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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Sinclair suggests that the fear of naming the real perpetrators is, itself, a sort of meta-violence; by refusing to call out men we are aiding and abetting this belief. But the fear of a backlash is justified. We live in a world in which we have leaders who get away, literally, with bragging about this belief system, where sexual assaults on college campuses are at a crisis point, and where casual violence is an accepted and celebrated form of entertainment, where former attorney general Jeff Sessions deemed intimate partner terrorism not enough of a threat to qualify an immigrant for asylum, and where men with histories of abuse like Rob Porter are given illustrious jobs with the commander in chief of our country, despite those violent histories. Indeed, the commander in chief himself has a history of known violence, at least to his first wife, Ivana, as described in her divorce deposition. David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, in a 2018 op-ed for the Atlantic, wrote that “Violence at home indicates a dangerous temperament for a high official, including vulnerability to blackmail … This president sent a message to the people around him about what is permitted, or at any rate, what is forgivable.”2