Teen relationship violence surges 40% in Fresno County, center says
A 40% jump in teen relationship violence in Fresno County included at least one campus strangulation case, raising alarms in schools and on phones.
Teen relationship violence climbed sharply in Fresno County, and Marjaree Mason Center leaders said the abuse was showing up not just in homes and neighborhoods but on school campuses. CEO Leticia Campos said the center served hundreds of victims ages 12 to 19 over the past year, and that some of the most serious cases involved physical violence that unfolded quickly and in public, including at local schools.
The center’s first-quarter data showed 67 unique reports of domestic violence among teens this year, up from 39 during the same period in 2025 and 56 in 2024. Campos said the spike was especially troubling as the school year ended, when students were no longer separated by the school day and could stay in constant contact through phones and social media. That digital access, she said, allowed abuse to follow teens off campus and into the spaces where adults are often least likely to see it.
The hardest question now is which Fresno County districts have prevention programs, where reporting gaps remain, and whether schools are equipped to intervene before teen dating abuse turns into a criminal case. Marjaree Mason Center partners with Fresno Police and runs its kNOw MORE program in six Fresno County school districts to teach students and families about healthy relationships and warning signs. The prevention program began in 2009, now operates in 10 Fresno County high schools, and reaches more than 15,000 local youth each year.
The center’s role in that response has deep local roots. It was founded in 1979 by the YWCA after the death of Marjaree Mason, became an independent nonprofit in 1996, and has operated the only domestic violence shelter in Fresno County for four decades. Its services include emergency shelter, transitional housing, counseling, legal assistance, safety planning, victim advocacy, human trafficking services and children’s services, largely at no cost to survivors.
The broader data point to a countywide public-safety burden that reaches far beyond teen cases. In 2023, Fresno County law enforcement and Marjaree Mason Center launched a domestic violence dashboard that says Fresno County has the highest per-capita calls to law enforcement for domestic violence among California’s 10 largest counties. A 2025 regional analysis found domestic-violence calls in Fresno County had more than doubled, from about 6,500 in 2019 to more than 13,300 in 2023, and that the county was the only San Joaquin Valley county to post a year-over-year increase from 2022 to 2023.
Federal public-health guidance frames teen dating violence as an adverse childhood experience that can happen in person or electronically, including repeated texting, stalking and posting sexual images without consent. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says nearly 1 in 11 female teens and about 1 in 15 male high school students reported physical dating violence in the last year, a national backdrop that makes Fresno County’s 40% rise more than a local warning sign.
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