There’s one voice Lisseth cannot get out of her head — the pleas of a 22-year-old girl.
In June 2025, the girl had left a bodily abusive associate to return to a shelter that Lisseth helped present in Honduras. By that point the shelter was going through a dire funds shortfall due to overseas assist cuts by the U.S. There merely wasn’t sufficient cash to supply sanctuary — and even meals — to all the ladies who wanted it.
“She would say ‘put me to sleep sitting up or give me meals as soon as a day,’ ” Lisseth recollects. ” ‘I can not return.’
For the previous 30 years, Lisseth has fought to enhance the lives of girls in her nation who skilled violence just because they have been ladies. She teamed up with others in her group and opened among the first shelters in Honduras for these fleeing abuse. She pushed for coverage adjustments.
However this previous 12 months, as worldwide help was slashed, she’s seen the disintegration of a lot of what she’s constructed. The 22-year-old’s voice echoing in her head — for her, it is the human value of shedding her funding.
Lisseth remembers how the younger girl liked portray the intricate, colourful geometric patterns of conventional mandalas. “She mentioned that is how she needed her life — with every little thing colourful,” recollects Lisseth.
NPR agreed to make use of solely Lisseth’s center identify as a result of she fears talking out may undermine future monetary help for her ladies’s shelters.
The 22-year-old had come to a type of shelters after being “assaulted not solely psychologically but additionally bodily and sexually,” says Lisseth, talking in Spanish by means of an interpreter. “He possessed weapons. It was very straightforward for him to kill her and he advised her that.”
This example is strikingly widespread. One in three ladies — greater than 700 million ladies — have skilled, in some unspecified time in the future of their lifetime, bodily or sexual violence by an intimate associate or sexual violence from a non-partner, based on the World Well being Group. In 2024, Lisseth’s shelters helped greater than 400 of those ladies.
Lisseth remembers that on the day the 22-year-old confirmed up, she mentioned her associate had practically killed her. Lisseth’s staff let her keep a couple of nights as they tried to search out various lodging. However they knew they weren’t able to assist her.
Shelters in lots of low- and middle-income international locations face the identical dilemma. The Trump administration’s huge cuts in overseas assist, together with a slashing of assist budgets from different international locations, have had a devastating affect. A world survey by U.N. Girls printed in October 2025 discovered that greater than 40% of organizations working to finish violence towards ladies and women needed to cut back life-saving companies or shut down fully up to now 12 months due to funding cuts.
“What does it imply in actuality? [It’s] that a whole lot of ladies all over the world shall be denied entry to secure shelter, medical assist or authorized illustration,” says Kalliopi Mingeirou, the top of the Ending Violence In opposition to Girls Part at U.N. Girls. “It is devastating.”
The U.S. pullback is an enormous a part of the image. A report from the nonprofit Girls’s Refugee Fee discovered that over $400 million in U.S. overseas assist was minimize this previous 12 months from grants that explicitly point out gender-based violence of their title or description.
Packages aimed toward combating gender-based violence acquired swept up within the second Trump Administration’s anti-DEI efforts, together with ending government-supported initiatives that point out “gender.” The overwhelming majority of abuse the falls beneath the umbrella class of gender-based violence is towards ladies and women and the cuts main affect this inhabitants.
Prior to now, the U.S. had been on the forefront of addressing violence towards ladies, together with in Trump 1.0.
How combatting gender-based violence turned “radioactive”
In the course of the first Trump administration, “Ivanka Trump led quite a few initiatives not solely offering funds for work towards gender-based violence, but additionally for girls’s empowerment, for girls’s financial growth,” explains Beatriz García Good, a analysis analyst for the Latin America Program on the Stimson Middle, a suppose tank in Washington, D.C.
This dedication continued beneath President Biden’s administration. García Good says the considering was that ending violence towards ladies internationally was key to stopping one of many root causes of migration.
“The US was the chief in supporting this work. That clearly modified,” she says.
The second Trump administration “by no means mentioned that violence towards ladies was okay,” explains García Good. “It was simply actually eliminating something that made a reference to gender.”
