1/15 For the last 4 years, I’ve spent a lot of my time reading thousands of pages of records on more than 7,000 children who died of abuse or neglect. It has been—and probably always will be—the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever done. I want to talk about trauma and journalism.
2/ We started with Indiana. I read this summary and had to stop. Indiana doesn’t make more information than this available about any child, even though they are required to explain previous contact with child welfare services. How do we hold the state accountable? 
3/ That’s often what I felt during the course of this project: I knew just enough to be devastated and understand that something, someone, had deeply failed each child in this database. But not enough to know who was responsible. Not enough to do justice for each of these lives.
4/ For both @emilyepalmer and I, this project was intensely personal. We decided to do this after completing other child welfare projects. For the first two years we worked on it, we were freelancers. Bankrolling the records requests on our own and doing data entry every Sunday.
@emilyepalmer 5/ The constant scraping, cleaning and data entry became, sometimes, meditative. Each row was a child’s life, and each successful import into the dataset became a small prayer for me. Routine, practiced motions, pulling more and more records into a dataset I often dreamed about.
@emilyepalmer 6/ Most of the time, I could compartmentalize. But there were days when that became impossible. One Sunday, Emily and I sat at my kitchen table while my ex-husband worked on the couch. I read aloud a description of a child’s strangulation, and he gasped — he was never startled.
@emilyepalmer 7/ We stopped shortly after, and that night I broke down. All of the deaths that hadn’t affected me crept back into my mind. I wept on the couch when my ex-husband went on a run. By the time he came home, I was able to pretend I was fine again. I think he knew I wasn’t.
@emilyepalmer 8/ Journalists are supposed to be objective, and we’re supposed to be level-headed. But I’d been a teacher in Newark. I’d taught English to refugee children in Dallas. I'd covered schools as an edu reporter. I’d known and loved too many children not to feel this project deeply.
@emilyepalmer 9/ But even if I hadn’t spent a former life working with children daily, how could *any* reporter be calm when faced with 7,000 records of dead children? Thousands of pages (this is from *one* county in CA), thousands more digital files. Spreadsheets. Photos. 911 audio.
@emilyepalmer 9/ That day was a turning point for me. A colleague told me I needed to put my own mask on first, and so I started to. I started talking about the kids openly. With my pastor, with a therapist. With my ex-husband. When things became too much, I took a break. You should, too.
@emilyepalmer 10/ Find something that soothes your mind that you can do after difficult work. For me, during the heaviest parts of this project, it was taking dance classes that were – frankly – far above my abilities but challenged me so forcefully that I felt I’d accomplished something huge.
@emilyepalmer 11/ For @emilyepalmer, that was running seven miles a day and finishing the New York City Marathon this year. Perhaps her outlet was a bit more productive than mine.
@emilyepalmer 12/ 1 of the many reasons this project took 4 years is bc of the deep, emotional toll this project took on us. And that is fine. The sense of urgency we felt to bring these children some measure of justice remained, but we couldn't allow it to impact our own mental health.
@emilyepalmer 13/ The project required a sense of clarity that we couldn’t have given it if we continued to quietly allow the deaths to make us spiral. Reporters often allow the trauma that their subjects have experienced silently weigh on them, unaddressed. Don’t. Care for yourself.
@emilyepalmer 14/ It is incredibly gratifying to have the 7,000 records see the light of day. I hope that local reporters can use these records to drill down and find local impact, and I hope that national leaders see the failure of our country to account for the most vulnerable among us.
@emilyepalmer 15/15 If you are working on an emotionally difficult project, talk about it. Find a creative outlet that allows you to feel fulfilled and take your mind off of the work. Go see a therapist. Mental clarity and ease will only improve your work — do not neglect it.
