There has been a growing awareness in recent years that traumatic events can rewire minds and bodies in all sorts of ways that corrode health and shorten life spans.
While much of the journalistic coverage of these themes over the past decade has focused on early childhood, two speakers at the Center for Health Journalism’s 2021 Domestic Violence Symposium recently walked reporters through some of the science of the trauma caused by domestic violence, with the goal of spurring deeper coverage of how such abuse can leave lasting devastation.
Karestan C. Koenen, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, researches the ways in which trauma harms women’s mental and physical health over the course of their lives.
She says that interpersonal violence — a broad category that includes domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse — disproportionately harms younger people. “Most people who are going to be exposed to those events have experienced them by the time they’re 18,” she said.
One of the more common responses to such trauma is post-traumatic stress disorder, Koenen explained, a situation in which the body’s system of self-preservation gets stuck on high alert, with the state of fear persisting long after the immediate danger passes. Trauma recovery tends to be slower for those who suffer from it. And interpersonal violence is a major driver of this form of trauma.
“The majority of PTSD burden in the U.S. is due to physical and sexual violence,” Koenen said.
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