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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

He tells me about an antiviolence conference he attended some years ago where a presenter was asked about a family who encouraged their child to go back to his harasser and beat him up. The target of the fight was a boy. The child of the family in question was a boy. The parent offering the advice was the father. (It is the rare mother who would exhort her son to “go back out there and beat him up.”) So here was a father advocating that the solution to his young son’s problem of violence was more violence; his solution reinforced the male-role belief system, recycling it to yet another young man. Violence begetting violence begetting violence. But none of the participants at the conference even mentioned the gender dynamics of this scenario, Sinclair said. Instead, the focus was on the anecdote itself, the possible result of the fight, but not the gendered exhortation in the first place. Sinclair points to this as “part of the problem.” This refusal to see or acknowledge the gendered source of violence. The whos as much as the whys. Violence, he says, is not a “relationship problem. It is a problem of [a woman’s] partner’s commitment to violence.” “Violent men are aware that they are violent and even take pride in the manliness of it to their friends,” he said. “But, they will often deny that their violence is actually violent when questioned. Their denial allows violent men to minimize the impact of their violence on their victims, blame them for it, and ask their familie...