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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

men who are violent. It is men who perpetrate the majority of the world’s violence, whether that violence is domestic abuse or war.

Even those relatively few women who are violent, he says, are most often violent in response to men’s violence. Indeed, this is the single most effective argument I know for why it doesn’t make sense to arm women with guns to protect them against men with guns: because arming a woman with a gun is asking her to behave like a man, to embody the somatic and psychological and cultural experience of a man while simultaneously quelling all that women have been taught. It says to women, if you want to protect yourself from violent men, you need to become violent yourself. To Sinclair, this is exactly the wrong way to the solution. It’s not women who need to learn violence; it’s men who need to learn nonviolence.

If men are taught not to cry, women are taught crying is acceptable. If men are taught anger is their sole allowable emotion, women are taught never to be angry. Men who yell are being men; women who yell are shrill or they’re drama queens or they’re hysterical. (Many before me have pointed out that there is no greater “drama” than a mass shoot...

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

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...

The inspiration for his curriculum was gender theory and neuro-linguistic training (NLP).4 In the ManAlive curriculum, it is simply a way of asking men to notice their bodies, their voices, and the responses of those around them during a violent incident in a way that the vast majority of them never have.

Men she met in her daily work life did some violent act to land them in prison, then did their time in the culture of violence that is incarceration in America today, and then brought that heightened level of violence right back into their families and communities. Schwartz began to see the children of the men she knew from her early days in corrections. And then the grandchildren. There had to be a better way, she thought. Violence isn’t supposed to be genetic. She’d seen the levels of incarceration rise year after year, but she knew crime in the United States wasn’t falling accordingly. Locking up men punitively wasn’t doing anything to change the reasons they got locked up in the first place.

After years with these men, she began to think that violence was something that could be reduced if prison became a place not to toss away and forget those who broke the law, but a place to reform them.

The current director of programs at San Bruno talked to me informally one evening, and when I asked her why RSVP hadn’t migrated to other prisons, she told me that unlike a lot of other prison populations, violent men just don’t have their own “champion.”6 A parallel might be incarcerated veterans who have a lot of outside support, and a consensus that we as a country need to be doing more to address their needs, particularly in light of post-traumatic stress. But the most prominent voices around domestic violence are the survivors who, naturally, prioritize their own needs over abusers’.

“Why isn’t [RSVP] the rule rather than the exception?” she asks. “What pisses me off so much is the lack of imagination we tend to have for people who haven’t had the same experience we have. As if lives are synonymous.”

It frustrates Schwartz that there are so few resources available to those coming out of the RSVP program and back into civil society. Things like job training, meditation, parenting classes, alcoholics and narcotics anonymous, housing support, twelve-step programs, art and humanities therapies, and educational opportunities. These guys go through RSVP, she told me, and they learn all this stuff about gender, about themselves, about culture and society and violence and communication, and then they walk back into a world in which all of that theory is real again, and all of those challenges are real again, plus all of those threats and all of that pain, and they’re just more or less on their own.

The United States spends as much as twenty-five times more on researching cancer or heart disease than it does on violence prevention, despite the enormous costs of violence to our communities.7 A 2018 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine put the cost of intimate partner violence at nearly $3.6 trillion (the study examined forty-three million U.S. adults, so it doesn’t count costs associated with, for example, dating violence); this equates to $2 trillion in medical costs and $73 billion in criminal justice expenses, among other costs, like lost productivity or property damage. Intimate partner violence costs women $103K and men $23K over the course of a single lifetime.

Prison creates more violence in our communities, not less.

She told me an anecdote that had stayed with her for years, a story that was equal parts call to action and reason to hope. It was about a Holocaust survivor who, in the midst of being beaten by a guard, never stopped smiling. It infuriated the guard. The guard hit him harder and harder, until finally, he stopped and asked the prisoner why he was smiling. He said, “I am grateful, because I am not like you.”

Misdemeanors, in the world of domestic violence, are like warning shots. And all too often they go unheeded.

But it’s also this other thing, so obvious it rarely gets mentioned: people don’t want to be in violent situations. When I’m told, as I often am, that violence is simply human nature, I think of San Bruno and wonder, if that is true, then why, given the choice, do people deemed so violent they must be locked away from civil society, try to put themselves first and foremost in a section known for its lack of violence?

for many of these guys it’s not becoming nonviolent that blows their minds about themselves; it’s learning that they’ve been fed a line about what they’re supposed to act like and who they’re supposed to be, a line about what masculinity means and what being a man means. How as men they can acknowledge anger, rage, and authority. But not empathy, kindness, love, fear, pain, sadness, care, nurture or any of those other “traits” that are deemed feminine. And that they’ve been manipulated by forces larger than themselves, shaped by a world they had never thought about in this way, which is shocking to them. What a relief to learn they’ve been coerced into their violence, not born into it.

Dustheads are what they called people who were always on PCP.

It’s true of so many relationships where violence lurks—short courtships and very young people—and sometimes those become the patterns that stick for the rest of someone’s life.

Emotional Intelligence

how big the battle was—the violent versus the nonviolent him, past versus present, ignorant versus knowledgeable.

No woman had an identity; no woman had a name. “By calling her a ‘bitch’ all the time,” he said, suddenly, “what I was really doing was taking away her humanity.”

Many of us on the outside of such a world tend to see something like intimate partner violence in a silo, a problem all its own that needs addressing all its own. Social service interventions have tended to treat such problems singularly, too. But a home with intimate partner violence might also have child abuse, alcoholism, and employment or housing instability. Traumatic brain injury or other serious medical conditions might be present. Education may not be a priority or may not be available or may be compromised. Treating just one of these doesn’t mitigate the issues that arise from the others. Treatment programs, not to mention research, are understanding this more and more, that problems are multidimensional and thus treatment must be, too.

How do you stop a thirty-year-old from beating his wife? Talk to him when he’s twelve.

Another one laughs, says, “Check it out. Fatal peril club right here.” They understand fatal peril as the exact instant when a man’s sense of expectation is most threatened. What the world owes him, what his own sense of self demands. Something challenges him—maybe his partner says something, or does something, and he reacts. Maybe a guy in a bar insults him. Maybe some coworker tells him he fucked up. It’s a split second that changes everything. Eyes narrow, chests pump, fists clench, muscles tense, blood rushes. The body language is almost universal, running across race and class and culture, sometimes even species. A man, a lion, a bear. The body reacts the same way. Fatal peril. A moment that, Jimmy and Donte hope to eventually show these men, is a decision. Violence as a learned behavior. We don’t know it, but we have another word for fatal peril. “Snap.” On the news, the mourning neighbor, the crying coworker: he just snapped. But the snap is a smoke screen, a cliché, a fiction. The snap doesn’t exist.

Separation Cycle because the pedagogical point to him was that it’s meant to show how a person separates from what Sinclair calls his “authentic self” in a threatening moment, and it’s this separation that allows for violence to happen.

“Don’t use program words,” Jimmy says. Program words are an important context for understanding one’s actions, but in a Separation Cycle exercise, where a singular moment is deconstructed, they can also be euphemistic, a way of not taking ownership for one’s actions. It’s the difference between, say, I had a moment of fatal peril and I punched her in the eye. So the story comes first, and then the group together contextualizes the story within the pedagogical framework of the program, attaching certain elements from what they learned during the curriculum. This split second was a threat to your male role belief system, for example. And this split second was where you entered fatal peril. And this split second was where you separated from your authentic self.

“Stay on track,” says one of the guys. This nudging, the language, the gentle urging to keep with the story is part of the curriculum. It shows how language matters, how much we can lie to ourselves, take ourselves off track to avoid responsibility, how we use words to frame our guilt or innocence, how easy it is to manipulate and how so often that manipulation starts inside our own minds, how we can minimize our impact on someone else.

“Can I ask you a clarifying question?” asks Donte. They frame it this way, as a “clarifying” question so the participants know the question isn’t meant to antagonize.

Donte chimes in about the name-calling. “Listen, man, in order for me to put my hands on her, she’s not Ashley anymore. She’s a slut. You gotta rename her, see what I’m sayin’?”

That’s the beginning: notice your body.

Next comes language.

Some of this becomes obvious immediately. Substituting a slur for a partner’s name, for example. But language in general is more subtle than this. It works at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Painfully, word by word, second by second they go. Don’t say “pussy.” Don’t swear. Don’t say “my old lady.” Don’t say “ho,” “slut,” “woman.” Use proper names. Use the term “partner.” Maintain eye contact with the person you’re speaking to or with the group. Sit up straight. No slumping. When describing the incidents that landed them in the place they’re in at the moment, they have to use “I” statements, poss...

guy. “I’m going to speak on that for one fucking second,” Jimmy says, standing up. “I’ve been aware of shit my whole life. I’m aware of everything that I ever did in my life. Lying, cheating, stealing. I heard ‘Don’t sell drugs’ all my life. ‘Don’t do drugs, don’t put your hands on girls.’ I heard that all my life, but I did it anyway.” A guy with his elbows on his knees sits back in his chair. “This is important, guys. How do I get the willingness to stop my violence?”

coercion.

Power and control.

How one violent act by one person begets another. How violence matched with more violence never really solves any kind of problem.

I have an ex-husband who spent his entire career in the military and he used to say to me that the problem with having a gun, no matter who you are, is that its presence automatically puts you on a side. You are no longer neutral. Violence, it seems to me, does the same thing. It splinters individual people, yes, but it also splinters families, communities, cities, countries.

