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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

The fact that the relationship got serious so quickly matters, too. Short courtships—let’s call it love at first sight—are a hallmark of private violence.

abut

“He had all these temporary restraining orders with other women,” says one of the team members. “But not Ruth. He killed the one who didn’t leave.”

restraining orders are generally a matter for civil courts; it’s only once those orders are broken that they become a criminal matter.

Dale says they also ought to take a page out of the DUI statutes. DUIs now remain on a person’s record in Montana. That’s a simple fix, keeping the history of temporary restraining orders in the system, even after they’ve expired.

Montana eventually implemented something called the Hope Card. It is the size of a driver’s license and laminated and contains identifying information about the offender, including a picture, the active dates of the protection order, and any other pertinent information.

As in cinema, this objectification—woman as an erotic form for the filmmaker or viewer—underscored the power dynamic in their relationship.

burgeoning

Sinclair said his attitude wasn’t that the husbands should refrain from beating their wives because it was morally reprehensible, but rather because it split up the community.

Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent? Or better yet, why couldn’t he stop his violence?

he paraphrased an assistant sheriff from San Francisco who told him, “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.”

Even those relatively few women who are violent, he says, are most often violent in response to men’s violence. Indeed, this is the single most effective argument I know for why it doesn’t make sense to arm women with guns to protect them against men with guns: because arming a woman with a gun is asking her to behave like a man, to embody the somatic and psychological and cultural experience of a man while simultaneously quelling all that women have been taught. It says to women, if you want to protect yourself from violent men, you need to become violent yourself.

men almost monopolize all sectors of violence perpetration,” Sinclair wrote. “The generic descriptions of violence seem to be a careful attempt not to see this crucial piece of evidence … a careful way of avoiding the gendered source of violence. This error in analysis will mislead us in our attempts to find solutions to the problem.” In

“Violence at home indicates a dangerous temperament for a high official, including vulnerability to blackmail … This president sent a message to the people around him about what is permitted, or at any rate, what is forgivable.”

exhortation

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

A law in California passed that made it mandatory for violent men to do the program or go to jail, and the law specifically said that the intervention had to be gender-based, not therapy-based. They couldn’t just be sent to anger management. They couldn’t have a few sessions with a therapist and be done. They had to learn about gender roles and expectations as part of their curriculum; they had to study the role of gender in their own acculturation.

Men she met in her daily work life did some violent act to land them in prison, then did their time in the culture of violence that is incarceration in America today, and then brought that heightened level of violence right back into their families and communities.

“You’ve heard the saying ‘hurt people hurt people,’ ” she says to the men gathered. “Well, I also think healed people heal people.”

“What pisses me off so much is the lack of imagination we tend to have for people who haven’t had the same experience we have. As if lives are synonymous.”

(San Bruno is the only jail I’ve ever been in with openly gay guards. Prison guards can be stoic, tough, even violent; I just hadn’t ever thought of them as also possibly gay, and my surprise was yet another reminder of how deep stereotypes can run, even in someone like me who was actively in that exact moment trying to upend such stereotypes.)

It’s not wrong to feel things; it’s wrong to feel things and then purposely avoid them, is the point.

I’m not beating them, but I’m still affecting them. You’re self-separating first.”

Roughly 12% of male inmates in jails like San Bruno today were sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. (In state prisons, the number is higher, and for those boys who grew up in foster care, the numbers are shocking, nearly 50%.11)

Another one laughs, says, “Check it out. Fatal peril club right here.” They understand fatal peril as the exact instant when a man’s sense of expectation is most threatened. What the world owes him, what his own sense of self demands. Something challenges him—maybe his partner says something, or does something, and he reacts. Maybe a guy in a bar insults him. Maybe some coworker tells him he fucked up. It’s a split second that changes everything.

A moment that, Jimmy and Donte hope to eventually show these men, is a decision. 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.

“It makes me feel that fatal peril, when I think about it,” Doug says. “Don’t use program words,” Jimmy says. Program words are an important context for understanding one’s actions, but in a Separation Cycle exercise, where a singular moment is deconstructed, they can also be euphemistic, a way of not taking ownership for one’s actions. It’s the difference between, say, I had a moment of fatal peril and I punched her in the eye. So the story comes first, and then the group together contextualizes the story within the pedagogical framework of the program, attaching certain elements from what they learned during the curriculum. This split second was a threat to your male role belief system, for example. And this split second was where you entered fatal peril. And this split second was where you separated from your authentic self.

“Stay on track,” says one of the guys. This nudging, the language, the gentle urging to keep with the story is part of the curriculum. It shows how language matters, how much we can lie to ourselves, take ourselves off track to avoid responsibility, how we use words to frame our guilt or innocence, how easy it is to manipulate and how so often that manipulation starts inside our own minds, how we can minimize our impact on someone else. Later, the group will be harder on Doug, but for now, they let him talk.

