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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Her response was autonomic: fight or flight? What do you do if a bear is coming at you? Do you rear up and scream to make yourself big or do you play dead? You certainly don’t sit and consider the wildlife protection services that might be available to you if the bear would only give you a little time to gather yourself together.

“every jurisdiction that has prosecuted strangulation as a felony with a multidisciplinary team has seen a drop in homicides,”

In other words, while nearly all other forms of homicide steadily declined over the past several decades in the United States, familicide appears to be on the rise.

We tend to have easy empathy for people suffering mental health issues when they are universally beloved and when their actions affect only themselves (a Robin Williams, say), but our empathy falters, perhaps rightly so, when those actions affect the lives of others, such as what happened with O’Hanlon.

The idea that a gun can “save” anyone in any situation has always seemed suspect to me. A gun is a passive instrument; it does what it’s told to do by a human. And humans make mistakes. I picture a home invasion, someone in bed, asleep, who wakes suddenly to find a stranger in the dark perched over the bed. How does the gun get into the homeowner’s hands? How does the safety get turned off? How does the bullet find its way into the target in those sheer seconds? Maybe it’s a quiet house; the homeowner is awakened, reaches under the mattress, silently gets out the gun, silently clicks off the safety, silently tiptoes downstairs. He can hear the thief, but the thief cannot hear him. Silently, he finds the thief holding a flat-screen TV and he shoots. Maybe it’s a movie theater. Guy walks in in the dark, starts shooting. Somewhere in the audience is another gun, a good guy. He shoots, too. Maybe it’s a hotel room. Guy starts shooting. A dozen people in the crowd have guns, but they’re good guys. Good guns. They start shooting back. How do you identify the good from the bad? The intentional from the accidental? Maybe it’s a sniper at a gas station. Someone with a Toyota has a gun. He’s a good guy. He shoots, too. Maybe it’s a kid, and another kid has a gun. A good kid with a gun. A good teacher with a gun. How do you know, how do I know, how does anyone know who is who, and which gun is which, in those panicky milliseconds? Where to run, how to hide? How does a plastic seat wi...

It 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,

Why are our guns more important to us than our citizens? I cannot come to any other conclusion than that retired nurse in Montana, knitting as she investigates on the fatality review team. Get rid of the fucking guns.

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.

In the weeks before this book was published, new data in the United States was released that domestic violence homicides have been on the rise since 2015 and have increased 33% since 2017.1 Other countries, too, are struggling with rising rates. 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.” 2 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.3 As I write this, France is in the midst of a series of conferences across the country, bringing together police, French officials, and domestic violence associations, to combat their country’s own increasing trend of femicide; according to the New York Times, in 2019 France reached one hundred domestic violence homicides earlier than ever before, calling it a “terrible benchmark.” 4 Between 2011 and 2018, the number of femicides in Turkey nearly quadrupled.5 The United Nations estimates that twelve thousand women are killed annually in Russia.6 In Brazil, where data is difficult to confirm and almost certainly underreported, femicides are up 4% since 2018.7 In Spain levels of domestic and sexual violence are so alarming that activists took to the streets across two hundred and fifty Spanish cities on a single night—September 20, 2019—to...