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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

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.

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 not doing. Just one simple question: how do we protect her?

“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.

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.

There is good news, Campbell says, and several in the room laugh, because, really, up until now it’s been pretty grim. Campbell says that states where “we have good domestic violence laws and resources” are states where both men and women, though especially men, are less likely to be killed by their partners. Yes, men. The gender distinction is where they find the causal relationship. The states with fewer men’s deaths, Campbell tells the audience, are the states with good police responses, with good laws of protection, with decent resources for victims. In other words, Campbell says, “Abused women feel less like there’s no way out except to kill him.” In fact, since 1976 rates of men killed by women have dropped by nearly three-quarters.2 What she means is that there are states where abused women don’t have to resort to murdering their abusers to return to freedom. While there are no national statistics, some states collect this data. 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. One woman I spoke with who is incarcerated in North Carolina for first degree murder, Latina Ray, says she endured over a decade of abuse. Her partner beat her so badly that she lost the sight in her right eye entirely, yet her long history of victimization with h...

Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.

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.

An expansive book by Edward W. Gondolf that looks at the current state of batterer intervention, The Future of Batterer Programs, says essentially that we are still in an early phase of such treatment and he cautions against putting too much stock in the idea of a predictive risk assessment: “The tough question facing batterer programs, and the criminal justice field in general, is how to identify the especially dangerous men … The shift, therefore, has been from prediction to ongoing risk management that entails repeated assessments, monitoring compliance, and revising interventions along the way.”

Anger management is often conflated with batterer intervention as if they are equivalent—indeed courts across the country today still often sentence abusers to anger management courses, as happened with Ray Rice in 2014. After he clocked his girlfriend—now wife—in an elevator so hard he knocked her unconscious, a New Jersey judge tossed the domestic violence charges and sent him to anger management counseling.4 Such outcomes speak to a deep misunderstanding of the nature of abuse. (The NFL, despite public promises, has made almost no progress when it comes to domestic violence. In the fall of 2017, at least half a dozen new players faced domestic violence charges, but were drafted anyway, and at the time of this writing the NFL had failed to implement a single reform recommended to it by a commission formed in the aftermath of the Ray Rice scandal, according to Deborah Epstein, a law professor at Georgetown University, who resigned from the commission in protest in 2018 as a result of the NFL’s failure to take seriously the problem of domestic violence.5) A 2008 assessment of 190 batterer programs, in fact, showed that most participants did not have substantial levels of anger, and that only a small percentage were in the unusually high range.6

Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent. In a 2002 paper he cowrote with Susan Cayouette, the codirector of Emerge, on abusive intervention and prevention, he wrote, “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 narcissists are “hiding among us,” Adams says, “and they’re clustered at the top.”

He and other researchers I spoke with often talk about our collective vision of criminals, especially murderers; how we tend to picture rageaholics when the reality is that they are impossible to divine from the general population. 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.” Even in court, a detective named Robert Wile told me some years ago how he has come to understand that “the majority of [victims] who we’re going to bring into court are going to be people who have a lot of mental health issues, and we have to portray them as good people so we can put away the knucklehead who beat them up. And who gets to say not a word? Him. He just sits there.”

Many researchers, including Websdale and Adams, also talk about the incendiary possibilities of extreme shame. In a now-famous TED talk called “Listening to Shame,” Brené Brown, who calls herself a “vulnerability researcher,” talked about the correlation of shame with violence, depression, and aggression, among others. She said shame is “organized by gender.” For women, it’s about a competing set of expectations around family, work, relationships; for men it’s simply, “do not be perceived as … weak.” Calling shame “an epidemic in our culture,” Brown cites the research of James Mahalik at Boston College, who studied what our ideas were of gender norms across American society. For women those norms involved “nice, thin, modest, and use all available resources for appearance.” For men, the norms included “show emotional control, work is first, pursue status, and violence.” I called Mahalik for further context and he said it isn’t so much about individual men endorsing violence as it is about a general cultural response in the United States. He cited foreign policy and civil unrest and how our collective first response veers toward violence: police in riot gear in Ferguson, for example, or military action in the Middle East. Even in Hollywood’s portrayal of men, violence is “a prominent part of moviegoing,” he said. “Somehow we’ve equated violence with problem-solving.”

