By Pía Riggirozzi & Natalia Cintra
Central America is undergoing a profound transformation. Once primarily a region of emigration, forced return, and northward transit, it is increasingly becoming a place of prolonged wait, various types of return, and long-term stranded mobility, where people move in multiple directions without clear pathways forward or adequate protection. In 2025, Honduras received nearly 43,000 deportees- up 25% from the previous year – and the Northern Triangle countries as a whole continue to absorb more than half of all US deportations, as seen in our report with the World Lutheran Foundation. Tighter border controls, fast-track deportations, and international agreements that shift responsibility onto transit countries have made onward movement more difficult even as displacement pressures persist. Likewise, cuts to humanitarian assistance by long-time international donors have reduced access to shelters, legal aid, food, and healthcare, leaving many migrants without support (Riggirozzi and Cintra 2026).
For forcibly returned women, this is particularly concerning as a convergence of forced return and institutional withdrawal not only creates new vulnerability, but it compounds pre-existing ones. Vulnerability to sexual abuse and other forms of gender-based violence is a constant feature of the experiences of forcibly displaced women (Zucarelli et al 2025). These women come back to the same communities, sometimes the same relationships or same dangers- and to states where the institutional architecture that should receive them is, by documented evidence, being actively dismantled. Migrant women are returning to states that have simultaneously narrowed the pathway to protection and widened the conditions that produced their displacement in the first place. In El Salvador, for example, over the past two years, a systematically dismantling of the institutional architecture that existed — however imperfectly — for gender-related protection has been taking place. The public institute responsible for all gender policy, ISDEMU, has had its budget cut nearly in half, from $12 million to $7.2 million; while the total workforce fell from 416 in 2024 to 209 in 2025 (Rivera 2025). Furthermore, twelve regional offices that served women survivors of violence closed. The Legislative Assembly’s Commission on Women and Gender Equality had been dissolved. Comprehensive sexual education was banned from schools. The legislature has gone three years without passing a single piece of substantive legislation on women’s rights or gender-based violence, as reported by the OHCHR here.
To understand why this matters so acutely for forcibly returned women, it helps to think about violence against women in Segato’s terms, around what she calls a mandato de masculinidad, or mandate of masculinity, in which women’s subordination is not incidental but structural (Segato 2019). Violence, in this reading, involves the control over what women are permitted to know, where their autonomy ends, what they cannot claim and do. At an institutional scale this is reproduced by banning sex education in schools, forbidding healthcare workers from discussing sexual health with adolescents, closing official offices where women could report and receive support.
For returned women in El Salvador, the danger that drove the original departure has not been resolved. As women are forcibly returned, via deportation or constraint in their choices to continue, they are placed back to the conditions from which they left. They however return to a country that has now made it measurably harder to move through the spaces of gender-related protection. In this way, returned migrant women face compounding violence — from their past journeys, from their communities, from their families, from deeply ingrained patriarchal social rules, and from a government actively dismantling the institutions that were supposed to protect them. El Salvador presents a stark internal contradiction. General homicide rates have fallen sharply under the current estado de excepción (state of exception) from 103 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015 to approximately 1.3 in 2025 , and the suppression of gang activity is widely credited for this reduction (WOLA 2026). Yet structural and interpersonal violence against women remains. Feminist and human rights organisations have warned that the estado de excepción has not redressed violence against women and that, on the contrary, killings of women within their circles of trust, within the domestic sphere and across intimate social networks, have increased (ORMUSA 2025).
What emerges is a security model that has successfully demobilised one form of violence while leaving the gendered architecture of harm, patriarchal social oppression, and gendered inequalities, structurally intact. That architecture persists in women’s lives and more fundamentally, it organises them, determining where women can go, whom they can approach, what they can name, and whether they can leave. Salvadoran women are therefore caught in a cycle of violence that is parallel to, and constitutive of, a cycle of forced (im)mobility, with no resolution in sight. In other words, women are restricted in their capacity for what Mackenzie (2021: 382) calls relational autonomy — the conditions under which self-governance becomes possible — while simultaneously eroding institutional spaces that might help to rebuild those conditions.
The Immobility Turn in Migration Studies
Migration studies long assumed that movement was the problem to be governed. The literature has shifted — Carling’s ‘involuntary immobility’, Hyndman and Giles on protracted displacement, Gammeltoft-Hansen on containment — to argue that preventing movement is equally a modality of bordering, and often a more violent one. For returned women specifically, immobility is a continuation of it under different conditions. This is particularly striking for Salvadoran women.
Take the case of the community Las Hortalizas, a low-income urban neighbourhood on the periphery of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, where women are stuck in a cycle of violence and concurrently of forced (im)mobility. Despite their forced return, return did not end their displacement; it relocated them to the same conditions of violence they left in the first place. This violence is paradoxically not only the reason why so many still consider migrating, but why so many cannot do so, as their levels of autonomy and agency grow increasingly weaker. Drawing from Bélanger & Silvey (2019:3425), the situation of Salvadoran women perfectly reflects the power geometries of migration, shaped by gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, amongst others, and
(…) Manifest not only in inequalities with respect to migrants and non-migrants, but more broadly as inequalities in control over mobility: who has the capacity to move, either at all or at the speed or to the destinations they might like, the degree of control people have over various stages of their mobility trajectories, the power people have to remain with their family members when they travel (and for how long), and the risks that different people face of deportation, confinement, and exclusion.
