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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

perpetrators almost always kill themselves as well, it is rarely studied by researchers. Websdale, in fact, who is also the director of the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative (NDVFRI), is perhaps the only researcher in the United States who targets his academic research at this act specifically.

Like many children who grow up in homes with domestic violence—verbal or physical—O’Hanlon did not describe his father as violent.

He downplayed the violence of his father and talked more often about his mother’s behavior. “My mother was no angel,” he told me. “If she had been less provocative, more respectful of his position as a husband …”

He cites the knife incident as proof that his father wasn’t abusive. “Another [more] violent man would have used that knife,” he says. O’Hanlon seemed not to realize that his house, to anyone outside, would have sounded just like his own description of violence.

Websdale began to gather centuries of data from familicides all over the country, research that culminated in his 2010 book, Familicidal Hearts, in which he identifies two primary types of family killer: livid coercive, or those with long histories of domestic violence, and civil reputable, in which perpetrators are respectable members of society—like William Beadle—with no obvious histories of violence and who kill out of a warped sense of altruism.

“What we miss in the ‘he just snaps’ theory is the accumulation of emotional repression,” Websdale says. Civil reputable killers tend to be middle or middle-upper class.

Their families tend to be traditionally gendered,

(This is not to say women don’t work, but rather they carry the emotional needs of the home.)

“I’m astounded at the level of secrecy in these men’s lives.”

James Gilligan, author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic and the evaluator on RSVP at its inception, sees evidence of both homicide and suicide rates rising under economic duress in his research.

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.

Matthew Desmond writes in his book Evicted how domestic violence nuisance cases surpassed all other forms of nuisance citations combined (things like disorderly conduct or drug charges) in Milwaukee, and that 83% of landlords who were issued such citations either evicted those tenants or threatened to evict them, meaning that victims who were abused became not only less likely to call the police next time, but they were also often victimized a second time through eviction.

Whatever the situation, the Survivor Resilience Fund is simply a means to get them past that first big financial hurdle and keep them in their own communities.

She says basically, the money they can offer helps a survivor avoid homelessness as a result of private violence. But the resilience fund has proven to Hacskaylo that conventional wisdom isn’t always necessarily true, that survivors don’t want to leave their communities, and many don’t even want to be cut off from their abusers. They want to be safe, but they also want their children to have both parents in their lives, so the fund provides them with a way to establish their own home in their own community and in many cases keeps the criminal justice system out of the picture.

“The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.”

“If you care about the long-term health of a victim, not having them killed is not enough,” Dunne says.

“When that offender goes to jail, her physical safety may be okay, but her life might unravel [with] the loss of support. You have to restore that victim back to the state they were in before that violence occurred.” To Dunne, this is critical. Victims often come with their own set of issues. Addiction, poverty, unemployment. Dunne is not trying to fix every aspect of someone’s life. She’s trying to get them out of danger to a space where they may be able to think through solutions to more systemic problems—like employment or addiction. To maybe give them the emotional and physical and mental space to address some of these other issues.

One of the most effective tools for the High Risk Team is a Massachusetts bail statute called a 58A, or dangerousness hearing. A standard bail hearing is meant to determine an offender’s flight risk, whereas a 58A can be requested by the district attorney and allows defendants, even those with clean records, to be held in the misdemeanor phase without bail until trial if they are deemed a sufficient threat to an individual or community. The statute might have prevented the release of William Cotter and saved Dorothy’s life, but it was seldom used for domestic violence cases at the time and so not on Dunne’s radar, and the details of the Cotters’ situation were scattered among agencies.

Preventive detention statutes emerged from federal legislation called the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which allows a defendant to be held pretrial if he or she is deemed dangerous enough to another person or to a community. A determination of dangerousness includes factors like the nature of the crime, the evidence against the defendant, and the history of criminal activity, among others; most often, these statutes have been used in gang or drug cases, though Massachusetts has seen a marked increase in their use for domestic violence.

