First, they want you to know what happened and how they feel. You listen carefully, painfully. The answers to these difficult questions lie in the nature of violence itself.
Violence is hard to talk about, for many reasons.
One of the difficult facts of being human is that our verbal tools for describing deep emotion and bodily realities are oddly crude and insufficient. So we sing about love, send flowers, do small things to show our love. And for violence, there are no nice little things to send or give to show your complicated feelings, to tell someone you are ashamed, or sorry for your distance, or that today you are so very afraid of even how the wind blows. I don't know the answer for love, but I have an idea about the reasons in the case of violence. I would not be surprised if deep down where human thought begins the reasons are the same for both.