Vanessa Martinez was finishing preparations for her daughter’s second birthday in September 2021 when her ex-boyfriend broke into her Mesa, Ariz., condo and shot her in the head as she frantically tried to shield their three young children. Doctors had to remove a third of her skull, but Martinez survived.

She left the hospital facing a fight for custody of her kids, who’d been placed in state care after the attack. She needed a new place to live after much of the house was damaged in a standoff between police and her shooter. Her 4-year-old son needed trauma counseling.

Arizona has a state safety net — local victim compensation programs — for victims of violent attacks like Martinez. But she was denied help because she was behind on about $900 in court fines from unrelated incidents, including one dating back nearly a decade. Program officials told Martinez she could reapply if she got current with a payment plan, but every dollar she made was needed for things like finding a place to live, work scrubs for her home-care job, after-school day care — and the list grows.Across the country, victims like Martinez are using their stories to advocate for changes to state victim compensation programs, where thousands of crime survivors turn for help with medical bills, relocation, funerals or other expenses. The programs disburse millions of dollars each year, but The Associated Press found racial inequities and other barriers in how claims are denied in many states.

Crime survivors have organized rallies, testified at legislatures and met with dozens of lawmakers — with much success.

Legislatures in more than half of U.S. states have passed measures to improve their programs in recent years. The changes vary widely: A victim’s criminal history is no longer an automatic disqualifier in Illinois. The time limit to apply for help was increased from three to seven years in California. In Michigan, the cap on aid will nearly double to $45,000 this year and more people like caretakers of victims will be eligible for survivor benefits.

States have cut back on their denials to families based on the behavior of homicide victims and loosened requirements that crime victims must have cooperated with or reported the crime to police.

In Ohio, denials are no longer automatic for crime victims who have felony convictions or for surviving family if a murder victim had drugs in their system. Those reasons were used to deny help for a handful of victims in the 2019 mass shooting at a Dayton bar where nine people were killed and 17 others were wounded.

Dion Green was at the bar that night with his father, Derrick Fudge, who was killed. Green helped fight for the changes to Ohio’s program after being denied help because his father had an almost 10-year-old felony conviction.

“I told them that I miss my father everyday, but the survivors, the people left here, are the ones still moving through their pain,” Green said.

Changes have incrementally rolled through states over decades as more is learned about victimization. Mental health treatment wasn’t a commonly covered expense when the programs started in the 1960s and 1970s, but now is widely covered. Pennsylvania passed a law to allow eligible victims access to counseling whether or not the program determined the victim contributed to their own victimization.

Sometimes, however, change runs up against institutional inertia.

Nevada doesn’t require sexual assault victims to go to police as long as they report the crime to nurses or other health professionals. But a 2021 federal audit found 175 claims from those victims had been denied over a five-year period because of missing or incomplete police reports.

Nevada retrained staff after the audit, and revised the denials notifications sent to victims. Program officials confirmed that as of early 2023, none of those denied claims had been reopened. They declined an interview request from the AP.

“The consensus has been that the potential re-traumatization to victims of sexual assault is too great of a risk in contacting victims regarding their claims,” program spokeswoman, Karla Delgado wrote in an emailed response.