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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

Blame, minimize, rationalize, and apology and promise:

The coercion, the manipulation, the emotional and verbal abuse, the threats, the dehumanizing. His attempts to make her believe that he is stronger than the system, that he knows more than the system. The tapes went on for more than an hour in court that day, far more than what I’ve included here, and in that time I noticed this, too: he failed to use her proper name even once.

Batterer intervention groups like Emerge and ManAlive have proliferated over the past two decades; there are now more...

There is a persistent attitude, particularly among law enforcement, that they are a waste of time and money, which Adams finds perpetually frustrating. Certifications vary from state to state. The court orders vary. The curriculum varies. The quality of the group leader varies. The length of time in the program varies. And in terms of social impact, it’s a new field, still finding its way. Judges, too, are often not trained in the differences between, say, batterer intervention and anger management, so you might have a judge order an offender to anger management, even in a jurisdiction where batterer intervention groups proliferate. The fact that only 55% of the men who go through Emerge actually complete the program is a sign of its rigor and efficacy, Adams says.2 “I’m always distrustful of programs that complete higher numbers. It’s like bad schools. They graduate everybody.”

If it takes the average victim seven or eight times to leave an abuser, why do we expect offenders to get it right the first time?

cautions against putting too much stock in the idea of a predictive risk assessment: “The tough question facing batterer programs, and the criminal justice field in general, is how to identify the especially dangerous men … The shift, therefore, has been from prediction to ongoing risk management that entails repeated assessments, monitoring compliance, and revising interventions along the way.”

Anger management is often conflated with batterer intervention as if they are equivalent—indeed courts across the country today still often sentence abusers to anger management courses,

A 2008 assessment of 190 batterer programs, in fact, showed that most participants did not have substantial levels of anger, and that only a small percentage were in the unusually high range.

perpetrators. I still carry a picture in my mind of an abuser who is a rageaholic, a monster, a person visibly and uncontrollably angry. Someone easily identifiable as a “bad guy.” I may even have operated under the idea that my own gut instincts would alert me to such a man. And what strikes me immediately—in fact, deeply unsettles me in a way—is how incredibly normal they all seem. Like a bunch of guys I’d go have a beer with. They are charming. They are funny, gregarious, shy, high-strung. Good-looking or not, well-dressed or not. They are Everyman. One of the hallmarks of domestic violence, Adams told me, is this false idea that abusers are somehow angry generally; rather, their anger is targeted—at a partner or at the partner’s immediate family. As a result, friends and acquaintances of abusers are often surprised to hear that they committed an assault. “The most surprising thing is that [abusers] seem like such normal guys,” says Adams.

“We look for the rageaholic,” Adams says. But only about a quarter of batterers fit that definition.

What he sees, instead, is an inflexible personality. “A rigid black-or-white thinker is what I most imagine,” Adams says.

Unlike RSVP and many (perhaps even most) other batterer intervention programs, Emerge always has one woman who is a co-facilitator. The reasons for this are twofold: first, a male and female team operating as equals can model for group members what that looks like. But also, Adams found that in the early days of Emerge, men participants would rarely exhibit the kinds of behaviors that reflected their general attitudes toward women, things like interrupting women, challenging their ideas or ignoring them altogether, and in group they call attention to such attitudes immediately.

When I speak to Adams later about it, he isn’t at all surprised that the men excused and contextualized the bad behavior of their fathers, while demonizing their mothers. “That’s part of what happens,” Adams tells me afterward. “They’ve internalized a selfish, narcissistic father … [But] you can’t lecture people. You give them information, and hopefully over time it begins to make a difference.”

nearly all the research from the 1960s and ’70s described violence in the home as the product of a manipulative woman who incited her husband. That victims provoke their own abuse is an attitude that persists today.

Power and Control Wheel.7 The Wheel highlights the eight ways a batterer maintains power and control: fear, emotional abuse, isolation, denial and blame, using children, bullying, financial control, and brute force and verbal threats. Advocates point out that abusers don’t walk around with a conscious notion that they’re seeking power and control. Instead, they say things like, “I just want her to be sweet [obedient and subservient] and have dinner on the table at six.” Or, “I just want her to have the house cleaned, and the kids in bed.” Or, “I just pushed her a little. She’s overreacting.” Or, “I wouldn’t have broken that plate if she hadn’t screamed.” All of these are variations on the same thing.

