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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

solved). That going to a shelter was an adequate response for victims and their children. That violence inside the home was something private, unrelated to other forms of violence, perhaps most notably mass shootings. That a lack of visible injury signaled a lack of seriousness. And, perhaps most of all, that unless we stand at the receiving end of a punch, such violence had nothing at all to do with us. Over the next few years, Suzanne Dubus and her colleague, Kelly Dunne, patiently taught me about the scope and history of an issue that still today is too often hidden. I learned why past approaches had failed, and what we could do more effectively today. Between

2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives.

Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners.

Private violence has such vastly profound public consequences.

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.

And those mass shootings that seem to plague us more with each new year? Most of them, too, are domestic violence.

domestic violence, rather than being a private problem, is a most urgent matter of public health.

if the tables were turned, if women were beating and killing men in such vast numbers—fifty women a month in the United States are killed by their intimate partners using guns alone—the problem would be the front page of every newspaper in this country.

VAWA funds meant victims no longer had to pay for their own rape kits and

Jfc

VAWA requires reauthorization every five years. The 2013 reauthorization was held up because Republicans didn’t want the bill to include same-sex partners, Native Americans living on reservations, or undocumented immigrants who were battered and trying to apply for temporary visas. After

Republicans Being monsters? Im shocked

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.

how much these men strain to keep such colossal pain inside them. How unfair it is that we live in a world in which they’re made to believe their tears are shameful.

murder trials happen every day in this country without victim cooperation.

in many states today, still, victims are barred from using their long histories of enduring violence at the hands of their partners in their own defense. One woman I spoke with who is incarcerated in North Carolina for first degree murder, Latina Ray, says she endured over a decade of abuse. Her partner beat her so badly that she lost the sight in her right eye entirely, yet her long history of victimization with him was never used in her case.

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

the system prioritizes my freedom over your safety.

Short courtships—let’s call it love at first sight—are a hallmark of private violence.

“You want to get rid of homicide?” she’ll ask. “Get rid of guns.”

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

See how polite we women are? We say “please” when we’re begging for our lives.

The pro-gun argument that asks women to arm themselves is asking them to behave as their abusers behave,

Imagine any other crime where the impetus for change, and the loss of civil liberties, lies with the victim,

a task force headed by the D.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence reported that a third of homeless women in the District were homeless directly because of violence in their home.

Anywhere from 25 to 80% of homeless women, depending upon which study is cited, have domestic violence histories. And it gets worse. In cities where police can give nuisance citations, domestic violence winds up being a major cause of eviction.

She said her father wore the pants in the family, but her mother picked out the ones he was going wear.

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, including South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Louisiana, Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, and Missouri.

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.