My first job out of grad school was at Independence House in Hyannis, Massachusetts. I was young, and like many people freshly armed with a degree, I thought I knew what to expect. But nothing — nothing — prepares you for what it’s like to sit with a survivor in the aftermath of rape or domestic violence and be asked, “What happens now?”

There are no perfect answers. But at Independence House, we tried to make sure there were at least options. Our team provided emergency shelter, legal advocacy, trauma counseling, and prevention education. We did hospital accompaniment. We helped survivors file restraining orders. We trained schools and talked to law enforcement. We held stories too heavy to repeat.

And we did all of that under the tireless leadership of our Clinical Director, Lysetta, and a team of advocates, therapists, and case managers who worked themselves into exhaustion, again and again, because the work demanded it. We fought for every grant dollar. We navigated complex federal applications. And most of all, we depended — truly depended — on the infrastructure provided by the federal government to do that work well.

So when I read that the CDC’s entire Division of Violence Prevention — the team responsible for supporting efforts like ours across the country — was gutted on April 1, the first day of Sexual Assault Awareness Month, I was furious. Because I know exactly what we’re about to lose.

Let’s be clear about the stakes

This isn’t about bloated bureaucracy. This is about the systems that make survivor support possible.

The CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention was more than a research unit. It provided strategy, coordination, evaluation, and direct support to state and local programs addressing sexual assault, intimate partner violence, childhood abuse, and even firearm-related harm. These weren’t abstract policy people — they were the ones who helped translate decades of prevention science into real-world programming.

Take hot spot mapping, for example. The CDC helped fund school-based efforts to identify where students felt unsafe — locker rooms, parking lots, stairwells. That data led to improved lighting, surveillance, and redesigns that actively reduced the likelihood of assault.

They funded evaluations that helped determine which prevention programs were actually working — and which were wasting precious time and money.

They trained local health departments on how to build sustainable prevention coalitions — so advocates didn’t burn out, and services didn’t disappear the second a grant ended.

Now those people — the ones with institutional knowledge, specialized training, and decades of experience — are gone.

One former CDC employee told NPR that nearly two-thirds of their division was wiped out. Another said the decision to keep the “surveillance” team while firing prevention staff sent a clear message: the federal government still wants to count assaults. It just doesn’t want to stop them.

What happens when the funding stops flowing?

You might think: well, Congress just approved $210 million in funding for sexual violence prevention through the Rape Prevention and Education Program (RPE). Isn’t that good news?

Here’s the catch: those dollars don’t magically distribute themselves. The federal staff who were fired were the same people who helped states and territories access that funding, build capacity, and report on progress.

Now? Everything is in limbo.

State officials are already warning they’re in a “holding pattern,” unsure how to draw down their allocated funds. Organizations are scrambling to figure out whether they’ll need to lay off staff or shut down programming. And this isn’t the first time. We saw it during the early Trump years when domestic violence shelters in Texas had to cut staff after a federal spending freeze.

This is a pattern. And it’s deadly.

“Here in Missouri, many of our domestic violence agencies rely on that funding for anywhere from one half to one third of their overall operating budget,” said Matthew Huffman of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.

The myth of apolitical violence

People love to say sexual violence “isn’t a political issue.” But watch who shows up when these programs are under threat. Watch who stays silent.

The truth is, this work has always been political — especially now. The idea that we should prevent sexual assault, that we should believe survivors, that we should care about gender-based violence — has been openly framed by some as “woke ideology.”

“A lot of our work is looking at gender-based violence and gender disparities and health equity and all of that quote unquote ‘woke ideology,’” said a laid-off CDC worker in the NPR article.

Let’s be very clear: teaching a child the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship is not woke. Ensuring your daughter isn’t assaulted in college is not woke. Funding data-informed violence prevention programs isn’t radical — it’s basic public health.

To slash these programs while leaving others intact is not neutral. It is ideological. It is strategic. And it is cruel.

What survivors and advocates are left with now

When you strip away federal coordination, what’s left is fragmentation. Silence. Burnout. And loss.

Loss of trust. Loss of infrastructure. Loss of everything we’ve learned in the last thirty years about how to make violence prevention work — and why it’s worth the effort.

At Independence House, we relied on federal frameworks not because we were bureaucratic, but because we were exhausted and underfunded and needed something bigger than us to hold the field together. We needed guidance. We needed standards. We needed to be part of a national movement, not a hundred scattered local efforts reinventing the wheel in isolation.

Without that support, we’re back to each shelter, clinic, and crisis center fighting alone.

So what now?

Now, we push back. We speak up. We refuse to let this be normal.

If you’ve never worked in this field, trust me when I say: prevention is possible. We have the science. We have the tools. We have the stories. What we lack — now more than ever — is political will.

We need leaders to step up and reverse these cuts. We need public health professionals to demand clarity and support. We need funders, donors, and allies to invest — deeply — in survivor-centered programs.

And for the rest of us: we keep telling the truth. We keep organizing. We keep remembering what this work has always been about.

Not just funding. Not just systems.

But people. Lives. Survivors. And the right to live free from violence.

We cannot afford to abandon this work. Not now. Not ever.