Angelina Jolie Shares How Her Kids Impacted Her Violence Against Women Activism

After lending her voice to the fight for the Violence Against Women Act, Angelina Jolie is relishing the fruit of their collective labor. 

On Wednesday, March 16, President Joe Biden signed the reauthorization of the act and marked the moment with an event inside the East Room of the White House. Among the sea of faces in the audience was Jolie's. In an interview with NBC News' Kate Snow, the actress and activist spoke about the nation's "serious" problem when it comes to domestic violence and child abuse. 

"I think this country doesn’t recognize what a serious domestic violence and child abuse problem it really has," she said.

"I think there is a reality that when somebody harms a child, if it’s a stranger, the way the law looks at it, the way the law responds is quite strong," Jolie noted. "When it's somebody within a family, within a home, it is responded to less and if you can imagine for the child, in fact that’s in many ways worse."

One of the ways she sought to improve the legislation was by pushing for funding for technology to detect bruising for people of color, something that partly came from her own experience as a mom. Jolie is famously a parent to six kids she shares with ex Brad Pitt: Maddox, 20, Pax, 18, Zahara, 17, Shiloh, 15, Knox, 13 and Vivienne, 13. 

"My children have different skin tones and I've noticed over the years just even with dermatology that so much of it is based on white skin," she said. "It’s personal and I won’t say very much, but if somebody comes in and assaults us -- you look at me and you look at Ruth [Glenn]. You have a better chance of seeing bruises on me, so anybody with darker skin is going to have less chance at justice."

"It's biased forensics," she said. 

When pressed on the comment Jolie made about this being personal, she responded, "It is personal to everyone who cares about family, everyone who cares about children."

While she did not expand specifically on her own experiences in the family court system -- she filed for divorce from Pitt in 2016 after two years of marriage -- Jolie told Snow, "I think once you're exposed to this system, whoever you are, once you’re exposed to it and you realize how unbelievably broken this system is, you have to do something to improve it."

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