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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

is surely no coincidence that the states with the highest number of guns per capita also happen to have the highest rates of domestic violence homicide, including South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, and Missouri.

In a study for his 2007 book, Why Do They Kill, David Adams asked fourteen men who were in prison for intimate partner homicide if they’d have done it were a gun not available. It’s a common argument, that if someone wants to kill, he’ll find a way. But eleven of those men said no, they wouldn’t have killed if they hadn’t had access to a gun.7 In a study released in October 2018, the researcher April Zeoli looked at states where anyone served with a restraining order is automatically required to relinquish guns, and found there was a 12% drop in intimate partner homicides, yet only fifteen states required that guns in such instances be turned in.8 Similarly, Zeoli found that in California, where broader restrictions for anyone—including both life partners and...

The United States is the most dangerous developed country in the world for women when it comes to gun violence.

Multiple smartphone apps have been developed to help survivors in an emergency situation, or to assist teens and college students in danger, or give shelter options for the night, or to help bystanders figure out how to intervene. Dozens, in fact—and Campbell is involved in the formation of a number of them.11

FJCs colocate as many different partnerships as possible into one location, from advocacy to counseling to legal services to law enforcement, so that victims don’t have to tell and retell their stories.

Gwinn’s most recent endeavor is Camp Hope, a summer camp with several locations around the country for children from violent homes; the camp’s aim is to disrupt that cycle of violence.

Former Maryland police officer Dave Sargent’s nationally lauded program began when Sargent took Campbell’s Danger Assessment, and whittled it down to three primary questions that a police officer could ask on scene to try to determine dangerousness quickly: 1. Has he/she ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon? 2. Has he/she threatened to kill you or your children? 3. Do you think he/she might try to kill you?13 Answering yes to these three will trigger eight more questions, as well as a call from the responding officer to the local domestic violence hotline who will then connect with victims on-site.

Sargent dubbed his model the Lethality Assessment Program, sometimes referred to as the Maryland Model, and it’s used in more than thirty states and in Washington, D.C., by first responders.14

A 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control found that more than eight million girls experienced rape or intimate partner violence before the age of eighteen; for boys, the number was about half that.19

Experts across the field note that the time to address dating violence starts as young as sixth and seventh grade.

“In some ways, men have been the biggest beneficiaries of the women’s movement,” she said. “Look at all the men who have a very different relationship [today] with their children. They go to school events; they talk to their kids. In my neighborhood, the guys are always walking their kids to daycare, to school. Look at how involved young fathers are. It’s not perfect, and women still bear the burden in many ways, but they have experienced a change.”

“#MeToo came from years of laying the groundwork. Lots of people having these discussions and suddenly conditions were right for it to happen,” she says.

it struck me how often I came upon such seemingly small changes that wound up making the difference between life and death, between a good decision and a bad one. A bag of diapers and grocery money, a laminated order of protection rather than paper, an afternoon court time rather than early morning, visiting a victim’s house rather than waiting for a visit, taking a literal step back from an argument rather than a step forward.

If I had to whittle down the changing world of domestic violence to just one idea that made all the difference, it would be communication. Across bureaucracies, certainly, but also political ideologies and programs, people and systems and disciplines. So many of the changes I saw when I traveled around the country came down to this one single act. The High Risk Teams, family justice centers, youth programs and batterer intervention and court initiatives, fatality review teams and police protocols and any number of other programs all shared this one absolutely free resource: they talked to one another.

Books line one wall: Next Time She’ll Be Dead. Loving to Survive. When Love Hurts.

“The U.S. Attorney’s Office is going to see if you want to assist them in pressing charges,” Naomi says. “You just need to make sure your phone is on and the volume all the way up. They’ll only call once and they won’t leave a voice mail or anything. They’ll call between eight and noon.”

D.C. has an unusual order of protection that allows an abuser to stay in contact, to co-parent, to even sometimes continue to live together. Called HATS, the acronym stands for: no harassing, assaulting, threatening, or stalking. But abusers and victims can remain in the same house. This kind of protection order has obvious shortcomings, but in a city like Washington, D.C., where affordable housing is perhaps the greatest challenge to any social service agency,21 it can help create, as Naomi put it, “a line in the sand saying I’m taking this seriously. This is a warning.” Often, victims don’t want an abuser to vacate the premises. They may need the financial and parenting support. “Clients are often like, ‘We have kids together. We pay the bills together. I can’t kick him out.’ This makes them more willing to [file].”

Behind every one of them was this shadow of another body, a terrible story. But all of them were also the disruptors now, changing the future narrative.

So often when reporters write about issues, we are covering stories of the living, speaking to change makers, policy makers, who are alive and well. But in domestic violence, I suspect for many of us it is often the dead with whom we really commune.

If someone I’d known for thirty-eight years could keep her abuse from me, what did it say about how we deal with abuse in our midst today, the shame and stigma it still carries?

He apologized to me that day and for the next weeks every time he broke down for “not being stronger.” Here was a man who’d just lost his second wife to cancer and yet he didn’t feel he had a right to public tears. Why? I told him his tears made him stronger, in my eyes, as a man, as a husband, as a father, that he didn’t fear his full range of human emotion. It’s a lesson I wish I could impart to all men.

Lola was just starting to come up against the bureaucracy of divorce, which locks you in place for too long.

“My brother took his own life, after taking that of his wife’s.” The language of it matters to her because it captures, somehow, the desperation and pain of her brother, while still acknowledging the horror of what he did.

Canada, where domestic and dating violence declined over the past decade, now seems to have such incidents “spiking”; a sergeant from the Calgary Police told a local reporter that they were in the midst of an “epidemic.”

In South Africa, where violence against women has become a national crisis, one woman is killed every three hours—a rate estimated to be five times higher than in Western Europe.

Other feminist emergencies: Women in China are rarely granted restraining orders against abusers, despite the Chinese government’s widely lauded 2016 law against domestic violence.

In fact, here is my charge to others: render this book obsolete.

I recognize that some of the conversations I began in No Visible Bruises need to happen alongside other pressing discussions; perhaps most notably, in my view, those about mass incarceration and childhood intervention strategies.

I do not think we can arrest and jail our way out of this problem.

I wondered recently: Why we don’t have a hotline for abusers in the way that we do for victims in crisis, or for alcoholics about to take a drink? Why don’t we have sponsors for those who graduate from a violence intervention program?

There are summer camps across the country that help children who are the victims of violence, but these all happen in the aftermath of violence. Some schools have interventions, but we cannot simply dump this on schools that are already under-resourced with teachers who are overworked.

And how are young people to learn what morbid jealousy looks like when our popular media frames stalking as romantic? When the Twilight movies, for example, portray romance as a man watching over a woman as she sleeps?

But my philosophy, having written it now, is that we ought to try everything, every idea, all of it, leaving nothing off the table, because this problem is so enormous, and lives so fragile, that we simply cannot afford to lose any more—not more time, and certainly not more lives.

But mostly I think I wrote it for the layperson, the one who knew nothing but assumed everything.

Latina Ray pled to a sentence of eleven years before her case went to trial. Her story is recounted in the documentary Private Violence.

“penultimate abuse by a perpetrator”: Strack coined this the “continuum of violence.”