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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

The first known annihilation in the United States can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century. Over the course of the next two centuries, such cases averaged three per decade. Then, in the 1990s, there were thirty-six cases. And between 2000 and 2007, sixty cases. And from 2008 through 2013, in research done by the Family Violence Institute, there were 163 cases of familicide that claimed a total of 435 victims. This did not include cases where children killed parents (patricide) or where a parent only killed children (filicide). From the time of the 2008 economic crash, we began averaging, says Neil Websdale, director of the Family Violence Institute and author of the book Familicidal Hearts, around three a month. In other words, while nearly all other forms of homicide steadily declined over the past several decades in the United States, familicide appears to be on the rise.