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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

An average, in fact, of 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.

Our homes and families are supposed to be sacred territory, the “haven in a heartless world,” as my college sociology teacher drilled into me.

As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness. The messages are insidious and they are consistent. We see those messages when our politicians wrangle over reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and then fund it so sparingly it’s practically a hiccup in the federal budget. VAWA has an entire budget of just under $489 million at present.14 To give a frame of reference, the entire annual budget for the Department of Justice, which oversees the Office of Violence Against Women, is currently $28 billion.15 Another way to think about it might be this: the wealthiest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, who is estimated to be worth $150 billion, could fund VAWA’s current budget for three hundred years and still have millions upon which to carve out a meager subsistence.16

We get the message when law enforcement treats domestic violence as a nuisance, a “domestic dispute,” rather than the criminal act that it is. I have to believe if the tables were turned, if women were beating and killing men in such vast numbers—fifty women a month in the United States are killed by their intimate partners using guns alone—the problem would be the front page of every newspaper in this country. Vast pools of funding would surface for researchers to figure out what’s wrong with women today. And, after all of this, we have the audacity to ask why victims stay.

Sally carries a swirl of memories like a nest around her; Paul holds those memories like stones inside him.

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.

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.

Levels of dangerousness operated on a specific timeline. Dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months, then dipped only slightly for the next nine months. After a year, the dangerousness dropped off precipitously.

Love is what makes domestic violence different from any other crime. That the people involved have said to each other and to the world, You are the most important person to me. And then, in an instant, for that relationship to become lethal? It requires us to mentally, intellectually, and emotionally hurdle beyond what we can imagine. “That trauma of knowing someone you love is willing to take your last breath?” asks Gael Strack, a leading domestic violence advocate in San Diego. “How do you live with that?”

Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.

that the literature on intimate partner abuse and advocates all say abusers are about power and control, but to Websdale, abusers are simultaneously powerful and powerless. Both in control and out of control.

Sometimes police will find a single deadly bullet in one victim and a constellation of bullets in another. These aren’t simply gratuitous details, Websdale says. They’re clues to the mind-set of an offender, details about the particular psychology of a couple, and often they speak to interventions that could have been made, for example, by mental health professionals.

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.

Because she asked him to stop. And he didn’t. And eventually she gave up asking. This is loss of power at its most elemental.

“men learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority, be it spousal abuse, gang turf wars, street assaults, armed robbery, and all the other crimes that men in the jails had been charged with. Men … had learned that it was normal to use force and violence in all of the forms above to enforce their social obligation to be superior.”

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

If men are taught not to cry, women are taught crying is acceptable. If men are taught anger is their sole allowable emotion, women are taught never to be angry. Men who yell are being men; women who yell are shrill or they’re drama queens or they’re hysterical. (Many before me have pointed out that there is no greater “drama” than a mass shooting, but the term “drama kings” hasn’t yet captured the popular lexicon, however accurate.)

Violence, he says, is not a “relationship problem. It is a problem of [a woman’s] partner’s commitment to violence.”

“Violent men are aware that they are violent and even take pride in the manliness of it to their friends,” he said. “But, they will often deny that their violence is actually violent when questioned. Their denial allows violent men to minimize the impact of their violence on their victims, blame them for it, and ask their families and friends to collude with them by approving it.” What he means is that incidents of violence are downplayed: perpetrators tend to use phrases like “it wasn’t that bad.” They accuse victims of overreacting. They claim they didn’t mean to “hurt” her when they threw that household item in her general direction or slammed that door on her or tossed her against a wall. As if the objects—wall, door—were to blame. These men do everything they can not to own an act as violent.

Misdemeanors, in the world of domestic violence, are like warning shots. And all too often they go unheeded.

Violence as a learned behavior. We don’t know it, but we have another word for fatal peril. “Snap.” On the news, the mourning neighbor, the crying coworker: he just snapped. But the snap is a smoke screen, a cliché, a fiction. The snap doesn’t exist.

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

I have an ex-husband who spent his entire career in the military and he used to say to me that the problem with having a gun, no matter who you are, is that its presence automatically puts you on a side. You are no longer neutral.

But here, let’s call him what he really was in that moment and on that day. He was a domestic terrorist. That’s what terrorists do. They terrorize.

Where the two groups tended to differ was that the non-abusers knew they were getting a good deal and appreciated and acknowledged their wives’ double shifts, whereas the abusers would say things like, “I do a lot more than most men, but does she appreciate that?” Adams’s research showed that the abuser’s perspective was that they “weren’t being appreciated for what they did, rather than what their wives were doing.” Non-abusers, on the other hand, “would say things like ‘I’m lucky. My wife does a lot.’ And that acknowledgment meant a lot to the wives.” Abusers also tended to be more critical of their wives’ housekeeping.

What Adams realized, then, was that the clinical narcissism of these men kept them from being able to really see how their behavior impacted their victims. “Narcissism filters how they see everything,” Adams told me.

“They’ve internalized a selfish, narcissistic father

The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers. Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t lose their kids.” In fact batterers often see themselves as saviors of a sort. “They feel they’re rescuing a woman in distress. It’s another aspect of narcissism … And there’s a sense of wanting to be eternally appreciated for that.” In contrast, he said, “a lot of victims come across as messed up. Because that’s exactly the point for him: ‘I’m going to make it so no one wants you.’ ”

Women are given the message over and over that we are the holders of the emotional life and health of the family, that the responsibility for a man to change lies, in fact, with us. “The only way that I can really describe what happened to me is like part of me, like, died, and then part of me got ignited in terms of, like, my love will heal us,” she said. “But I had to stop loving myself and only love him.” His narcissism, in other words, didn’t even allow the room for her to care for herself.

But Websdale argues that abusers are just as vulnerable in a sense by their own inability to live without that victim. “My question isn’t ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ ” he says, “It’s ‘Why does he stay?’ Many of these men are terribly dependent on their female partners. They see them as a conduit to the world of feeling that they don’t inhabit, generally. Often these men have an inchoate sense of shame about their masculinity that they don’t understand.” Websdale calls it the great paradox of domestic violence, how an abuser can be both controlling over his or her partner, while simultaneously unable to control that dependency.

Did Dorothy have time to remember that fateful day when she was fifteen years old and she met a boy who claimed to fall in love with her at first sight? Did she blame that young version of herself? Did she consider how her culture pushes little girls toward love, tells them love conquers all? Did she ever wonder why we don’t tell more stories of love’s defeat? I don’t believe love conquers all. So many things in this world seem more powerful than love. Duty. Rage. Fear. Violence.

And I understand this, too: that however terrible the singular moment of death is, however haunting those brittle final seconds, the loss will come to be defined by the buildup of years still to come. The scale of it, the cruel forever of it, a steel gate the size of the world itself shutting before you have time to blink.

In his book The Body Keeps the Score, the author Bessel van der Kolk writes, “The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival, even under the most miserable conditions … Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.”

And, finally, for Jazz: everything I love and care most about in the world can be found in you.