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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

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

Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called violence against women and girls the “most shameful human rights violation”3 and the World Health Organization called it a “global health problem of epidemic proportions.”

study put out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime cited fifty thousand women around the world were killed by partn...

The UNODC report called home “the most dangerous place for women.”

I would go on to learn more and more, including how domestic violence sits adjacent to so many other problems we as a society grapple with: education, economics, mental and physical health, crime, gender and racial equality, and more. Those who push for prison reform butt up against domestic violence over and over as perpetrators go to jail for a time, get little or no treatment, return to civilian society, and repeat the cycle.

Private violence has such vastly profound public consequences.

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.

The overwhelming majority of incarcerated men today first witnessed or experienced violence as children in their own homes, and children who grow up in violent homes are at far greater risk for developmental disorders.

Domestic violence is hard to talk about. It is also, I learned in the course of this research, among the most difficult of subjects to report on. It is vast and unwieldy, but it’s also utterly hidden.

With domestic violence, often there is no end date for the victims. Women who do manage to break free of their abusers still spend their lives negotiating with them if they share custody of children. And even if children are not involved, many victims remain on the lookout long after they escape abuse—particularly if incarceration was a result of the abuse. If they find a new partner, it can put both of them at risk.

Visitations and drop-offs are notoriously dangerous even for victims who manage to get away. One woman I know had her face smashed into a stone wall while her children were watching from the backseat of their car during a custody drop-off. She’d been divorced for years by then.

Domestic violence is like no other crime. It does not happen in a vacuum. It does not happen because someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our homes and families are supposed to be sacred territory, the “haven in a heartless world,”

This is part of what makes it so untenable. It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you. It is most often hidden from even one’s closest confidantes, and on many occasions the physical violence is far less damaging than the emotional and verbal violence.

the intellectual coercion required to make a man believe that his love and his violence stem from the same place inside himself is of course utterly duplicitous. I came to learn that there is a high incidence of narcissism in perpetrators. And a high incidence of other factors that can make duplicity a matter of survival—addiction, poverty, and other acts of desperation can be particularly deadly when combined with a certain toxic masculinity.

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.

None of this is surprising, given that we didn’t recognize domestic violence as wrong for most of human history. Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any other of his properties, including servants, slaves, and animals; of course, the holy texts—Koran, Bible, and Talmud—from which such beliefs stem were simply interpretations by (of course) men of the time.17 Some of these interpretations even gave instruction on the manner of wife beating, such as avoiding direct blows to the face, or making sure not to cause lasting injury.

It’s only been in the last century or so that laws against wife beating have been written in the United States, and even those early states—Alabama, Maryland, Oregon, Delaware, and Massachusetts—that began writing legislation against spousal abuse in the late nineteenth century rarely enforced their own laws.

The American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several decades,

there’s Russia, which in 2017 decriminalized any domestic violence that doesn’t result in bodily injury.23 There’s also, of course, the United States, whose first appointed attorney general under the Trump Administration believed domestic abuse was not grounds for asylum and that such an “alien” merely suffered the fate of “misfortune.”

It wasn’t until 1984 that Congress finally passed a law that would help women and children victims of abuse; it was called the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, and it helped fund shelters and other resources for victims.25 Stalking wasn’t identified as a crime until the early 1990s and still today is often not seen for the threat it truly is—not by law enforcement, abusers, or even by the victims actually being stalked, despite three-quarters of women killed in America having been stalked beforehand by these same partners or ex-partners.

Nearly 90% of domestic violence homicide victims were both stalked and beaten in the year prior to their deaths.

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

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My goal for No Visible Bruises, then, is to shine a flashlight in the darkest corners, to show what domestic violence looks like from the inside out. I’ve written the book in three sections, each of which tries to tackle one primary question.

Section one tries to answer that most dogged of questions: why victims stay.

Section two, perhaps the most difficult section to report, interrogates violence at its core, with abusers.

Over and over I asked, during the years I was researching this book, whether a violent man could be taught to be nonviolent. The answers almost always fell along these lines: police officers and advocates said no, victims said they hoped so, and violent men said yes.

In the third section I shadow the changemakers, people on the front lines of domestic violence and domestic violence homicide,

Similarly, while there is a movement afoot to refer to domestic violence victims as “survivors” or in some situations “clients,” I often refrained from doing this unless I knew unequivocally that they were survivors, that is, that they had managed to escape their abusive relationships and build new lives for themselves and their families.

I have, for years, tried myself to coin a better term, and I’ve yet to conceive of anything, though I believe the word “terrorism” comes as close as any to what such a relationship feels like from the inside.