One common thread, however, is the controversy of whether to use preventive detention at all. “The Constitution tends to frown upon punishing prospective behavior,” Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., the director of the Harvard Criminal Justice Institute, told me. “We punish past behavior that’s been proven. Here we’re keeping people in jail because we think they’ll be dangerous.” But Viktoria Kristiansson, an attorney adviser for AEquitas, cited the importance of the dangerousness hearing, claiming it “automatically provides a different context for a judge to analyze the evidence.”

Then, in 2004, Crawford came. In Crawford v. Washington the Supreme Court ruled that cross-examination is required of witnesses at trial unless a witness was unavailable (e.g., sick or dead). The court said that a defendant had the Constitutional right to face his accusers, that testimonial statements by witnesses who did not appear at trial were hearsay. And hearsay was not admissible.3 This meant victims who were too terrified to appear in court but were otherwise healthy could no longer allow prosecutors to use their statements.

These days, victim statements are often inadmissible in court proceedings if a witness is uncooperative (as happens in as many as 70% of cases).4

“The barrier to evidence-based prosecution is not about evidence,” Gwinn said. “It’s not about the viability of winning these cases. It’s about cultural norms and values. And at the heart of it is a stunning amount of misogyny.”

Prior to the team’s formation in 2005, the town of Amesbury alone had on average one domestic violence homicide per year. Since they began, Dubus and Dunne have not had a single homicide in their caseload. What is of equal importance to Dunne, though, is that they have had to put fewer than 10% of the survivors in shelter; before 2005 that number would have been above 90%.

To Dubus, it seems obvious to create a model in which the victims are protected rather than banished. “Here’s the outrage,” she told me. “It’s really cheap to do what we’re doing. It’s a lot cheaper than murder investigations and prosecutions and jail time.”

Most people, myself included, when presented with an autistic toddler, would likely just ignore the child. Maybe ask if someone can watch him for a moment. Martina brings him right into the action. It’s a subtle way of telling Grace, “I see how complicated your life is, and it won’t put me off.”

She said her father wore the pants in the family, but her mother picked out the ones he was going wear.

“If I had to say what makes someone a good investigator, it’s your patience,” she says. Then she adds, presumably for my benefit, “I’m going to cuss right now; you’re going to hear me cuss for the first time [by “first” she means fiftieth] … but sometimes policemen and detectives need to shut the fuck up and just listen.”

Calvin Coolidge: Don’t expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong.

Mark is crying a little, too, but also trying to hold it in, and I can see his chest heaving a little bit. He’s a little man, standing right there on the brink of adulthood, stranded between feeling like he wants to save his mom and needing her to protect him.

I want to stop here in this moment and acknowledge how easy it would be to blow past, how important it is to really understand. The Danger Assessment is one thing that gives an idea of risk, a kind of mathematical calculation of a life in which there are infinite variables. Martina’s question is the kind of drilling down detail that many don’t think to do—police, advocates, even attorneys. They ask for the facts, the play-by-play of a violent moment, but they may not ask what the person was thinking or feeling in that same moment. But Martina learns, from Grace’s answer, not only about Byron’s dangerousness, and his carelessness with another life, but also about Grace’s vulnerability. She thought she was going to die. This is sometimes where the discrepancy comes from when people say victims aren’t aware of the dangerousness of their own situations: it’s not so much that they’re unaware as that they don’t know they know. A kind of cognitive dissonance. Martina will underscore then what Grace knows, but may not be fully aware of: that she can trust her own gauge of danger.

Grace mentions again the flowers he bought the next day. That’s when she got really scared. Because he’d never bought her flowers before. He didn’t apologize. But he bought her those flowers. It reminds me of a poster in Martina’s office: He beat her 150 times. She only got flowers once. The pink and white flowers are atop a casket.

“So we are going to take Byron down,” Martina says. “You’re on my team. But this protection order is not knife proof. It’s not bulletproof. So when you see him, you have to call the police. You have to let me know. It’s okay to call me crying, and it’s okay to call me and say you want to go back. As much as you love him, you have to call me when you get that urge.”

(It’s worth noting that should that plate bounce off the wall and break into shards, and should a shard cut you in the face, the Supreme Court considers it “intentional” abuse.5)

Same-sex partners fare no better. They, too, rarely report their situations to police or advocacy centers, despite rates of violence being generally higher in LGBTQ couples compared to heterosexuals, with transgender individuals and bisexuals experiencing the highest rates of violence out of all groups.

