November 6, 2025 Original MassLive Article Link
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Every day in Massachusetts, survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence face intersecting challenges to achieving safety, healing, and well-being. Right now, those challenges are deepening as survivors – and the workers and advocates who support them – face intense, politicized attacks that include threats to funding and the indiscriminate targeting of survivor communities.
As Massachusetts’ statewide coalition against sexual assault and domestic violence, we are watching survivors hesitate to seek out potentially life-saving care and support out of fear. Advocates become increasingly exhausted and overwhelmed, facing continued need for their services while receiving less and less resources themselves.
And organizations that provide meaningful, live-affirming services are forced to make impossible choices based on swirling uncertainty around funding – all of which empowers abusers and puts survivors at even greater risk.
We are at a critical moment in the fight to preserve the availability and accessibility of survivor services, and it’s not hyperbole to say that lives hang in the balance.
The increase in dangerous rhetoric and destructive federal policies that vilify immigrants and attack gender equality, racial equity, health care, and economic security have a disproportionate impact on survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse.
Fearing detention and deportation, immigrant survivors are more likely to remain in an abusive household, rather than risk attempting to access emergency housing as immigrants continue to be detained and disappeared. Transgender and gender-nonconforming survivors are more likely to avoid crisis centers and critical medical services for fear of being singled out, denied care, or even experiencing hate violence.
Survivors of color are more likely to think twice about seeking out resources as organizations are pressured to retreat from efforts to make those resources more reflective of diverse communities. Barriers like these isolate survivors at critical stages in healing from violence, escaping abuse, and thriving.
As survivors face increasing challenges to accessing support, survivor-serving organizations are being forced to navigate tumultuous terrain and scramble to understand, react and persevere in this vital work as best they can.
The avalanche of unpredictable hits to vital federal funding impacts the advocates, service providers and resources that survivors urgently need. The work depends a great deal on federal funding – 87% of sexual assault, domestic violence and human trafficking programs in Massachusetts receive at least some degree of federal funding to provide lifesaving services to survivors across the state.
Attempts by the Trump administration to bar concepts like diversity, equity, inclusion and “gender ideology” from grant funding applications hinder organizations that support survivors from diverse backgrounds and threaten to undermine decades of evidence-based service, research and advocacy that clearly demonstrate gender-based violence is deeply rooted in the systems of oppression these restrictions aim to conceal.
One of Jane Doe Inc.’s member programs, a free crisis center that serves over 2,000 people in Massachusetts every year, explained, “As a crisis center, we engage with people in emergency and urgent situations who need help immediately, as well as working with people who would like to heal from past experiences of abuse … Funding cuts will reduce all of that work simply because we do not have access to private funds or foundations.”
As disorder erupts on the national stage, we at JDI, alongside survivor service networks across the state and country, remain deeply committed to protecting the rights and voices of all survivors, and supporting survivors in all phases of their healing journey from legal representation, to housing and emergency shelter, to accessing health care services.
We know that an intentional focus on the wide range of survivor identities and communities they inhabit is deeply embedded in finding justice for survivors, and has empowered us to better serve all survivors and prevent violence in all communities.
Increasing accessibility, inclusivity and community-driven solutions to abuse prevention and survivor protection are the bedrock of this field. The damaging and divisive rhetoric and politics of the federal administration – leveraging many of the same threats and narratives of abusers – undermines the very nature of this work.
We are enormously grateful for the ongoing work of service providers, advocates and the survivors themselves who work tirelessly to prioritize and support the needs of survivors in Massachusetts against all odds.
As organizers, advocates and leaders, we know that this work is and has always been crucial, challenging and heavily dependent on community orientation. The landscape we now face presents unprecedented challenges that destabilize the work of supporting survivors.
Federal officials and state leaders must acknowledge their shared responsibility in providing urgently needed opposition to the attacks on survivors and supporting new strategies for investment, protection and healing. Together, we must find collaborative solutions to protect survivor access to life-saving resources while keeping survivors and our communities safe, and coming one step closer to ending the cycles of violence and abuse.
Hema Sarang-Sieminski is executive director of the Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Dom