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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Campbell says they told Maryland state officials, “We’ll be looking at another case involving these kids [in twenty years] …” The state representatives balked, told Campbell they weren’t interested in what might happen in the future. In how kids who witness abuse perpetuate the cycle as adults. They wanted the immediate answer. What could they do right now? But the future was her point.

“This was a simple remedy,” he said years later to a roomful of people at a video conference, “to prevent mistaken surgeries … And what we’ve found exploring errors in the fields of medicine, aviation, nuclear fuels is that we can correct problems fairly easily if we’re open to reviewing tragedies and accidents with a keen detailed analysis.”

Websdale told me that aviation has gotten considerably safer over the past two decades, whereas medical mistakes still happen far more often than they ought. (In fact, death from medical errors in hospitals is now the third leading cause of death for adults in the United States.)3 Websdale credits a burgeoning culture of openness in highlighting human error wrought by the NTSB as the primary reason for today’s relative flight safety.

Indeed, in my near-decade of reporting and researching domestic violence all across America, the most successful cities and towns I encountered that had either lowered their domestic violence homicide rates or increased available services all had this in common: they’d broken down the cultural barriers between their police departments and their domestic violence crisis centers.

The pastor is tall, with a mustache, and, like nearly everyone in the room with me that day, carries a gun at his belt, because Montana.