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Award-winning journalist Natasha Senjanovic explained her process for reporting on stories of sexual assault and domestic violence during the pandemic at a virtual event Wednesday.

The “Surging in Silence: Domestic and Sexual Violence in the Pandemic” event was hosted by the Magazine, News and Digital Journalism department at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.

In October 2020, Senjanovic began work on the project Surging in Silence, a series of articles covering stories of domestic abuse in Tennessee, which she said increased during pandemic stay-at-home orders.

“The underlying foundation is that the pandemic is sort of tailor-made for extreme domestic violence because unemployment, high stress and social isolation leads to the most extreme abuse,” Senjanovic said. “Violent people get more violent in moments of stress.”

Senjanovic began pitching stories about sexual and domestic violence after speaking with people who work with abuse survivors and those still experiencing domestic abuse. Telling the stories of survivors is necessary, she said.

Through conversations with Memphis and Nashville district attorneys, she learned that domestic violence makes up half of all violent crimes in both cities. She has also found in her reporting that other crimes are often traced back to domestic violence.

“Almost all roads of criminal justice lead to domestic violence,” she said. “The vast majority of incarcerated Americans experienced or witnessed it as children.”

Exploring the background of the abuser can be valuable when reporting on domestic abuse, Senjanovic said.

Substance use disorder is an issue that often leads to domestic violence, which is sometimes overlooked, Senjanovic said. Though substance use disorder may not be the root of the issue, it can cause people to fall back into the same patterns of abuse, she said.

“You’re talking about traumatized people who are inflicting trauma on other people,” Senjanovic said. “We want to hear these traumatized stories, but we don’t necessarily put them in a greater context.”

The only way to break the cycle of abuse is to get to the emotional, psychological and physical causes of the abuse, Senjanovic said.

“If we keep thinking of them as monsters, what are we really understanding of those crimes?” Senjanovic said.

While Senjanovic believes telling survivors’ stories is important and necessary, she tries to avoid including meaningless trauma in her reporting.

The public often wants to hear traumatizing stories but fails to see them in greater context, she said. But to present the full complexities of sexual assault and domestic violence, reporters need to shift the narrative to look at the issue in greater depth, she said.

“Only in the last few years have people really begun speaking about intimate partner violence, which is one of the biggest problems, and very few jurisdictions break that down,” Senjanovic said.

Published on April 8, 2021 at 12:19 am

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