In today’s interpretation of Christianity, God literally sacrifices his own son, the ultimate filicide, so that the world can be saved. The Romans may have committed the act of putting Jesus on the cross, but it was all part of God’s master plan. Other examples abound in the Bible. Abraham brought his son, Isaac, to the altar, prepared to sacrifice him, but God stopped him at the eleventh hour, the knife at Isaac’s throat, his arms and legs bound up. God said Abraham had passed the test, had proven his love. O’Hanlon refers to Isaiah 53:8–9: He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. In a religion in which family killing is not only rationalized, but also celebrated as the ultimate form of love, devotion, and faith, perhaps the connection is not a stretch today. 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, sa...

Kit Gruelle told me this was the most significant misunderstanding about guns and domestic violence. “[Guns] increase women’s danger exponentially,” she told me. “Until a gun comes into the relationship, she still feels like she has some capacity to deal with what’s going on, whether it’s to run, to lock the bedroom door, or whatever.”21 The pro-gun argument that asks women to arm themselves is asking them to behave as their abusers behave, Gruelle notes. Such views have conscripted the narrative, putting the blame on victims for not doing all they could to protect themselves. “It’s not a character flaw if [women] don’t have a natural tendency to turn and fire on the father of [their] children,” she said.

It’s that thing, right, where men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn’t extend to their partners. This view has always sat uncomfortably with me; must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else’s mean something? Can’t we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy?

Jimmy told me once about how he knows women want to “fix him.” That he recognizes a certain fetish women have with a survivor story, a formerly violent man who’s been reborn as a man who doesn’t fear his own vulnerabilities and feelings. Nothing sexier than a man in touch with his emotions, right? When I look at his Facebook page, I can see that he’s not lying. With every post, women are dripping with platitudes, inspired by his story of survival. He said one woman once flew across the country to meet him. And it makes me a little uncomfortable. It might even piss me off a little. Men like Jimmy are not remarkable. They’re not noteworthy. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing—which is not beating up women. If there’s any triumph at all, it is in their very averageness. David Adams is skeptical, too, of this potential fetishization our culture has with a good survival story. It’s the potential narcissism, again, the charisma they all naturally seem to have in the first place. “They can become charismatic loose cannons,” he told me once, “who never really took responsibility for their own abuse.”

All of these critical gaps in the system often make the biggest difference between who lives and who dies—including the lack of communication between criminal and civil courts—and it still persists not only in this particular county in Massachusetts, but also in states and counties across the nation. The very fact that intimate partner violence is so often addressed in civil court, rather than criminal court, gives insight into how we as a society still view it. The country’s first “family court,” as it was called, began in Buffalo, New York. At the time, it seemed a great judicial innovation to have a place where families could work out issues related to divorce and child custody that didn’t require a visit to criminal court. In the ensuing decades, however, what this has meant is that domestic violence has been lumped in with other family matters, like custody and divorce, rather than being the criminal matter that it is. Imagine a man, a stranger, strangling another man with a phone cord, pushing another man down the stairs, punching another man so hard he breaks an orbital eye socket. Such assaults happen daily with domestic violence, but I have yet to speak with a prosecutor who sees these crimes treated as seriously as when they happen in the context of domestic violence. “It shocked me, the things someone would do to a family member that they wouldn’t do on the street, or in a bar fight,” a former prosecutor from Ohio named Anne Tamashasky told me.

I agreed to not identify anyone from Dunne’s caseload, and not to quote any healthcare team members who are barred by HIPAA confidentiality. If a detail was part of a public record, say a police report, then I’d use that, but otherwise, the primary way I was able to include specific details from any one case was if the detail is present in multiple cases; for example, there is a case where an abuser threatened to break CDs and slit his wife’s throat with them. Seems incredibly specific, identifiable to a certain couple, but as it turns out, Dunne sees this particular threat frequently (though presumably less often with the advent of streaming … which I realize sounds a little ridiculous, but is also probably true. Spotify saves lives.).

Grace mentions again the flowers he bought the next day. That’s when she got really scared. Because he’d never bought her flowers before. He didn’t apologize. But he bought her those flowers. It reminds me of a poster in Martina’s office: He beat her 150 times. She only got flowers once. The pink and white flowers are atop a casket.

