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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Men made the rules, primarily through physical violence.

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.

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.

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.

Cases like these and so many others make clear that domestic violence, rather than being a private problem, is a most urgent matter of public health.

private violence affects in some way nearly every aspect of modern life, yet our collective failure to treat it publicly demonstrates a stunning lack of understanding about this very pervasiveness.

“Domesticating” violence implies some kind of softening, that somehow assaults from a family member deserve lesser attention than those of a stranger.

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.

“It’s okay, Bugga. I’ll go.” By now, Melanie had called 911.

how do we protect this person? No qualifiers. No musing about why she stayed or what she might appear to be doing or not doing. Just one simple question: how do we protect her?

“We now know it’s the ones who don’t show up in court, who don’t renew the restraining orders, who are in the most danger.”

Originally written to help healthcare workers identify potential victims of domestic violence in emergency rooms, the Danger Assessment is probably the single most important tool used in intimate partner assault, treatment, and awareness today.

Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.

That figure does not count children. And it does not count the abusers who kill themselves after killing their partners, murder-suicides we see daily in the newspaper. And it does not count same-sex relationships where one or the other partner might not be “out.” And it does not count other family members, like sisters, aunts, grandmothers, who are often killed alongside the primary victim. And it does not count innocent bystanders: the twenty-six churchgoers in Texas, say, after a son-in-law has gone to a service to target his mother-in-law, or the two spa employees in Wisconsin killed alongside their client by her ex. The list is endless. And it does not count the jurisdictions who do not report their homicides, since homicide reporting is voluntary through the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reporting Data.

Some of the risk factors were broad: substance abuse, gun ownership, extreme jealousy. Others were more specific: threats to kill, strangulation, and forced sex. Isolation from friends and family, a child from a different biological parent in the home, an abuser’s threat of suicide or violence during pregnancy, and stalking all added lethality.

Access to a gun, drug or alcohol abuse, and controlling daily activities are among the risk factors, as are threats to children, destruction of property, and a victim’s attempt to leave anytime within the prior year. The sole economic factor Campbell identified was chronic unemployment.

many people do the Danger Assessment without the timeline, which misses crucial information about escalation and keeps victims from really being empowered with the knowledge that comes from being able to see their own situations as a collective whole.

Sacral nerves in the brain stem—which happens to be the final part of the brain to expire—control the sphincter muscles. So urination and defecation weren’t a sign of fear, McClane showed Strack, but rather evidence that each of those victims had been very near death.

Prior to the training and forensic exams, only 14% of strangulation cases were prosecuted; that number is now closer to 62%.

an emergency room screening tool, called HELPS, that aims to identify domestic violence victims with a potential TBI,

It is not uncommon for victims of domestic violence to have poor recall of the incidents that landed their partners in trouble.

The variety of red flags are things everyone in domestic violence has seen before: the quick courtship, the isolation and control, the unemployment, the medications, the narcissism and lying and stalking.

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?

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

Then the Violence Against Women Act passed, and suddenly courts were referring guys to them—not just to ManAlive, but to batterer intervention programs all over the country,

The San Bruno program is called Resolve to Stop the Violence (RSVP).

Roughly 12% of male inmates in jails like San Bruno today were sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. (In state prisons, the number is higher, and for those boys who grew up in foster care, the numbers are shocking, nearly 50%.

Emerge is perhaps the nation’s most widely emulated. The program is forty weeks long and covers topics ranging from effects of abuse on family members to jealousy and healthy communication.

The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming.

two primary types of family killer: livid coercive, or those with long histories of domestic violence, and civil reputable, in which perpetrators are respectable members of society

a far more accurate term, and one that captures the particular psychological, emotional and physical dynamics, is “intimate partner terrorism.”

Stalking is also not included in Lautenberg, which means that tens of thousands of stalkers are legally in possession of firearms in America today.

Zeoli’s study found that intimate partner homicide decreased by 25% in cities where the restraining order laws were clear and enforced.

“Accountability,” Jimmy says. Four ways they get into a moment of fatal peril. The first is denial. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.” The next is minimize. “To lessen the impact of my violence,” he tells them. Words like “but” and “only” are clues. “I only hit her once. I only pushed her a little. But she came at me first.” Blame and collusion are the other two ways. “She hit me first,” he says. “She was in my face.” That’s blame. Collusion is, say another guy is sitting there beside you. “Oh, dog, you going to let her talk to you like that? Yo, man, if I was you, I’d let her know what’s what.”

They’d say, ‘If she’s really that afraid, she’ll go into shelter,’ and when women didn’t, we’d surmise that they really weren’t that afraid.” Dorothy taught her how dangerous such an assumption could be.

Preventive detention statutes emerged from federal legislation called the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which allows a defendant to be held pretrial if he or she is deemed dangerous enough to another person or to a community.

They ask for the facts, the play-by-play of a violent moment, but they may not ask what the person was thinking or feeling in that same moment.

No victim of domestic violence—man or woman, adult or child—ever imagines that they’re the type of person who would wind up in such a situation.

But neither the control nor the abuse tend to come at once, lit up like a punch. They leak out slowly over time like radon.

victims vacate emotionally first, sometimes years before they are actually physically able to leave.

“The most important job of the brain is to ensure our survival, even under the most miserable conditions … Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.” Van der Kolk believes that while post-traumatic stress in soldiers garners the most attention these days, victims of trauma, including domestic violence, are “arguably the greatest threat to our national well-being.”3

Not just the crime and punishment, but the terrible and terrific toll of violence—the whether and the how you rebuild your life, and the whether and how you convince your children to make different choices than you made. The ancestral manifestation of emotional and physical terror.

Fifty American women are shot and killed every month by intimate partners; a further untold number are threatened with those guns, kept in line, kept quiet. (And then there are those killed by other methods. Stabbed, strangled, pushed out of moving cars, poisoned.)