“Can I ask you a clarifying question?” asks Donte. They frame it this way, as a “clarifying” question so the participants know the question isn’t meant to antagonize.

“That’s a big component. That verbal.” Donte chimes in about the name-calling. “Listen, man, in order for me to put my hands on her, she’s not Ashley anymore. She’s a slut. You gotta rename her, see what I’m sayin’?”

Jimmy asks Doug to recognize how his body moved through the room that night. What was he doing with his muscles? “Clenching them,” Doug says. And what was his heart rate doing? “Racing.” Jimmy stands up for a minute, asks if Doug’s body was lax or stiff? “Stiff.” And then Jimmy takes on the posture, shows Doug and the group what it looks like. His back curves slightly like a boxer’s, his fists are clenched, his face hardens. He’s got one shoulder slightly jutting out, his weight on the balls of his feet like he’s ready to pounce. In the context of the room, which is relatively relaxed and quiet, it’s a startling juxtaposition, a complete epiphany for some of these guys to see how their body communicates a message even if no words are uttered. “This,” Jimmy says, holding the posture, “is what she sees.”

That’s the beginning: notice your body. Next comes language. Some of this becomes obvious immediately. Substituting a slur for a partner’s name, for example. But language in general is more subtle than this. It works at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Painfully, word by word, second by second they go. Don’t say “pussy.” Don’t swear. Don’t say “my old lady.” Don’t say “ho,” “slut,” “woman.” Use proper names. Use the term “partner.” Maintain eye contact with the person you’re speaking to or with the group. Sit up straight. No slumping. When describing the incidents that landed them in the place they’re in at the moment, they have to use “I” statements, possessive pronouns. It’s not “our” violence or “men’s” violence or “society’s” violence. It’s “my” violence. Own your violence. Be accountable for your violence.

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.

“Can I ask you a clarifying question?” Jimmy says. “What was your first fatal peril?” The first time, in other words, he can identify his male role belief system being challenged.

some examples of the male role belief system: 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. When a man’s belief system is challenged, he goes into fatal peril and that is the moment where violence is a choice.

Jimmy points out to Doug that when he is in a moment of fatal peril, Doug is not only not noticing his partner, he is also no longer noticing himself, his own feelings, his own needs, his own body. He is simply reacting to the challenge that’s been made to his belief system, and it’s in this kernel of conflict where a decision to become violent or not resides.

Donte chimes in. “When you said you had decided you all were going to be like friends, that to me sounds like denial.” Doug nods. He wanted her back. He was denying his own feelings. “When you say ‘I’ve never been so drunk in my life’ that kinda sounds to me like blame. And you said she came at you—that’s kinda like blame again.” Blaming the liquor. Blaming her. Blaming everything and everyone but himself. Doug acknowledges that Donte is right.

purview

He assumed the research would support his theory that abusers did far less of the housework and childcare. But Adams was shocked to find that both men did about the same amount in each home, 21%.1 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.

The “I wouldn’t do X if you didn’t do Y” rationalization. Blame and denial.

The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming.

The tapes went on for more than an hour in court that day, far more than what I’ve included here, and in that time I noticed this, too: he failed to use her proper name even once.

book by Edward W. Gondolf that looks at the current state of batterer intervention, The Future of Batterer Programs,

In the fall of 2017, at least half a dozen new players faced domestic violence charges, but were drafted anyway, and at

A 2008 assessment of 190 batterer programs, in fact, showed that most participants did not have substantial levels of anger, and that only a small percentage were in the unusually high range.

“We can be the eyes and ears of the court,” Adams said. “Victims are trying to make decisions about staying or leaving; if she’s hearing back from us that he’s still blaming her, that’s useful to know.”

Legally defined, familicide, or family annihilation, includes the killing of an intimate partner and at least one child. (Some researchers define it as killing the whole family.)

The first known annihilation in the United States can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century. Over the course of the next two centuries, such cases averaged three per decade. Then, in the 1990s, there were thirty-six cases. And between 2000 and 2007, sixty cases. And from 2008 through 2013, in research done by the Family Violence Institute, there were 163 cases of familicide that claimed a total of 435 victims. This did not include cases where children killed parents (patricide) or where a parent only killed children (filicide). From the time of the 2008 economic crash, we began averaging, says Neil Websdale, director of the Family Violence Institute and author of the book Familicidal Hearts, around three a month.

But in familicide, the reverse is true: the overwhelming majority of men who kill their entire families are white, middle or middle-upper class, often educated, often well-off, or well-off until just before the murders.