Melanie said the minute she got that call from Gordon and Sarah, Michelle’s demeanor changed. “Her confidence about the restraining order, everything changed,” Melanie said. Michelle recanted. This is one of the most profoundly misunderstood moments in any domestic violence situation. Michelle did not recant because she was a coward, or because she believed she had overreacted, or because she believed Rocky to be any less dangerous. She did not recant because she was crazy, or because she was a drama queen, or because any of this was anything less than a matter of life and death. She did not recant because she had lied. She recanted to stay alive. She recanted to keep her children alive.

Victims stay because they know that any sudden move will provoke the bear. They stay because they have developed tools, over the years, that have sometimes worked to calm down an angry partner: pleading, begging, cajoling, promising, and public displays of solidarity, including against the very people—police, advocates, judges, lawyers, family—who might be the only ones capable of saving their lives. They stay because they see the bear coming for them. And they want to live.

Why victims stay isn’t the question we need to be asking. Rather, I think a better question is: how do we protect this person? No qualifiers. No musing about why she stayed or what she might appear to be doing or n...

Years later, I would think of Michelle, this moment, as I’d listen to a domestic violence advocate tell me: “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.”3

“The criminal justice system,” Tenney told me, “isn’t set up for uncooperative witnesses.” And Tenney had enormous gaps in her knowledge, just as they all did then about Rocky and Michelle’s history. I’ll hear this same thing from prosecutors around the country over the years. But I’ll also hear this: murder trials happen every day in this country without victim cooperation.

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.

How a victim answers the questions on any given Danger Assessment will determine what comes next: whether a perpetrator is arrested, tried, found guilty, and whether a victim will press charges, be taken to a shelter, walked through the court system. Often it will determine a much starker outcome: whether someone will live or die.

Campbell’s slideshow lists grim domestic violence statistic after statistic: second leading cause of death for African American women, third leading cause of death for native women, seventh leading cause of death for Caucasian women.

Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 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. So how many people are killed as a result of domestic violence each year? The bystanders, the other family members, the perpetrators’ suicides? The victims who just can’t take it anymore and kill themselves? The accidents that turn out not to be accidents at all, victims pushed out of cars and from cliffs or driven into trees. Tragedies forever uncategorized.

Many of them know the statistics intimately, in that they don’t see statistics, they see faces—of women, of men, of children caught up in this seemingly intractable cycle of violence.

In Maryland, homicide is the leading cause of maternal mortality. Same with New York City and Chicago, Campbell says. Foreign armies and international terrorists

Layers, years, generations of abuse.

In New York, for example, two-thirds of incarcerated women in 2005 had been abused beforehand by the person they killed.3 Though 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.

Suddenly, Campbell could quantify what had been largely theory until then: that the single biggest risk for domestic homicide, for example, is the prior incidence of domestic violence. (Her initial research from Dayton’s police files showed that 50% of domestic homicide victims had been visited by the police for domestic abuse at least once previously.)

Levels of dangerousness operated on a specific timeline. Dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months, then dipped only slightly for the next nine months. After a year, the dangerousness dropped off precipitously.

It seemed to Campbell that something that appeared random, like it happened in a snap, could actually be quantified and cataloged. At least half the women Campbell interviewed were unaware of the severity of their situations—a fact she says remains true today.

it’s an absolute leap of cognition to imagine that this person you love, or once loved, this person you made a child with, this person you made a commitment to and vice versa, this person who shares every big and small detail of your life, would actually, truly take that life from you. Love is what makes domestic violence different from any other crime. That the people involved have said to each other and to the world, You are the most important person to me. And then, in an instant, for that relationship to become lethal? It requires us to mentally, intellectually, and emotionally hurdle beyond what we can imagine.

Over the years, Campbell eventually identified twenty-two high risk factors that, when put together in an almost endless series of combinations, portended a potential homicide. 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.

It’s not the presence of a single factor that matters; it’s the particular combination of factors, each of which carries a different weighted measurement.

She had women fill out a timeline of incidents, a kind of catalog of abuse, so that they would be able to see for themselves if there was escalation. (Campbell says 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.

Strangulation is one of those danger signs that Campbell pointed out in her early research, but it turns out that it is a much more significant marker than, say, a punch or a kick. Sixty percent of domestic violence victims are strangled6 at some point during the course of an abusive relationship—often repeatedly, over years—and the overwhelming majority of strangulation perpetrators are men (99%).7 Those strangled to the point of losing consciousness are at their highest risk of dying in the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the incident from strokes, blood clots, or aspiration (choking on their own vomit). Such incidents can cause brain injury—mild or traumatic—not only by cutting off oxygen to the brain, but because they are often accompanied by blunt force trauma to the head.