Melissa Jeltsen, a Senior Reporter at the Huffington Post, spends her days focusing on one of the most pressing — and often-overlooked — issues in our society: domestic violence. Here’s a snippet of Nat. Brut’s conversation with the fearless reporter about reporting on trauma, what needs to be done about domestic violence in the U.S., and what the media gets right — and wrong — about domestic violence. Read the full interview here.
Talia Lavin: How and when did you decide to focus on domestic violence in your reporting?
Melissa Jeltsen: I came to the topic almost by accident. In 2012, in the aftermath of the horrific Sandy Hook shooting, a group of us at The Huffington Post began tracking all the gun deaths across the country by combing through local news reports. We were trying to get a handle on the scope of the problem. We divided up a list of states, and each of us spent time every day noting down the deaths in our states, along with the age and gender of the victims, and any known details.
As I was going through my list of states each day, I noticed a pattern. When men died, they died for all sorts of reasons — a fight, gang violence, suicide, accident. But for the most part, when I was writing down a woman’s name, she was killed by an intimate partner — her husband, her ex, an estranged boyfriend. It was striking to me, though it really shouldn’t have been. What I found in my small sample is true across the country. On average, almost half of all female homicide victims each year are killed by a spouse or ex-partner.
I ended up writing a piece about what I’d discovered, focusing on the death of Laura Aceves, a young mother who was shot and killed by her abusive ex in front of her four-month-old baby. I had no idea, at that time, where the story would take me. A year later, I flew to Arkansas to write an in-depth feature on her life and death, and the missteps local authorities made in her case. That story resulted in legislative change in the state.
Since then, I’ve been investigating the questions around domestic violence that are most interesting to me: How can we actually reduce violence? How can we make it easier for women who want to leave abusive partners to do so? How is the criminal justice system helping and hurting women in abusive relationships? How does witnessing violence affect children? And how can we support those who may suffer physical, mental, emotional and financial consequences from living with abuse?
To read the full interview, visit natbrut.com!
Melissa Jeltsen is a reporter who lives in Brooklyn. She currently works at The Huffington Post, and has written for Jezebel, Talking Points Memo, The Rumpus, Cosmo and The Boston Globe, among others. She tweets, mostly about violence against women, here.