“What’s wrong with me?” Grace says, quiet as a sigh. “Why do I feel empathy towards him? Like I feel bad that I’m talking about Byron?” “It’s okay to still love him,” Nesbitt says, reaching her hand toward Grace’s leg. “But we’re involved now, and we’re going to get you and your children the help you need.” She tells a story then that might be true, might be apocryphal. This one detective, Nesbitt says, used to be on their squad, and he was lactose intolerant. Wouldn’t you know it, his favorite food was ice cream. He loved ice cream. But every time he ate it, it made him sick. Luck of the draw. What were the chances? Didn’t mean he still didn’t want to eat it. Just that he knew if he ate it, he was going to get sick. Grace gets it.

This is the long-term fallout from a lifetime of violence directed toward you: the rewiring of a brain geared solely and entirely toward survival. A brain that reacts to being under constant attack will continue to send danger signals; increased levels of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones, contributing to a vast constellation of physical and mental health issues. Disassociation is one of the more common issues, but victims of chronic domestic violence can also have a wide and long-term range of problems, from the emotional to the physical. They may have long-term cognitive loss, memory problems or sleep disorders. They may suffer from inattention or irritability. Some researchers link a host of physical ailments to unresolved trauma, including fibromyalgia and severe digestive issues.

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.”

“Everybody’s crazy,” he said. “It’s how you handle it.” The girl’s

“Quit looking at the bad things you did. Look at the good things,” she says. “You called the police. You agreed to meet with me. You let me take photos. We did the protection order. We’re getting the warrant out.”

“The hardest thing to do is call the police on someone,” she tells me later. “Everyone has a bad day, but it’s important to me to know how people view the police. It should be important to the police to know how people feel.”

staid

Today is a case in point, where we have a government composed of a conservative majority, and a citizenship comprising the most politically liberal people in the nation.

The orders of protection they do here are all civil. Unlike High Risk Teams, or larger community coordinated responses, they focus on the very short term—just days, usually—in the hopes of getting a victim to a place where he or she can make clear-headed decisions for the longer term. Primarily, police are the ones calling from on-site situations of domestic violence in one of the city’s eight wards. Advocates then formulate an immediate plan for victims and will most often call them back and discuss this plan in the minutes after a perpetrator has been arrested. This means that the response line is a fulcrum with a limitless number of spokes. Advocates can look up dockets for officers to find out if there are orders of protection in place, or warrants for arrest, or other pending cases.

They have partnerships, relationships, and contracts with agencies all across town in various capacities: shelters, yes, but also locksmiths, grocery stores, victim services, hotels, attorneys. If an officer calls the response line, the advocate can arrange for shelter for a couple of nights, or get a bag full of diapers and formula out to a victim who’s fled her house, or get her connected to a forensic nurse at a local hospital who is trained to find domestic violence injuries, or get her a grocery store gift card if an abuser controls all of their money, or pay for a taxi to get to safety. Advocates walk clients through the system of obtaining an order of protection, how to apply for transitional or longer-term housing, and how to access free legal assistance.

Victims focus on small questions because the big ones are often too difficult to face in moments of chaos and fear. Otero told me that the biggest difference she sees when a victim has basic needs met for a day or two or a week is “their level of competence. They’re in such a better position to make longer-term decisions.”

And I want to believe all of this is a national call to action. Yet as I write this, I can’t help but think of how I sat in that ghostly midnight courthouse fewer than six blocks from the United States Capitol where Congress just weeks ago in September failed to reauthorize the 2018 Violence Against Women Act. Instead, it gave VAWA stopgap funding for another three months and this time—unlike when VAWA first passed with bipartisan support—there is not a single GOP cosponsor.

An uncomfortable misogyny creeping into areas that had, until now, seemed fully resolved to the idea of women’s equality.

Kit Gruelle’s quote about our current political situation haunts me more often than I’d like to admit: “We are leaping backwards at an obscene pace.”

Between 2010 and 2016, the number of guns manufactured in the United States nearly doubled, from 5.5 million to 10.9 million—and the overwhelming majority of those guns stayed here on U.S. soil.