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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

it. Back in 2006, Hacskaylo told me, the city had just two shelters, which between them offered forty-eight beds for women and kids only (no men). The police department, meanwhile, got more than thirty-one thousand domestic violence calls a year. (Domestic violence didn’t become a crime in Washington, D.C., until 1991.4) Between D.C.’s two primary agencies—House of Ruth and My Sister’s Place—seventeen hundred victims annually were getting some kind of assistance. The gap between needs and services was gigantic and overwhelming. At the time Hacskaylo had left her role as deputy director of My Sister’s Place and taken a job with the Office of Violence Against Women (OVW). After a coalition of domestic violence groups convinced the D.C. city council of the District’s overwhelming need for shelter, the council allocated a million dollars to anyone willing to create additional safe housing. If funding is the most significant challenge any nonprofit organization has, this seemed like a no-brainer; here was basically a bank account just waiting to be used by someone to address an obvious and huge social need. The recipe was all right there: need plus funding. But no one came forward to apply for the funds. It was an unusual situation, to have a vast pool of funding, and no applicants. Hacskaylo, who knew her way around the D.C. domestic violence community, was tasked with finding out why. She set up a series of focus groups and for four months tried to figure out what the problem...