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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

One of the most difficult aspects of writing about domestic violence is that you’re writing about a situation of such intense volatility that you risk endangering victims who are already right in the middle of an explosive and dangerous situation. Yet

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, and on many occasions the physical violence is far less damaging than the emotional and verbal violence.

Instead, abused wives were believed to have provoked the violence of their husbands

despite three-quarters of women killed in America having been stalked beforehand by these same partners or ex-partners.26

These funds allowed for targeted trainings of first responders, the creation of advocacy positions, shelters, transitional housing, batterer intervention classes, and legal training; VAWA funds meant victims no longer had to pay for their own rape kits and if an abused partner was evicted because of events related to her abuse, she could now receive compensation and assistance; victims with disabilities could find support, as could those in need of legal aid.

Women like Michelle Monson Mosure share this steadfastness. A determination and resoluteness to keep themselves and their children alive by any means possible. They don’t quit. They stay in abusive marriages because they understand something that most of us do not, something from the inside out, something that seems to defy logic: as dangerous as it is in their homes, it is almost always far more dangerous to leave.

of all the unbelievable, massive burden of guilt. What did we miss? But you can’t miss what you don’t know to look for.

“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.

Leaving is never an event; it’s a process.

She did not think of the criminal justice system, or whatever domestic violence resources were available to her. She did not calculate what areas of Billings would be off-limits to Rocky with her order of protection. Her response was autonomic: fight or flight? What do you do if a bear is coming at you? Do you rear up and scream to make yourself big or do you play dead? You certainly don’t sit and consider the wildlife protection services that might be available to you if the bear would only give you a little time to gather yourself together.

she hadn’t done before. It was taking some of his control from him, and she had to give it back to him in order to not die.”

Campbell asked the woman if she’d been referred to domestic violence services, and she said she had not, but would have

Dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months,

At least half the women Campbell interviewed were unaware of the severity

empowered with the knowledge that comes from being able to see their own situations as a collective whole. Indeed, I have seen multiple Danger Assessments done across the entire country, from police to advocates, and I rarely saw anyone do a timeline.)

They were in one part of the house and then suddenly another, and they can’t remember the sequence of events. Their explanation of what happened is cloudy, and law enforcement and courtrooms put the burden of proof on them. To the untrained, they sound like liars. Often, they also sound hysterical, which can be part of the symptomology. What researchers have learned from combat soldiers and football players and car accident victims is only now

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

In medicine, however, there is a pervasive hierarchy that keeps the lines of communication closed. He cited the operating room culture, how the surgeon is god, and god is never second-guessed. But the systems that work best, Websdale says, across the country—whether they are police, advocates, social workers, probation officers, judges, or even just family members—are those that focus on working as a team.

How as men they can acknowledge anger, rage, and authority. But not empathy, kindness, love, fear, pain, sadness, care, nurture or any of those other “traits” that are deemed feminine. And that they’ve been manipulated by forces larger than themselves, shaped by a world they had never thought about in this way, which is shocking to them. What a relief to learn they’ve been coerced into their violence, not born into it.

“The old me got a whole lot more ammunition than the new me,” he

that looking to the future rather than just surviving the present was a whole different way of moving through the world.

man does not get disrespected. Man does not get lied to. Man’s sexuality does not get questioned. Man is the authority. Man does not get dismissed. Woman should be submissive, obedient, supportive to man.

Since men are being taught this, what are women being taugt ht?

They minimize the violence, rationalizing abusive behavior and blaming the victim. And it works. The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming. And then comes the remorse. The deep, tearful apology, the promises of better behavior, the adoration and claims of love. The script is strikingly similar no matter who’s saying it.

In the early 1980s, Ellen Pence, a domestic violence advocate in Minnesota created the Power and Control Wheel.7 The

By then, she says, she was so beaten down as a person she felt as if there was nothing left, a husk of skin and bone with no spirit, no agency of her own, only a kind of slow, painful slog toward unconsciousness.