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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.2 This does not include men. Or children.

Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives. (This figure is likely an underestimate, as it was pulled from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, which gather data from local police departments, and participation is voluntary.) Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners.

Domestic violence health and medical costs top more than $8 billion annually for taxpayers and cause victims to lose more than eight million8 workdays each year. It is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half our homeless women and is overall the third leading cause of homelessness in our country.

“You could certainly say about half the cases of mass shootings are extreme incidents of domestic violence.” In other words, it’s not that domestic violence predicts mass shootings. It’s that mass shootings, more than half the time, are domestic violence.

They stay in abusive marriages because they understand something that most of us do not, something from the inside out, something that seems to defy logic: as dangerous as it is in their homes, it is almost always far more dangerous to leave.

Victims who side with their abusers during police calls do so not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety.

Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.

Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent? Or better yet, why couldn’t he stop his violence?

“men learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority, be it spousal abuse, gang turf wars, street assaults, armed robbery, and all the other crimes that men in the jails had been charged with. Men … had learned that it was normal to use force and violence in all of the forms above to enforce their social obligation to be superior.”

It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.”

That the best shot we have with domestic violence is to disrupt it in the misdemeanor phase before it becomes something bigger.