The increase in forced return, alongside the institutional dismantling of gender- or women-related protection mechanisms in the country of return (El Salvador), such as ISDEMU, the closure of Ciudad Mujer offices, the ban on sex education, amongst other losses in their rights, further compound their forced (im)mobility. These institutional losses further restrict their chances of claiming support, challenging and reporting situations of violence, which paradoxically restricts their ability to engage in acts of self-governance (Mackenzie 2021; Riggirozzi et al. 2025), and hence their capacity to leave situations of harm, while simultaneously making departure ever more necessary. Displacement is therefore protracted, even after return to the country of origin.
Women as epistemic authorities and subjects of protection
If institutional retreat narrows what displaced women can name and claim, one response, although necessarily partial, from the academic and social grounds – and hence not insignificant — is to develop tools to help rebuild that capacity directly with women themselves. This is the context in which we developed, implemented and evaluated the AGAPE Guide — a tool co-developed with migrant women in Colombia out of the ReGHID research at the University of Southampton, and adapted and implemented in El Salvador, first by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and, later, by the Lutheran World Federation (LWF), which rolled it out across El Salvador and Honduras with 300 returned migrant women and community leaders.
ReGHID generated primary data on the sexual and reproductive health needs of displaced and returned women in Central America — surveys with over 1,000 women migrating through the Central and South American region, interviews and focus groups documenting needs and barriers to sexual and reproductive healthcare, and institutional analysis of why governance frameworks consistently fail to protect women in mobility. What the research showed, consistently, was that information gaps — about sexual and reproductive rights, forms of violence, and gaps in protection services reproduce vulnerabilities and inequalities amongst migrant women affecting not only their journeys but also the prospects of integrating in places of above.
The guide was built to address these gaps; a practical pedagogical tool organised around four dimensions that map directly onto the vulnerabilities ReGHID documented: gender equality and recognition of violence; sexual and reproductive rights; comprehensive self-care; and risks and protection mechanisms in migration contexts. The AGAPE guide is structured around four dimensions that map directly onto the vulnerabilities the research documented: gender equality and violence recognition; sexual and reproductive rights; comprehensive self-care; and risks and protection mechanisms in migration contexts.
The Lutheran World Federation implemented the guide in El Salvador and Honduras between 2025 and 2026, reaching 300 returned migrant women and community leaders — 200 in San Salvador and Morazán, and 100 in LWF programme areas in Honduras. The evaluation results are striking. There were statistically significant improvements across seven knowledge indicators we measured, with a 23-point gain in knowing protection routes; a 27-point gain in self-care knowledge; and a substantial increase in the ability to recognise different manifestations of violence, reaching 100% correct responses in the post-intervention measurement, compared to 84.2% at baseline (as seen in the forthcoming impact report done by the University of Southampton with the LWF).
What distinguishes the AGAPE approach is that it does not frame women as passive recipients of information. It treats women as the epistemic authorities on their own lives, which is why the guide was co-produced with migrant women, and why its evaluation treats their own articulation of what violence is, what their priorities are, and what they have a right to claim as the measure of success. The knowledge these women acquired related to sexual violence and consent, that their bodies are their own regardless of context, that there are routes to protection and they have a right to use them.
This is significant because knowledge precedes action- you cannot exercise a right you cannot name. In a country where the state is in active retreat from women’s rights, what the AGAPE evaluation demonstrates is that research oriented towards a positive transformation of the politics of migration must engage migrant women as experts in their own right, recognising their capacity to see themselves as having normative authority over their own lives, and creating the conditions through which they can claim and act upon rights. Unless this is properly done, women will be trapped in an im/mobility cycle, wherein the end result is the violation of their fundamental rights and dignity.
References
Bélanger, D., & Silvey, R. (2020). An Im/mobility turn: power geometries of care and migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 46(16), 3423–3440.
Riggirozzi, P; Cintra, N. (2026). How Immigration Crackdowns and Aid Cuts Are Reshaping Migration Across Central America. Migration Information Source, Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/journal/feature/how-immigration-crackdowns-and-aid-cuts-are-reshaping-migration-across-central
Rivera, Stefany. (2025). El Isdemu se apaga bajo el Gobierno de Bukele. Focos. https://focostv.com/recortes-isdemu-bukele-violencia-mujeres/
Segato, Rita. (2019). Pedagogías de la crueldad: El mandato de la masculinidad (fragmentos). Revista de la Universidad de México. https://www.revistadelauniversidad.mx/articles/9517d5d3-4f92-4790-ad46-81064bf00a62/pedagogias-de-la-crueldad
Zuccarelli, Gloria; Riggirozzi, Pía; Owen, David; Cintra, Natalia. (2025) Vulnerabilities in displacement: Can humanitarianism protect women?, Migration Studies, Volume 13, Issue 2.
Pía Riggirozzi is a Professor of Global Politics and Head of Department at the University of Southampton. Contact: P.Riggirozzi@soton.ac.uk
Natalia Cintra is a British Academy Research Fellow at the Politics & IR Department of the University of Southampton. Contact: N.Cintra-de-Oliveira-Tavares@soton.ac.uk.
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