access to more than 140 languages through interpreter services.
1-800-799-SAFE (1-800-799-7233) (or 1-800-787-3224 TTY)

The Virginia Family Violence & Sexual Assault Hotline (1-800-838-8238 v/tty) is a statewide, toll-free, confidential, 24-hour service that provides crisis intervention, support, information, and referrals to victims of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, their friends and families, professionals, and the general public. It is operated by the Virginia Sexual & Domestic Violence Action Alliance, Virginia’s coalition of professionals working to end sexual and domestic violence.

Hotline Services
Each year the Hotline responds to over 40,000 calls. Most of those calls are answered on behalf of local Domestic Violence Programs and Sexual Assault Crisis Centers that forward their local hotlines to the statewide hotline when local staff and volunteers are unavailable.

The Hotline offers the following services:

Information and support for survivors, friends and family, and the general public.
Links to local crisis centers, shelters or other human resource agencies through referrals and by directly connecting callers to local agencies via a 3-way calling system.
Resource packets on a variety of topics for callers seeking written information.
Technical assistance to professionals working with victims and perpetrators of intimate partner violence and sexual assault.
Brochures and other resource materials in bulk for agencies seeking to distribute information about intimate partner violence and sexual assault.

Accessibility
In an effort to make the Hotline accessible to a wide array of callers, the Hotline employs bi-lingual (English/Spanish) staff and contracts with Language Lines to provide language interpretation services for callers; the Language Line offers interpreters for over 140 different languages.

Hotline advocates are also trained to respond to TTY or Voice Relay calls from callers who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.

Confidentiality
The Hotline maintains a strict confidentiality policy. While we do ask callers to identify their age, ethnicity, and city or county of residence for data collection purposes, we do not collect any additional information which might compromise the caller’s confidentiality. Callers are welcome to remain completely anonymous, if they choose.

If a caller requests that we take a message for one of the local hotlines contracting with the statewide Hotline to provide phone coverage, it is our policy to destroy the information directly after giving the message to the local hotline.

It is also our policy to destroy any written transmissions via TTY after the hotline call has ended.

The Red Flag Campaign is a project of the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance (Action Alliance) and was created thanks to the generous support of the Verizon Foundation. The Red Flag Campaign is copyrighted by the Action Alliance and protected under the laws of the United States of America and member treaty nations. None of the campaign graphics, survey instruments, documentation, written information, posters, ikons, buttons or any other material related to the campaign may be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the Action Alliance. All rights conferred under law, whether or not mentioned herein, are reserved.