Nearly every woman carries the fear of becoming a victim of a violent crime. She may not always say it, but every time she walks to the office, takes her children on an errand run, or double-checks the lock on her front door at night, there is an underlying calculation of what she needs to do to keep herself safe.
If the unthinkable does happen, and a woman becomes a survivor of a crime committed against her, what happens then?
The justice system can feel like a linear conveyor belt, with a clean start and end. An offender commits a crime, an investigation follows, the perpetrator is prosecuted, convicted, sentenced, and often released back into society. The pattern is that every step is focused on the offender. But what does real justice look like for a victim when the headlines disappear?
A criminal sentence is supposed to mark the end of an offender’s punishment for a crime they committed — but it should not mark the end of their victim’s protection from them. An effective criminal justice system does more than punish and lock up dangerous people. It protects victims in a way that gives them their lives back. Anything less is justice that is incomplete.
From an offender’s perspective, the process is fairly cut-and-dried. The prosecutor closes the file, the judge concludes proceedings, and the guilty party serves and often completes their sentence.
A victim’s experience is fundamentally different. She must return home, go back to work, take the children to school, run to the grocery store, and try to live a normal life. She may have to do all of this knowing the person who violated her could eventually return to society. An offender serving a sentence does not mean the victim’s trauma or fear comes to an end, and we cannot force survivors to “manage” that trauma on some arbitrary calendar.
That is exactly the problem the Kayleigh’s Law Act of 2026 is designed to address. A criminal sentence might be the last stop in an offender’s journey, but it shouldn’t be the end of a victim’s protection.
Kayleigh Kozak was sexually abused by her middle school soccer coach and, years later, learned he was seeking to end his probation. When she sought protection, she discovered the system offered little recourse. She turned that experience into a life of advocacy, helping secure protections for thousands of survivors and championing Kayleigh’s Law, first in Arizona, which allows victims to seek lifetime no-contact orders against their abusers.
Now, the Kayleigh’s Law Act of 2026 would bring those protections to the federal level, recognizing that protecting victims shouldn’t end simply because an offender’s sentence does.
We can’t ignore the reality that rehabilitation can play an important role in an offender’s time served, and that when someone is released from their sentence, it can be done safely through reentry programming that helps them become productive members of society who will not reoffend. So, in the case of Kayleigh’s Law, the question becomes: Should the government really be able to impose a lifetime restriction on someone? The short answer is yes.
To be clear, this bill is not saying that the government gets to decide someone is dangerous forever. Instead, it creates a mechanism for a victim to seek continued protection after a qualifying violent crime while preserving the ability to ask the court to modify the order if circumstances change. The design of Kayleigh’s Law is not to hand more power to the government, but rather to give a survivor the autonomy and justice she deserves in a situation she did not choose.
A complete picture of justice asks two vital questions: Was the offender held accountable? And is the victim actually free to rebuild her life without the burden of fear? Criminal punishment must be nonnegotiable in a civilized society, but victim protection must be just as much of a priority.
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Congress has an opportunity to do just that. The Kayleigh’s Law Act of 2026 would establish that justice requires both pieces of the puzzle to create a complete picture. A crime committed against a victim should not create lasting chains that keep her from healing and rebuilding her life.
Instead, this legislation can give survivors something they truly deserve: the freedom to move forward.
Rachel A. Wright is the national policy director for Right On Crime.