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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Before we finish, Hacskaylo takes me on a short tour of Cornerstone. It finally opened to clients in 2010, and today has forty-three studio and one-bedroom units; DASH covers rent for two years—long enough, Hacskaylo says, for survivors to get their finances together, pay off debts and hopefully save some money, to address whatever other needs they may have, like substance abuse, and to get their children situated in school. There is a small fitness room with a television in one of the units and two communal play areas for kids—one for younger kids and one for older, plus the playground outside. Twice a week they have volunteers trained on children’s trauma come in to play, and two former students of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design have a nonprofit to work on art therapy with the kids. The basement has walls lined with children’s art that’s been professionally mounted, and she says they do community art shows regularly where the kids are the docents. The units have hardwood floors with newly renovated efficiency kitchens and large windows overlooking the neighborhood, where sunlight streams in on this muggy summer day. What Cornerstone offers is immediate: it’s not a beautiful place to live, but it’s an autonomous place to live. Hacskaylo says it’s like a first apartment out of college. But it’s not a place that seems, at all, like a shelter, where everything is shared, everything is a negotiation with someone else. Families have privacy; most of the sixty or so...