President Donald Trump is “dismantling domestic violence nonprofits,” according to a report from Slate.
The sentiment from writer Matt Watkins comes after “the Department of Justice quietly released a revised set of guidelines for the Office on Violence Against Women grants.”
Under the Trump administration’s guidance, programs that help victims can’t use certain language if they are to use federal funds. This includes describing domestic violence as a “systemic issue.” Inequality, identity, or structural harm could also be seen as potentially disqualifying.
According to Watkins, “Organizations are warned against ‘inculcating or promoting gender ideology.’ Funding now prioritizes trafficking prevention, immigration enforcement, and law enforcement collaboration.”
“That might sound like a shift in emphasis. But on the ground, it’s something else: a quiet rewriting of what counts as valid care,” Watkins said. “For many of the frontline organizations that support survivors of domestic and sexual violence, the new rules don’t just change how you talk about the work. They change whether you’re allowed to do it at all.”
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According to the CDC, about 41% of women and 26% of men have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner during their lifetime.
The needs of domestic violence victims are widely varied. “In each case, violence is rarely the only thing someone is surviving,” Watkins notes. But the “most effective” programs go beyond the crisis.
“They’ve linked housing support to legal aid, connected mental health care with economic stability, and designed services to meet people where they are—in language, in geography, in experience,” Watkins wrote. “They’ve built systems out of necessity, not ideology. Because healing doesn’t happen on a tight timeline. It happens in layers.”
Watkins believes the Trump administration's guidance leaves those helping people suffering from domestic violence “with a dangerous paradox: The more accurately an organization describes the full context of the violence its clients face, the more likely it is to be penalized for doing so.”
