DECATUR, Ill. (WAND) — The numbers are staggering, but it's hard to get a picture of it in your mind.

That is until you see the paper trail and hear the stories — stories like Jane Doe's.

"I was literally at the mercy of my abuser," she said. "I was saved by the appearance of the police."

WAND News is withholding Jane's real name out of concern for her privacy.

She came to the United States to find love. Jane communicated for months with a man in central Illinois, immigrating to the U.S. to meet and marry him.

But that love quickly disappeared.

"It all started with verbal abuse and then escalated to physical abuse," she said. "It just got worse and worse after that."

It continued for months until police arrested her husband — for abusing another woman before marrying Jane.

"It meant I became homeless as a result," she said. "I didn't know exactly what to do next."

That's when Jane ended up in the care of Dove, Inc. and Teri Ducy, the organization's director for domestic violence programs.

"Sometimes when you've been in this work for so long, you just assume everyone knows [about Dove], but they don't," Ducy said.

Since July 2018, Dove has served more then 405 men and women alongside 106 children. The organization provides them with shelter, critical services and emotional support in the wake of domestic violence.

"I don't know why it is so elevated here other than we've got to start looking at this as the crime that it is," Ducy said.

And she's not kidding about domestic abuse being elevated in central Illinois.

In just one year, WAND News collected 640 domestic battery arrest records in Macon County, averaging just under two per day — and those are only the ones we knew about.

"That's 640 people who are like you and I," Ducy said. "They're mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers [and] children."

Jay Scott has been trying these cases as a prosecutor for 34 years.

"I'm not surprised in the least bit," he said. "I can tell you when I came in Monday morning, I had ten people in custody [for domestic battery]."

Many times, these cases don't go as planned — like one particular series of cases Scott remembers from his time as a young prosecutor.

"We had a case several years ago where a man and a woman had a long-term relationship," he said. "She had him arrested for domestic battery. She recanted. She had him arrested a second time for domestic battery. She again recanted. We then prosecuted him a third time and that was after he killed her."

Many of the suspects arrested in that stack of 640 papers were repeat offenders — 25 of them arrested multiple times in just that year — four of them arrested three times.

"If you go back to 1996 to 1999, we ranked number one per capita in the state [for domestic violence arrests]," Scott said. "Since then, we've averaged third to fourth."

The numbers from the Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority back that up. For the last year on record, 2016, Macon County was fourth in the state for abuse arrests per capita. Sangamon County was first and Champaign County was eighth.

But do those numbers indicate abuse is on the rise in central Illinois? Deputy Chief Shane Brandel of the Decatur Police Department doesn't think so.

"It's doesn't necessarily mean we have that much more occurrences," he said. "It means we take a more aggressive stance in how we enforce the domestic violence laws."

Brandel and his officers are often on the front lines of the abuse epidemic. They respond to the calls and make the arrests — each arrest contributing to the stack of 640 sworn statements in Macon County. In 2018 alone, the department had more than 4,000 calls for domestic violence, taking up the largest percentage of calls for officers.

"We may go out to a house six or seven times before we make an arrest because the information isn't there or it never got to the point where there's an arrestable offense that occurred," Brandel said.

Jane Doe's abuser was ultimately convicted of domestic battery, set to serve seven years behind bars.

That conviction will never take away the trauma, but it brings Jane some semblance of closure.

"Whenever I go past that place, I feel afraid because it was so emotional and psychological," she said. "But now, since I know he's far away, I feel quite safe and I'm able to focus on building myself."

Anyone who is a victim of domestic violence or knows someone dealing with something similar should call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at (800) 799-SAFE or Dove, Inc. at (217) 423-2238. For more information on domestic violence, visit Dove, Inc. or the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV).