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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Strangulation turned out to dramatically increase the chances of domestic violence homicide. But only 15% of the victims in the study turned out to have injuries visible enough to photograph for the police reports. As a result, the officers often downplayed the incidents,

What Strack and the domestic violence community believe today is that most strangulation injuries are internal and that the very act of strangulation often turns out to be the penultimate abuse by a perpetrator before a homicide.

Today, forty-five states17 prosecute strangulation as a felony, and “every jurisdiction that has prosecuted strangulation as a felony with a multidisciplinary team has seen a drop in homicides,

When Campbell’s research tells her that women often don’t know their own level of danger, what she means is that they may not know how to situate their danger in a larger context. They may not realize it is escalating. They may not know the specific predictors of intimate partner homicide.

And in these small, separate moments, Rocky showed her something even more urgent: that if she tried to contain him, tried to use the system to beat him, he’d win, and in case she didn’t get those two messages, he made sure she understood that he’d escalate, that he’d take what she valued most in the world: her children.

So often, by the time a situation is this critical, it is already too late unless those in a system—police officers, advocates, judiciaries—are aware of the context of these kinds of actions and have appropriate measures to address them.

I filled out a Danger Assessment on Michelle once. She scored somewhere between a sixteen and an eighteen. (There are two questions that can never be known in her case.) This score put her in the highest risk category for domestic violence homicide. It is a failure to understand these critical moments in context that makes the “Why didn’t she leave?” question so maddening.

Look at Michelle Monson Mosure. Look at any intimate partner homicide anywhere in any given year and it will be the same: she tried every which way she could. She tried and tried, but the equation, or rather, the question, isn’t a matter of leaving or staying. It’s a matter of living or dying. They stay because they choose to live. And they die anyway.

Michelle Mosure stayed for her kids and for herself. She stayed for pride and she stayed for love and she stayed for fear and she stayed for cultural and social forces far beyond her control. And her staying, to anyone trained enough to see the context, looked a lot less like staying and a lot more like someone tiptoeing her way toward freedom.

she couldn’t stop missing her sister.

I also consider how ceding power to another person does not happen in a vacuum. It’s a slow erosion over time. Step by step, moment by moment, whittling away until a person no longer feels like a person.

Why is it not okay that he filmed her over and over and over in her underwear? Because she asked him to stop. And he didn’t. And eventually she gave up asking. This is loss of power at its most elemental.

There are three stories that make up the emotional axis of Jimmy’s life. A play in three acts, so powerful to him that they are somatic as much as psychic. They can be summed up in three questions: what is the worst thing that ever happened to you? What is the worst thing you ever did? What is the worst thing to happen to someone you love? Anyone who’s lived a life in which these three questions are immediately answerable may have some kind of understanding of what drives Jimmy today.

Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and 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.

Sinclair calls this “the elephant in the room.” That we won’t say, simply, that it is men who are violent. It is men who take their violence out on masses of others. School shootings are carried out by young men. Mass murders. Gang warfare, murder-suicides and familicides and matricides and even genocides: all men. Always men. “Every commonly available domestic violence and official general violence statistic, and every anecdotal account about domestic and all other kinds of violence throughout the United States and around the world, point clearly to the fact that men almost monopolize all sectors of violence perpetration,” Sinclair wrote. “The generic descriptions of violence seem to be a careful attempt not to see this crucial piece of evidence … a careful way of avoiding the gendered source of violence. This error in analysis will mislead us in our attempts to find solutions to the problem.”

And all of these did something that no one, up until that point, had really thought to do: address violence not in its aftermath, with victims, but at its core, with the abusers.

For many of the men here, it’s not merely the first time they’ve ever really listened to a survivor of domestic violence tell her story, it’s the first time they ever considered how trauma and violence can have a long-term impact on someone. Many of them wipe away tears.

The talk about their own incidents of violence, times they also denied any wrongdoing, moments they manipulated or verbally threatened partners, instances of trivializing their own violent events. They begin to see, some of them for the first time ever, the effect their violence may have had on their victims. That is to say, they begin to see the world through someone else’s eyes.

The United States spends as much as twenty-five times more on researching cancer or heart disease than it does on violence prevention, despite the enormous costs of violence to our communities.

part of the point of the course for these men is that we are all from the same community, and we share the same burdens: the need to be loved, the fear of vulnerability, the suffocating weight of shame.

What a relief to learn they’ve been coerced into their violence, not born into it.

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%.

Jimmy addresses the rest of the group. “I need you guys to stay focused right now,” he says. “Don’t collude if you hear something that to you appears to be funny. He may describe how he assaulted his partner and you laugh and he may shut down. What we did to our partners is not funny, so let’s be delicate with that. Let’s treat that in a mature manner. This work is serious. It’s not funny.”

Perhaps the most significant challenge to this entire program is that men who’ve gone through it—either RSVP or ManAlive—are still operating in the same world as before they went through the program.

