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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

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