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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

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.