On the tape, the husband said things like, “I wouldn’t have such anger and rage if I weren’t so crazy in love with you.” It was the first time he really heard and understood how manipulative abusers could be. How they romanticized both their abuse and their jealousy. The “I love you so much you make me this way” excuse. The “I wouldn’t do X if you didn’t do Y” rationalization. Blame and denial.

Adams and other researchers point out the framework of these kinds of sentiments. They minimize the violence, rationalizing abusive behavior and blaming the victim. And it works. The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming. And then comes the remorse. The deep, tearful apology, the promises of better behavior, the adoration and claims of love. The script is strikingly similar no matter who’s saying it.

I still carry a picture in my mind of an abuser who is a rageaholic, a monster, a person visibly and uncontrollably angry. Someone easily identifiable as a “bad guy.” I may even have operated under the idea that my own gut instincts would alert me to such a man. And what strikes me immediately—in fact, deeply unsettles me in a way—is how incredibly normal they all seem. Like a bunch of guys I’d go have a beer with. They are charming. They are funny, gregarious, shy, high-strung. Good-looking or not, well-dressed or not. They are Everyman.

“The average batterer is pretty likable.” For Adams this is the whole point: that we look for talons and tails, but find instead charm and affability. It’s how abusers attract victims in the first place.

When Adams first began studying how to change the behavior of abusive men, before he’d made the connections to narcissism, nearly all the research from the 1960s and ’70s described violence in the home as the product of a manipulative woman who incited her husband. That victims provoke their own abuse is an attitude that persists today.

Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent.

“Many batterers conduct some, if not most, of their nonfamilial relationships in a respectful manner, which indicates that they already know how to practice respectful treatment of others when they decide to.”

For Adams this extreme narcissism is at the root of understanding batterers, and while we may think of narcissists as conspicuous misfits who can’t stop talking about themselves, in fact they are often high-functioning, charismatic, and professionally successful.

The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers. Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t lose their kids.” In fact batterers often see themselves as saviors of a sort. “They feel they’re rescuing a woman in distress. It’s another aspect of narcissism … And there’s a sense of wanting to be eternally appreciated for that.” In contrast, he said, “a lot of victims come across as messed up. Because that’s exactly the point for him: ‘I’m going to make it so no one wants you.’

Victims’ lives are messy. Often they are substance abusers, or they live in extreme poverty. Many have suffered traumatic, abusive childhoods. Such cases are the most difficult to prosecute, not least because the victims can be unreliable witnesses. “This is why batterers are so often able to fool the system,” one domestic violence advocate told me. “They’re so charming, and the victim comes off as very negative.”

Women are given the message over and over that we are the holders of the emotional life and health of the family, that the responsibility for a man to change lies, in fact, with us.

I had to stop loving myself and only love him.” His narcissism, in other words, didn’t even allow the room for her to care for herself.

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.

If batterer intervention programs are most often populated by working-class white men and minorities, and jails are overwhelmingly poor white and people of color, it is in familicide where white middle- and upper-middle class men dominate.

the overwhelming majority of men who kill their entire families are white, middle or middle-upper class, often educated, often well-off, or well-off until just before the murders.

O’Hanlon himself says it took three lives to save his: Jesus Christ, Dawn O’Hanlon, and April O’Hanlon. He was, by his own admission, a “lukewarm” Christian until the murders. “I ask God, ‘Why? Why? Couldn’t there have been any other way?’ ” In his interpretation, the murders seemed to be a way for God to get O’Hanlon’s attention, to straighten up, to restore his faith in the Lord, to serve. He said God is working miracles through him, saving other prisoners. At several points he suggests I title this chapter “Triumph Over Tragedy.” Where is the triumph? I ask him. Because the tragedy part is clear. He says it hasn’t come yet, but it will.

jfc this is so gross. the NARCISSISM

One of the first questions I ever asked O’Hanlon was whether or not he thought he was going to heaven. “Absolutely,” he said.

Though the numbers are not tracked consistently, around 80% of all hostage situations in this country are a result of domestic violence,

police can also be the perpetrators themselves—rates of domestic violence among police officers are two to four times higher than the general population.

although I use the term “domestic violence” in this book because it is the most commonly used reference for what I am investigating, a far more accurate term, and one that captures the particular psychological, emotional and physical dynamics, is “intimate partner terrorism.”

In a study done in Los Angeles of ninety-one cases of officer-involved domestic violence, three-quarters of the time the complaints weren’t even included in performance reviews.

A study from Florida between 2008 and 2012 noted that while only about 1% of officers remained on the job following a failed drug test, and 7% remained after a theft, nearly 30% of officers with domestic violence complaints were still employed in their same positions a year later.

at least a quarter of departments around the country have no written procedures on how to deal with domestic violence calls.

The lessons of the male role belief system that I’d learned sitting in classes by Jimmy Espinoza operate every bit as strongly in any given police department as they do in the San Bruno jail.

Stories happening in real time, as the trainees sit in class learning. Stories close by and across the country. Daily stories of angry men, scared women, vulnerable children. The constant stream of stories give these scenarios the feel of real life, the weight of real life.