Mary Ellen Klas: Domestic violence is a real crime. My mother worked to make it one.

President Donald Trump implied this week that he doesn’t consider domestic violence a crime. “Much lesser things – things that take place in the home – they call crime,” he complained during remarks at the Museum of the Bible in Washington on Monday. “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.”

Trump was lamenting that these “little fights” with “the wife” unfairly inflated the crime statistics in Washington, D.C., after he deployed National Guard troops. But Trump’s comments shouldn’t be dismissed as just another 79-year-old elder with an old-school view. He may have grown up in an era when survivors were expected to endure abuse alone without legal protections or community support, but decades of legal and cultural progress have now made domestic violence unacceptable.

I should know. My mother was on the front lines of that fight for progress.

It took only a few months in her first rotation as a judge on the family court bench in Minnesota before my unflappable mother admitted to being shocked. “The extent and scope of domestic violence that was happening in St. Paul where I had lived all my life blew me away,” she would later recall.

Although my mother, Mary Louise Klas, had spent more than a decade as a family law attorney before being appointed a judge on the Ramsey County bench, the number of protective orders sought by victims of domestic abuse stunned her. That experience in 1988 launched a lifelong crusade during which she worked with other domestic violence and human rights advocates to change the laws in Minnesota. She joined then-U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone, his wife, Sheila, and other advocates to push for the 1994 Violence Against Women Act and served on its first grant guidelines committee. She was also invited to develop a curriculum for judicial training in the U.S. and, ultimately, in other countries.

Back in the 1980s, police often didn’t know how to handle domestic violence. Judges inconsistently applied the law. Batterers would return to do more damage, scarring their families for another generation.

The central principle of the work animating my mother, activists and senators like Wellstone was simple: Domestic violence is a crime that the community will not tolerate. It is not a private family problem but a societal one. When perpetrators are arrested and charged, victims are provided comprehensive support and batterers ultimately get treatment, cycles of abuse end and healing happens.

It now comes as no surprise that Trump has signaled he is no fan of this approach. His comments on Monday sounded like more of the same from a man with a long history of belittling and demeaning language toward women. Trump has denied the allegations of dozens of women who have accused him of sexual abuse. This week, an appeals court upheld a ruling ordering him to pay $83.3 million for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.

We cannot realistically expect this man to continue the work advocates like my mother began. But that work is essential. The pre-Trump Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that intimate partner violence remains “a significant public health issue,” with four out of every 10 women saying they’ve experienced it. Left untreated, research shows, it “has a profound impact on lifelong health, opportunity, and well-being.” But, the agency also found, the risk factors are identifiable and, with the right resources, prevention works.

Since he came into office, however, Trump has systematically started to dismantle this safety net. In the last nine months, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has fired most of the staff within the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention program. He has eliminated the federal team that coordinated funding and support for the 13 state-based domestic violence networks. He has laid off the staff that developed the teen dating violence prevention program. The president’s budget recommendations propose sweeping reductions to domestic violence programs. The National Network to End Domestic Violence warns these cuts will undermine “decades of progress in domestic violence prevention, public safety, health, and community well-being.”

The Trump administration has also actively worked to protect abusers. When Elizabeth Oyer attempted to follow federal law and refused to restore gun rights to actor and Trump supporter Mel Gibson over his 2011 misdemeanor domestic violence conviction, she was fired. When police obtained an arrest warrant for Florida Republican Congressman Cory Mills after an alleged assault on a 27-year-old woman at his D.C. apartment, Trump’s interim U.S. attorney refused to sign it. Mills called it a “private matter.”

My mother often said it would take “the rest of our natural life” to change attitudes like Mills’ and create the kind of society that “helps families be families.” And indeed, after her mandatory retirement from the bench at age 70, my mother spent another 20 years advocating for change.

She realized it was much harder for humans to reject domestic abuse than it was to reject other damaging behaviors, like drunk driving or indoor smoking, because power and control are “so intertwined” in our intimate relationships. “It is our culture and our cultural belief that persons have the right to control their partners that’s the core of the problem,” she once told a reporter. “It’s not easy for us to see our own faults in someone else.”

I’m sure my mother would have recognized comments like Trump’s as emblematic of the challenge. Trump says these things with the power of the bully pulpit, but too many people know better. We’ve made too much progress to let him drag us back.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.