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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

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...