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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

“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?”

What Strack and the domestic violence community believe today is that most strangulation injuries are internal and that the very act of strangulation often turns out to be the penultimate abuse by a perpetrator before a homicide.11 “Statistically we know now that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide,” says Sylvia Vella, a clinician and a detective with the San Diego Police Department in the domestic violence unit at the San Diego Family Justice Center. “They don’t go backwards.”12

Wtf

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. Rocky manipulated whoever he could to secure his freedom—in this case, Gordon and Sarah—and thus he maintained his control over Michelle. Except now it wasn’t just control; it was control and rage.

Sinclair calls this “the elephant in the room.” That we won’t say, simply, that it is men who are violent. It is men who take their violence out on masses of others. School shootings are carried out by young men. Mass murders. Gang warfare, murder-suicides and familicides and matricides and even genocides: all men. Always men. “Every

The first time, she said, was so sudden and so strange she assumed it was just a onetime event.

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.

It’s that thing, right, where men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn’t extend to their partners. This view has always sat uncomfortably with me; must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else’s mean something? Can’t we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy?

Then, in between weeks and months of some good times, and some not-so-good times, you might hear how he knows men look at you, he sees other men looking at you. You might even feel complimented by this. But then maybe he follows it up with a request that you stay home with him a little more. Maybe this, too, is for your “protection.” And that one friend you have, the loud one? He knows she doesn’t like him. And before you even realize it’s happening that friend’s falling away from your life. Then, a couple of years in, he loses his job, comes home in a mood, pushes you into a wall. And you know that’s not him, not really. You’ve been with him awhile now. Anyone would feel bad, losing a job. And he apologized, right? Seemed truly remorseful. And then the next month it’s a slap, a backhanded shove, another thrown plate. But neither the control nor the abuse tend to come at once, lit up like a punch. They leak out slowly over time like radon.