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. Whatever we envision when we envision a victim, there is one universal truth to each and every one of those images: none of us ever picture ourselves. What we might conjure, if anything at all, is a punch. Someone we’re dating, one punch, and we’d be gone. But that’s not how it happens. It evolves over time. A partner who might not like your makeup. Or a suggestive outfit. Maybe he’ll say it’s for your own protection. Then a few months later, maybe he yells a little louder than you’ve heard before. Maybe he throws something, a fork, a chair, a plate. (It’s worth noting that should that plate bounce off the wall and break into shards, and should a shard cut you in the face, the Supreme Court considers it “intentional” abuse.5) Then, in between weeks and months of some good times, and some not-so-good times, you might hear how he knows men look at you, he sees other men looking at you. You might even feel complimented by this. But then maybe he follows it up with a request that you stay home with him a little more. Maybe this, too, is for your “protection.” And that one friend you have, the loud one? He knows she doesn’t like him. And before you even realize it’s happening that friend’s falling away from your life. Then, a couple of years in, he loses his job, comes home in a mood, pushes you into a wall. And you know that’s not him...

For battered men, who comprise anywhere from 15% to 40% of the victims in America (depending upon which study you read6), the stigma is even greater. Men rarely seek out shelter. They rarely call law enforcement. The culture that tells women to keep the family intact, to find love and be loved at all costs, is the same culture that emasculates and shames men in abusive situations, that tells men if they are victims, it is because they are weak and not real men. It is the same culture that tells them violence is acceptable as a response to any external threat or internal pain, but tears are not. It is a culture that limits both victim and perpetrator, the abused and the abuser.

“So for the next couple years we call [the police] to do checks,” Martina says. “They question her in front of him. She doesn’t say anything.” This is the long-term fallout from a lifetime of violence directed toward you: the rewiring of a brain geared solely and entirely toward survival. A brain that reacts to being under constant attack will continue to send danger signals; increased levels of cortisol, adrenaline and other stress hormones, contributing to a vast constellation of physical and mental health issues. 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. In his book The Body Keeps the Score, the author Bessel van der Kolk writes, “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

It’s a common argument, that if someone wants to kill, he’ll find a way. But eleven of those men said no, they wouldn’t have killed if they hadn’t had access to a gun.7 In a study released in October 2018, the researcher April Zeoli looked at states where anyone served with a restraining order is automatically required to relinquish guns, and found there was a 12% drop in intimate partner homicides, yet only fifteen states required that guns in such instances be turned in.8 Similarly, Zeoli found that in California, where broader restrictions for anyone—including both life partners and dating partners (California calls it closing the “boyfriend loophole”)—convicted of a violent misdemeanor had to relinquish guns, there was an astonishing 23% drop in domestic violence homicides.9 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.10 This is not an issue of partisanship, liberal versus conservative, though I understand many people view it that way; to me it is a moral imperative.

Rosenthal had just finished a listening tour called Youth Leads in high schools around the United States when she met me for lunch one day to talk about the broad view of all this. The aim of the listening tour, she said, was to try to determine best practices for addressing teen dating violence. A 2017 report from the Centers for Disease Control found that more than eight million girls experienced rape or intimate partner violence before the age of eighteen; for boys, the number was about half that.19 Experts across the field note that the time to address dating violence starts as young as sixth and seventh grade. Rosenthal told me that in her sessions with high schoolers, she found herself heartened by the way young people, especially young men, talked about issues of domestic and sexual violence. “These young guys have a very different relationship to each other and to women,” she said, comparing them to elder generations. “They have a lot of questions themselves about it … They’re not going to let their peers engage [in sexual violence] without some sort of confrontation.”

Rosenthal said something surprising to me in that moment, something I’d not really quite thought about until she said it. “In some ways, men have been the biggest beneficiaries of the women’s movement,” she said. “Look at all the men who have a very different relationship [today] with their children. They go to school events; they talk to their kids. In my neighborhood, the guys are always walking their kids to daycare, to school. Look at how involved young fathers are. It’s not perfect, and women still bear the burden in many ways, but they have experienced a change.” How a matter like family violence with such profound public consequences was ever considered a private issue is confounding in hindsight. 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. I think of the relatively minuscule funding we give to VAWA relative to other governmental expenditures, and remem...