No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Men made the rules, primarily through physical violence.

what domestic violence victims across the world lacked: agency in their own lives.

137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.2 This does not include men. Or children.

Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners.

And for every woman killed in the United States from domestic violence homicide, nearly nine are almost killed.

Women who do manage to break free of their abusers still spend their lives negotiating with them if they share custody of children.

Domestic violence is like no other crime. It does not happen in a vacuum. It does not happen because someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you. It is most often hidden from even one’s closest confidantes,

We live in a culture in which we are told our children must have a father, that a relationship is the ultimate goal, that family is the bedrock of society, that it’s better to stay and work out one’s “issues” in private

Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife

Nearly 90% of domestic violence homicide victims were both stalked and beaten in the year prior to their deaths.

But you can’t miss what you don’t know to look for.

the phrase “coercive control” to describe the ways an abuser might dominate and control every aspect of a victim’s life without ever laying a hand on her.

Victims who side with their abusers during police calls do so not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety.

“The criminal justice system,” Tenney told me, “isn’t set up for uncooperative witnesses.”

the Danger Assessment is probably the single most important tool used in intimate partner assault, treatment,

she was shocked to find the leading cause of death for young African American women was homicide.

the very act of strangulation often turns out to be the penultimate abuse by a perpetrator before a homicide.11 “Statistically we know now that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide,”

traumatic brain injury is only now being addressed in the larger domestic violence community. The vast majority of domestic violence victims who show signs of TBI never receive a formal diagnosis,

the poor recall, the recanting, the changing details, along with other markers, like anxiety, hypervigilance, and headaches, can all be signs of TBI.

access to a gun by an abuser is one of the three highest risk indicators for domestic violence homicide.

The variety of red flags are things everyone in domestic violence has seen before: the quick courtship, the isolation and control, the unemployment, the medications, the narcissism and lying and stalking.

violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed.

It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.