There's one voice Lisseth can't get out of her head — the pleas of a 22-year-old woman.
In June 2025, the woman had left a physically abusive partner to come to a shelter that Lisseth helped found in Honduras. By that time the shelter was facing a dire budget shortfall because of foreign aid cuts by the U.S. There simply wasn't enough money to provide sanctuary — or even food — to all the women who needed it.
"She would say 'put me to sleep sitting up or give me food once a day,' " Lisseth recalls. " 'I can't go back.'
For the past 30 years, Lisseth has fought to improve the lives of women in her country who experienced violence simply because they were women. She teamed up with others in her community and opened some of the first shelters in Honduras for those fleeing abuse. She pushed for policy changes.
But this past year, as international assistance was slashed, she's seen the disintegration of much of what she's built. The 22-year-old's voice echoing in her head — for her, it's the human cost of losing her funding.
Lisseth remembers how the young woman loved painting the intricate, colorful geometric patterns of traditional mandalas. "She said that's how she wanted her life — with everything colorful," recalls Lisseth.
NPR agreed to use only Lisseth's middle name because she fears speaking out might undermine future financial support for her women's shelters.
The 22-year-old had come to one of those shelters after being "assaulted not only psychologically but also physically and sexually," says Lisseth, speaking in Spanish through an interpreter. "He possessed weapons. It was very easy for him to kill her and he told her that."
This situation is strikingly common. One in three women — more than 700 million women — have experienced, at some point in their lifetime, physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner or sexual violence from a non-partner, according to the World Health Organization. In 2024, Lisseth's shelters helped more than 400 of these women.
Lisseth remembers that on the day the 22-year-old showed up, she said her partner had nearly killed her. Lisseth's team let her stay a few nights as they tried to find alternative accommodations. But they knew they were not in a position to help her.
Shelters in many low- and middle-income countries face the same dilemma. The Trump administration's massive cuts in foreign aid, along with a slashing of aid budgets from other countries, have had a devastating impact. A global survey by U.N. Women published in October 2025 found that more than 40% of organizations working to end violence against women and girls had to scale back life-saving services or shut down completely in the past year because of funding cuts.
"What does it mean in reality? [It's] that a lot of women around the world will be denied access to safe shelter, medical help or legal representation," says Kalliopi Mingeirou, the head of the Ending Violence Against Women Section at U.N. Women. "It's devastating."
The U.S. pullback is a big part of the picture. A report from the nonprofit Women's Refugee Commission found that over $400 million in U.S. foreign aid was cut this past year from grants that explicitly mention gender-based violence in their title or description.
Programs aimed at combating gender-based violence got swept up in the second Trump Administration's anti-DEI efforts, including ending government-supported initiatives that mention "gender." The vast majority of abuse the falls under the umbrella category of gender-based violence is against women and girls and the cuts primary impact this population.
In the past, the U.S. had been at the forefront of addressing violence against women, including in Trump 1.0.
How combatting gender-based violence became "radioactive"
During the first Trump administration, "Ivanka Trump led numerous initiatives not only providing funds for work against gender-based violence, but also for women's empowerment, for women's economic development," explains Beatriz García Nice, a research analyst for the Latin America Program at the Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
This commitment continued under President Biden's administration. García Nice says the thinking was that ending violence against women internationally was key to stopping one of the root causes of migration.
"The United States was the leader in supporting this work. That obviously changed," she says.
The second Trump administration "never said that violence against women was okay," explains García Nice. "It was just literally getting rid of anything that made a reference to gender."
Before President Trump started his second term, the effort to support women facing violence was a bipartisan issue. No longer, says García Nice.
"In many countries, it has become an issue of the left. It's not a human rights issue anymore," she says. "It's kind of radioactive."
"This issue is falling off the agenda. It's like women's needs are disappearing," says Diana Flórez, a researcher who wrote a report on gender-based violence in Latin America for the Women's Refugee Commission. "At the beginning I thought: 'Okay, the U.S. is going to go and then other actors are going to step in.' That hasn't happened."
Asked to comment on the loss of funding for programs aimed at addressing gender-based violence, the U.S. State Department sent a statement to NPR, which said that the U.S. continues to provide lifesaving assistance to women and children while not supporting the "radical ideologies" of Biden-era programs that "deny biological reality."
"She had to go"
Lisseth's commitment to helping women who've experienced abuse comes from her family's experience.
Just over 30 years ago, Lisseth urged her younger 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 situation to the authorities might help.
"She did that but, when she returned home, she experienced terrible moments for having reported [it]," remembers Lisseth, who says her sister was pregnant at the time and the abuse only grew more intense.
That's when addressing gender-based violence became Lisseth's life mission.
Back in June, when she had to tell the 22-year-old woman that funding for the shelter couldn't support her, Lisseth says it felt as if the woman could have been her younger sister.
Budget cuts in the past year had already forced Lisseth to cut back on medical care, psychological support and legal services for the women her shelters support. These days, she says her organization can't afford diapers and formula for the children who arrive with their mothers. Beds are in short supply as well. Several kids pile into the same bunk bed as their mom.
Lisseth did the best she could do to help the 22-year-old. "She had to go. What we did was find her a support network through a church so they could place her somewhere else," Lisseth says.
That's a better outcome than most, she admits. Her organization has had to turn away more than 100 women and children this past year. Tearing up, she says, it feels cruel to turn them away, especially in a country with one of the highest rates of sexual violence and femicide in the region.
"Instead of opening more places for more women, we are reducing them," she says. "It is hard, hard."
What does the future hold?
"You can consider [Honduras] representative of what is happening," says García Nice.
Nancy Glass agrees. In many low- and middle-income countries, "the care is gone, the advocates are gone, the staff gone," says Glass, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing who has been researching gender-based violence since the 1990s.
The impact is especially bad, she says, because of the speed of the U.S. cuts — "overnight" — and the fact that "there was just no planning" by the U.S. to help Honduras or other countries cope with the sudden and deep cuts. Simultaneous cuts to other U.S. aid initiatives, including HIV/AIDS and humanitarian crisis work, have compounded the damage, Glass adds, because addressing gender-based violence was often integrated into other aid programs.
"It's been catastrophic," she says.
After the past year, she says, the global gender-based violence field is beginning to regroup and figure out what to do next.
She says organizations have been discussing how they can no longer be "at the mercy of a foundation closing or a government having new priorities." Part of the solution, she thinks, may be consistent funding that comes from taxes or, perhaps, teaming up with faith-based organizations that have been singled out by the Trump administration to help implement the country's remaining international aid work.
In Honduras, Lisseth is less confident about what can be salvaged. She says she sees no glimmers of hope as more funding streams dry up and staff who applied for grants have been laid off.
"We believe that this year the crisis will deepen," she says, explaining that many women — just like her sister — will need refuge and have fewer and fewer places to turn.
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