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Started reading
May 19, 2024
I was pulled toward hidden corners of the world, to disenfranchised people, because I knew in some small measure what it felt like to be an unseen, unheard person, what it felt like to grieve beyond what you thought your body could absorb.
if I thought of domestic violence in the States at all, I saw it as an unfortunate fate for the unlucky few, a matter of bad choices and cruel environments. A woman hardwired to be hurt. A man hardwired to hurt. But I never envisioned it as a social ill, an epidemic we could actually do something about.
An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.
Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives. (This figure is likely an underestimate, as it was pulled from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, which gather data from local police departments, and participation is voluntary.)
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.
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 than to leave and raise kids as a single mother. Michelle Monson Mosure said this over and over when she insisted to her mother that she didn’t want to raise her children in a “broken home.” As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness.
But we give victims the message to stay in other ways, too. When our court system puts them on the defensive, asks them to face a person who may have tried to kill them, a person they know only too well may kill them for real next time.
We get the message when law enforcement treats domestic violence as a nuisance, a “domestic dispute,” rather than the criminal act that it is.
In so many cases, including hers, we mistake what we see from the outside as her choosing to stay with an abuser, when in fact it’s we who don’t recognize what a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving actually looks like.
None of this is surprising, given that we didn’t recognize domestic violence as wrong for most of human history. Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any other of his properties, including servants, slaves, and animals; of course, the holy texts—Koran, Bible, and Talmud—from which such beliefs stem were simply interpretations by (of course) men of the time.17
abused wives were believed to have provoked the violence of their husbands—and this belief threads through hundreds of years of literature on domestic violence, nearly everything written about spousal abuse, in fact, prior to the 1960s and ’70s.
The American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several decades, meaning, I suppose, that we held our dogs in higher regard than we held our wives. (Pet shelters in the 1990s outnumbered domestic violence shelters by nearly three to one.21)
Stalking wasn’t identified as a crime until the early 1990s and still today is often not seen for the threat it truly is—not by law enforcement, abusers, or even by the victims actually being stalked, despite three-quarters of women killed in America having been stalked beforehand by these same partners or ex-partners.26
Another was the 2002 opening of the country’s first family justice center; begun in San Diego by a former city attorney named Casey Gwinn, family justice centers put victim services under one roof—police, attorneys, victim compensation, counseling, education, and dozens of others. (San Diego’s opened with thirty-five different agencies. Other geographies have varying numbers of partners.)
But when local papers ran stories about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, for the first time nearly all of them listed sidebars with where to go for help. Victims suddenly began to access resources in unprecedented numbers.
White House liaison to the Office of Violence Against Women, a position created by the Obama Administration that remains unfilled two years into the Trump Administration.
If we could invest in one thing, what would it be? Well, the answer is, there’s not one thing.” And that’s the whole point: private violence affects in some way nearly every aspect of modern life, yet our collective failure to treat it publicly demonstrates a stunning lack of understanding about this very pervasiveness.
why victims stay. (Kit Gruelle told me once: “We don’t say to bank presidents after a bank’s been robbed, ‘You need to move this bank.’ ”)
aphorism
Throughout this book I generally refer to victims as “she” and perpetrators as “he.” This is not because I don’t recognize that men can be victims and women can be perpetrators, or that I am unaware of the relative lack of resources available for same-sex partners, or the grim statistics of domestic violence in LGBTQ relationships and communities; rather, my reasoning is twofold: first, men remain the overwhelming majority of perpetrators, and women the overwhelming majority of victims by nearly every measure. And I use she/he/they pronouns for consistency in the writing. Please assume that
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“Private violence,” as a term, has gained usage in the past decade or so.
Michelle had never been the rebellious type. When it came time to grow up, which happened far sooner than any of them would have wanted, she did. Grew straight up into an adult. Missed most of her teen years entirely.
