Domestic Violence: A Look at Coverage

When domestic violence causes the death of one or both of the people in a relationship, the local media spotlight usually picks up the tragedy. But the reporting usually reveals little about the painful history that preceded the violence.

Using all the newspaper reporting about domestic violence deaths in Washington State in one year, two Dart Center researchers studied what does get included in domestic violence reporting and wondered about what is usually omitted. The first part of the research by Cathy Ferrand Bullock, who teaches at Utah State University, and Jason Cubert, a law student at Cardozo University in New York City, was published last spring by the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. You can read about these findings in the Special Feature on our home page.

Their broad conclusions tell journalists and police agencies that more is needed if the public is to gain a realistic view of domestic violence. The coverage seldom labeled the killings as domestic violence, seldom placed the killing in the context of a history of psychological or physical abuse, and too often found excuses for the death that clouded the history of interpersonal violence.

Here at the Dart Center, we especially noted two other findings in their analysis. The first was that there was scant reference in any of the reporting to psychological or emotional abuse as part of the case history. Domestic violence often includes physical injury, of course, and often long before a fatal injury. But the relentless control of the victim by the perpetrator may also wound the brain and the emotional system, but leave no evidence of a physical injury. The traumatic injuries may be delivered over time, draining the will to resist and denying the victim the resilience of recovery. When that part of the DV experience is more widely recognized, we will try less often to explain such deaths as “unexplainable.”

The other finding was that most of the coverage read by the two scholars offered little or no expert information about the reality of domestic violence. Officials, such as police, coroners and prosecutors, and emergency personnel, including firefighters and medical technicians, were often quoted. But people who know about DV from working with victims as therapists, or in other support roles, were not there. Also missing from the accounts were people who had experienced domestic violence as direct victims or as members of the families of victims.

This research warns us of the dangers of half-formed accounts of a poorly understood yet widespread form of interpersonal violence. As we study the on-going coverage of the Tacoma deaths, we note commendable efforts by Seattle and Tacoma media to offer context and accurate information about domestic violence.

Bullock and Cubert went beyond their study of newspaper content to talk to the journalists who produced that coverage. Those findings are provocative also, and will be reported by the Dart Center in the near future.