Earlier than President Trump began his second time period, the hassle to help ladies going through violence was a bipartisan situation. Now not, says García Good.
“In lots of international locations, it has grow to be a difficulty of the left. It is not a human rights situation anymore,” she says. “It is form of radioactive.”
“This situation is falling off the agenda. It is like ladies’s wants are disappearing,” says Diana Flórez, a researcher who wrote a report on gender-based violence in Latin America for the Girls’s Refugee Fee. “At the start I assumed: ‘Okay, the U.S. goes to go after which different actors are going to step in.’ That hasn’t occurred.”
Requested to touch upon the lack of funding for applications aimed toward addressing gender-based violence, the U.S. State Division despatched an announcement to NPR, which mentioned that the U.S. continues to supply lifesaving help to ladies and youngsters whereas not supporting the “radical ideologies” of Biden-era applications that “deny organic actuality.”
“She needed to go”
Lisseth’s dedication to serving to ladies who’ve skilled abuse comes from her household’s expertise.
Simply over 30 years in the past, Lisseth urged her youthful sister to go to the Honduran police. Lisseth says her brother-in-law was verbally abusing her sister, who was 20 years his junior. Lisseth thought reporting the state of affairs to the authorities may assist.
“She did that however, when she returned house, she skilled horrible moments for having reported [it],” remembers Lisseth, who says her sister was pregnant on the time and the abuse solely grew extra intense.
That is when addressing gender-based violence turned Lisseth’s life mission.
Again in June, when she had to inform the 22-year-old girl that funding for the shelter could not help her, Lisseth says it felt as if the girl might have been her youthful sister.
Funds cuts up to now 12 months had already compelled Lisseth to chop again on medical care, psychological help and authorized companies for the ladies her shelters help. Lately, she says her group cannot afford diapers and method for the kids who arrive with their moms. Beds are briefly provide as nicely. A number of youngsters pile into the identical bunk mattress as their mother.
Lisseth did the very best she might do to assist the 22-year-old. “She needed to go. What we did was discover her a help community by means of a church so they might place her some place else,” Lisseth says.
That is a greater final result than most, she admits. Her group has needed to flip away greater than 100 ladies and youngsters this previous 12 months. Tearing up, she says, it feels merciless to show them away, particularly in a rustic with one of many highest charges of sexual violence and femicide within the area.
“As an alternative of opening extra locations for extra ladies, we’re lowering them,” she says. “It’s onerous, onerous.”
What does the long run maintain?
“You may contemplate [Honduras] consultant of what’s taking place,” says García Good.
Nancy Glass agrees. In lots of low- and middle-income international locations, “the care is gone, the advocates are gone, the workers gone,” says Glass, a professor at Johns Hopkins Faculty of Nursing who has been researching gender-based violence for the reason that Nineteen Nineties.
The affect is particularly dangerous, she says, due to the velocity of the U.S. cuts — “in a single day” — and the truth that “there was simply no planning” by the U.S. to assist Honduras or different international locations deal with the sudden and deep cuts. Simultaneous cuts to different U.S. assist initiatives, together with HIV/AIDS and humanitarian disaster work, have compounded the injury, Glass provides, as a result of addressing gender-based violence was typically built-in into different assist applications.
“It has been catastrophic,” she says.
After the previous 12 months, she says, the worldwide gender-based violence subject is starting to regroup and work out what to do subsequent.
She says organizations have been discussing how they’ll not be “on the mercy of a basis closing or a authorities having new priorities.” A part of the answer, she thinks, could also be constant funding that comes from taxes or, maybe, teaming up with faith-based organizations which were singled out by the Trump administration to assist implement the nation’s remaining worldwide assist work.
In Honduras, Lisseth is much less assured about what could be salvaged. She says she sees no glimmers of hope as extra funding streams dry up and workers who utilized for grants have been laid off.
“We consider that this 12 months the disaster will deepen,” she says, explaining that many ladies — similar to her sister — will want refuge and have fewer and fewer locations to show.
