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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Every domestic violence scenario I’ve ever known has had this one thing in common when guns are present: there is never, ever time to think. A knife gives you a second to run. A bullet does not. Guns supercharge the dangerousness for all parties involved.

The risk of homicide to a person in an abusive situation increases eightfold when guns are present.

half of women killed by their partners had sought help from the police or the criminal justice system at least once.

The risk of homicide unfolds on a timeline, Campbell said, spiking, for example, when a victim attempts to leave an abuser, or when the situation at home changes—a pregnancy, a new job, a move. The danger remains high for three months after a couple splits, dips slightly for the next nine, and drops significantly after a year.

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abusers tended to fall into two categories when it comes to their pregnant partners: those whose abuse escalates, and those who lay off entirely for those nine months.

Dunne’s goal was twofold: one, identify and create action plans for high risk cases; and two, keep victims out of shelters as much as possible.

For many, this resulted in an endless loop of recurrent homelessness and violence and shelter and homelessness and violence and shelter.

Anywhere from 25 to 80% of homeless women, depending upon which study is cited, have domestic violence histories.

keep quiet and face abuse, or call the police and face eviction.

“When survivors have access to income,” Hacksylo said, “they necessarily are in a better position to demand safety and justice for themselves.”

empowerment comes with sovereignty.

It reminded me of James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. “The most dangerous creation of any society is that man who has nothing to lose.”

“The key with domestic violence,” says Dunne, “is addressing it in misdemeanor phase.” One of the more challenging elements of domestic violence is that ideally you want to stop abuse from escalating. But for that to happen, misdemeanors need to be taken far more seriously than they generally are in intimate partner violence cases.

many perpetrators like Ramirez go straight from a misdemeanor to a murder.

In Crawford v. Washington the Supreme Court ruled that cross-examination is required of witnesses at trial unless a witness was unavailable (e.g., sick or dead). The court said that a defendant had the Constitutional right to face his accusers, that testimonial statements by witnesses who did not appear at trial were hearsay. And hearsay was not admissible.3 This meant victims who were too terrified to appear in court but were otherwise healthy could no longer allow prosecutors to use their statements.

Crawford had a profound effect on the movement of evidence-based domestic violence cases across the country. These days, victim statements are often inadmissible in court proceedings if a witness is uncooperative (as happens in as many as 70% of cases).

There is almost nothing more terrifying to a child than seeing an adult—who is meant to be in control, who is meant to have all the answers—break down sobbing.

That Martina is a woman, frankly, seems entirely meaningful to me, though her supervisor, Shamode Wimberly, disagrees. Gender doesn’t matter, Wimberly believes, if someone is good at her job. And Martina seems to do the work of three people. But in my view, the fact that she is a woman speaking mostly to women is significant. That she meets victims in their own homes, or the homes of friends and family, rather than forcing them through a bureaucratic maze of departments and courthouses and crisis centers, is meaningful. That she jokes around, asks about the rest of their lives, spends as many hours as it takes, is meaningful.

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

Many women across the country today languish in jail cells because their histories of domestic violence were barred in court in their own defenses.

Disassociation is one of the more common issues, but victims of chronic domestic violence can also have a wide and long-term range of problems, from the emotional to the physical. They may have long-term cognitive loss, memory problems or sleep disorders. They may suffer from inattention or irritability. Some researchers link a host of physical ailments to unresolved trauma, including fibromyalgia and severe digestive issues.

“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.”

She sees versions of Brandi and Bresha and Jonathan every single day. 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.

I try to be the detective that I wanted my sister to have.”

I want to believe all of this is a national call to action. Yet as I write this, I can’t help but think of how I sat in that ghostly midnight courthouse fewer than six blocks from the United States Capitol where Congress just weeks ago in September failed to reauthorize the 2018 Violence Against Women Act. Instead, it gave VAWA stopgap funding for another three months and this time—unlike when VAWA first passed with bipartisan support—there is not a single GOP cosponsor.

murder of women by an intimate partner has increased by 11% since 2014.3 This report, I should note, only covers single incidents, not mass shootings, familicides, or any other combination of deaths.

There are other markers that worry me, too, especially those invisible ones. An uncomfortable misogyny creeping into areas that had, until now, seemed fully resolved to the idea of women’s equality.

Kit Gruelle’s quote about our current political situation haunts me more often than I’d like to admit: “We are leaping backwards at an obscene pace.”

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.

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.)

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

Sargent took Campbell’s Danger Assessment, and whittled it down to three primary questions that a police officer could ask on scene to try to determine dangerousness quickly: 1. Has he/she ever used a weapon against you or threatened you with a weapon? 2. Has he/she threatened to kill you or your children? 3. Do you think he/she might try to kill you?13 Answering yes to these three will trigger eight more questions, as well as a call from the responding officer to the local domestic violence hotline who will then connect with victims on-site.

Familial violence is not a problem in a silo. It is insidious, infecting so many other challenges we as a society face, in education and healthcare, in poverty and addiction, in mental health and mass shootings and homelessness and unemployment. Given the sheer span of issues that domestic violence intersects with, whatever solutions we imagine for the future must take this breadth into account.

We cannot address homelessness without addressing the fact that domestic violence accounts for so many homeless families. We cannot successfully address educational disparity or poverty without addressing how much domestic violence can be a root cause of such problems.

If I had to whittle down the changing world of domestic violence to just one idea that made all the difference, it would be communication. Across bureaucracies, certainly, but also political ideologies and programs, people and systems and disciplines.