The dents in Paul’s front door, he says, are from a time Rocky tried to beat it down to get to Michelle. But at the time that didn’t really register to him as violent, not dangerously so. It’s the kind of violence that seems so difficult to evaluate in the moment, but crystal-clear in hindsight—which is to say that this is precisely what domestic violence looks like. Paul is hardly alone in his failure to register the portent of it. But imagine it’s not Rocky at Paul’s front door, beating at it, kicking it, screaming for a woman inside. Imagine it’s a stranger. Who wouldn’t call the police?
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He sucks in his breath, trying to gather himself together. This is why parents like him don’t talk to me, men in particular. They’ll do anything to avoid this moment.
I’ve found, in the face of overwhelming tragedy, that women often talk and talk, and men fall silent.
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. Many of them plan, like Michelle did. They stay. They bide their time. They keep their children safe. They balance, poised, on the front lines. Hypervigilant, and patient, in a constant scan for when they can slip away intact. They do it for as long as they possibly can.
It’s the legacy of domestic violence homicide, a trauma embedded into entire swaths of families.
Evan Stark, author of the book Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life,
Stark’s research shows that in as many as 20% of relationships where domestic violence is present there might be no physical abuse at all.
Kit Gruelle, an activist in North Carolina, calls such victims “passive hostages” in their own homes.
Leaving is never an event; it’s a process.
how much these men strain to keep such colossal pain inside them. How unfair it is that we live in a world in which they’re made to believe their tears are shameful.
conciliatory.
Originally written to help healthcare workers identify potential victims of domestic violence in emergency rooms, the Danger Assessment is probably the single most important tool used in intimate partner assault, treatment, and awareness today.
Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 That figure does not count children. And it does not count the abusers who kill themselves after killing their partners, murder-suicides we see daily in the newspaper. And it does not count same-sex relationships where one or the other partner might not be “out.” And it does not count other family members, like sisters, aunts, grandmothers, who are often killed alongside the primary victim. And it does not count innocent bystanders: the twenty-six churchgoers in Texas, say, after a son-in-law has gone to a
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While there are no national statistics, some states collect this data. In New York, for example, two-thirds of incarcerated women in 2005 had been abused beforehand by the person they killed.
Sixty percent of domestic violence victims are strangled6 at some point during the course of an abusive relationship—often repeatedly, over years—and the overwhelming majority of strangulation perpetrators are men (99%).7
But only 15% of the victims in the study turned out to have injuries visible enough to photograph for the police reports.
“We’re really good now in our [emergency rooms], if a kid comes in with an athletic injury or someone’s been in a car accident, about working people up for post-concussive syndrome,” said Campbell, who is the lead author on a study that examines the effect of brain injuries from domestic violence on the victims’ central nervous systems.
What researchers have learned from combat soldiers and football players and car accident victims is only now making its way into the domestic violence community: that the poor recall, the recanting, the changing details, along with other markers, like anxiety, hypervigilance, and headaches, can all be signs of TBI.
When Rocky bailed himself out it was an even more crucial message to Michelle. This time, it’s Not only am I stronger than you, but the system prioritizes my freedom over your safety.
Look at any intimate partner homicide anywhere in any given year and it will be the same: she tried every which way she could. She tried and tried, but the equation, or rather, the question, isn’t a matter of leaving or staying. It’s a matter of living or dying. They stay because they choose to live.
untenable
She’s not religious in any way, but she said sometimes when she sees a rainbow she believes it’s the kids. “It’s bullshit, but you take what you can get,” she says.
“This was a simple remedy,” he said years later to a roomful of people at a video conference, “to prevent mistaken surgeries … And what we’ve found exploring errors in the fields of medicine, aviation, nuclear fuels is that we can correct problems fairly easily if we’re open to reviewing tragedies and accidents with a keen detailed analysis.”
“Everyone asks why the victim doesn’t just leave,” he said to me. “But no one asks why an abuser stays.” Here’s another one, the paradox of domestic violence, he calls it: 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.
preternaturally
Websdale’s phrase—“no blame, no shame”
the most successful cities and towns I encountered that had either lowered their domestic violence homicide rates or increased available services all had this in common: they’d broken down the cultural barriers between their police departments and their domestic violence crisis centers.