The names Jimmy has for himself—“bottom-feeder,” “low-life motherfucker”—are street lingo, a kind of gritty poetry, cred with the homies in the classes. But here, let’s call him what he really was in that moment and on that day. He was a domestic terrorist. That’s what terrorists do. They terrorize. All the men in the RSVP wing of San Bruno and beyond. They’re the terrorists in our midst, purveyors of a horror that many people today, including some of our country’s leaders, feel is simply a “private” matter.

How many women across time? I think. How many have pled this same sentence? Women around the world, in a thousand languages, across the centuries, the span of human existence. Please don’t kill me. See how polite we women are? We say “please” when we’re begging for our lives.

Drinking is “self-violence.” Calling names is “verbal violence.” Punching walls is “physical violence.”

some examples of the male role belief system: man does not get disrespected. Man does not get lied to. Man’s sexuality does not get questioned. Man is the authority. Man does not get dismissed. Woman should be submissive, obedient, supportive to man. When a man’s belief system is challenged, he goes into fatal peril and that is the moment where violence is a choice. ManAlive uses a kind of hokey phrase for this moment: when a man’s “inner hit man” comes out and his “authentic self” disappears. A hit man operates in silence, alone. A hit man blends into a crowd, destroys people in stealth, then disappears. A hit man takes no responsibility. A hit man has no moral center.

Donte chimes in. “When you said you had decided you all were going to be like friends, that to me sounds like denial.” Doug nods. He wanted her back. He was denying his own feelings. “When you say ‘I’ve never been so drunk in my life’ that kinda sounds to me like blame. And you said she came at you—that’s kinda like blame again.” Blaming the liquor. Blaming her. Blaming everything and everyone but himself. Doug acknowledges that Donte is right.

It was one thing, they said, to help victims after they’d been abused, give them support through the community, but what about the men who’d done the abuse? Why couldn’t that be stopped in the first place?

family. In his PhD dissertation, he’d looked at childcare and housework in houses where there was abuse versus those where abuse was not present. He assumed the research would support his theory that abusers did far less of the housework and childcare. But Adams was shocked to find that both men did about the same amount in each home, 21%.1 Where the two groups tended to differ was that the non-abusers knew they were getting a good deal and appreciated and acknowledged their wives’ double shifts, whereas the abusers would say things like, “I do a lot more than most men, but does she appreciate that?” Adams’s research showed that the abuser’s perspective was that they “weren’t being appreciated for what they did, rather than what their wives were doing.” Non-abusers, on the other hand, “would say things like ‘I’m lucky. My wife does a lot.’ And that acknowledgment meant a lot to the wives.” Abusers also tended to be more critical of their wives’ housekeeping.

What Adams realized, then, was that the clinical narcissism of these men kept them from being able to really see how their behavior impacted their victims. “Narcissism filters how they see everything,” Adams told me.

country’s first batterer intervention program: Emerge, a program for controlling and abusive behavior. Along with the Duluth program, Emerge is perhaps the nation’s most widely emulated.

Hamish and Adams share an essential origin story in that it was women who compelled them both to act, feminists who pointed out the need for male allies. They wanted men to join in their fight.

One day, early on, Adams told me the story of a woman who brought in a recording of her abusive husband to his group. On the tape, the husband said things like, “I wouldn’t have such anger and rage if I weren’t so crazy in love with you.” It was the first time he really heard and understood how manipulative abusers could be. How they romanticized both their abuse and their jealousy. The “I love you so much you make me this way” excuse. The “I wouldn’t do X if you didn’t do Y” rationalization. Blame and denial. Adams and other researchers point out the framework of these kinds of sentiments. They minimize the violence, rationalizing abusive behavior and blaming the victim. And it works. The trifecta is cyclical: minimizing, rationalizing, blaming. And then comes the remorse. The deep, tearful apology, the promises of better behavior, the adoration and claims of love. The script is strikingly similar no matter who’s saying it.

“Give me one more chance. One more. Jail’s not worth it. This shit ain’t worth it.” “You’re blowing it out of proportion. I was just fucking with you. I wasn’t trying to kill you … Why you keep fighting me instead of helping me get outta here? Why ain’t you apologizing, too, for staying out all night?” “I am in love with you, bitch, and I wish I wasn’t, ’cause you’re putting me through fucking misery. Why you doing this to me?” “I don’t owe you no explanation … You done nothing but put me in jail. You ain’t sent no letters or pictures. I don’t care if you come to court on me. I ain’t calling you no more.” “You don’t got to come to court. They talk about me, you tell them to shut the fuck up. They lying to you. Just tell them you’re going to file for a dismissal. Don’t let the prosecutor give you another chance to come to court.” “You ain’t gotta sign. Don’t answer the door … I trust you. I don’t think you’re doing anything. You’re not dumb enough.” “Let’s go down there and make it official. I believe in marriage. It’s a commitment for life, dude … Wait till I get out. I have people watching you.”