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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

I have to believe 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. Vast pools of funding would surface for researchers to figure out what’s wrong with women today.

The American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several decades, meaning, I suppose, that we held our dogs in higher regard than we held our wives. (Pet shelters in the 1990s outnumbered domestic violence shelters by nearly three to one.

Indeed, we live in a climate in which the right to own guns seems ever more to supersede the right to life.

“The consequence of [Trump’s] words and deeds are so profound for women,” Kit Gruelle, a survivor and activist, said to me. “We are leaping backwards at an obscene pace.”

The only sure thing is that doing nothing will ensure that nothing ever changes.

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

If it takes the average victim seven or eight times to leave an abuser, why do we expect offenders to get it right the first time?

“This is going to be the hardest thing you ever do,” Martina says. “It’s also the most courageous.”

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.

The United States is the most dangerous developed country in the world for women when it comes to gun violence.

At the same time, I think there is reason to hope. I look around at my male friends, my colleagues, my brothers, my friends’ husbands, and I see allies everywhere. I see men who care, who speak to an insecurity that I and many women feel, who will say, unabashedly, that they will refuse to be influenced by the craven misogyny filtering through the country and even the rest of the world.

He apologized to me that day and for the next weeks every time he broke down for “not being stronger.” Here was a man who’d just lost his second wife to cancer and yet he didn’t feel he had a right to public tears. Why? 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.