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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

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...