Like Sinclair, Adams believes that men make choices to be violent. In a 2002 paper he cowrote with Susan Cayouette, the codirector of Emerge, on abusive intervention and prevention, he wrote, “Many batterers conduct some, if not most, of their nonfamilial relationships in a respectful manner, which indicates that they already know how to practice respectful treatment of others when they decide to.”

The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers. Batterers don’t lose sleep like victims do. They don’t lose their jobs; they don’t lose their kids.” In fact batterers often see themselves as saviors of a sort. “They feel they’re rescuing a woman in distress. It’s another aspect of narcissism … And there’s a sense of wanting to be eternally appreciated for that.” In contrast, he said, “a lot of victims come across as messed up. Because that’s exactly the point for him: ‘I’m going to make it so no one wants you.’ ”

Victims’ lives are messy. Often they are substance abusers, or they live in extreme poverty. Many have suffered traumatic, abusive childhoods. Such cases are the most difficult to prosecute, not least because the victims can be unreliable witnesses. “This is why batterers are so often able to fool the system,” one domestic violence advocate told me. “They’re so charming, and the victim comes off as very negative.” Even in court, a detective named Robert Wile told me some years ago how he has come to understand that “the majority of [victims] who we’re going to bring into court are going to be people who have a lot of mental health issues, and we have to portray them as good people so we can put away the knucklehead who beat them up. And who gets to say not a word? Him. He just sits there.”

One of the questions that is so difficult to really explain is how abuse slowly erodes a person, how often survivors talk about emotional abuse being so much worse than physical abuse.

Indeed, Gondolf’s book talks about domestic violence as a process, rather than a single incident, and yet our entire criminal justice system is set up to address incidents, not processes.

By then, she says, she was so beaten down as a person she felt as if there was nothing left, a husk of skin and bone with no spirit, no agency of her own, only a kind of slow, painful slog toward unconsciousness. And yet, at the same time, she felt if she could only help him see himself through her eyes, he’d change, become the person she’d always felt him capable of being. It’s a common narrative. Women are given the message over and over that we are the holders of the emotional life and health of the family, that the responsibility for a man to change lies, in fact, with us. “The only way that I can really describe what happened to me is like part of me, like, died, and then part of me got ignited in terms of, like, my love will heal us,” she said. “But I had to stop loving myself and only love him.” His narcissism, in other words, didn’t even allow the room for her to care for herself.

Wasn’t she the only person he really had? Wasn’t that the promise she’d made him? Love, honor, sickness, health, poverty, wealth. It was her duty to stay, to help him see clear to fixing his own pain. She couldn’t imagine what he’d been through. Where was her empathy? Her patience? Someday, somehow, she thought he’d get better and the abuse would end and it would all be okay.

Legally defined, familicide, or family annihilation, includes the killing of an intimate partner and at least one child. (Some researchers define it as killing the whole family.)

The first known annihilation in the United States can be traced back to the mid-eighteenth century. Over the course of the next two centuries, such cases averaged three per decade. Then, in the 1990s, there were thirty-six cases. And between 2000 and 2007, sixty cases. And from 2008 through 2013, in research done by the Family Violence Institute, there were 163 cases of familicide that claimed a total of 435 victims. This did not include cases where children killed parents (patricide) or where a parent only killed children (filicide). From the time of the 2008 economic crash, we began averaging, says Neil Websdale, director of the Family Violence Institute and author of the book Familicidal Hearts, around three a month. In other words, while nearly all other forms of homicide steadily declined over the past several decades in the United States, familicide appears to be on the rise.

If batterer intervention programs are most often populated by working-class white men and minorities, and jails are overwhelmingly poor white and people of color, it is in familicide where white middle- and upper-middle class men dominate. The disparity between minorities and whites of course is most visible in prisons across the country, where minorities are disproportionately incarcerated for things that Caucasian men get away with all the time because they have the money or the connections or the education.

But in familicide, the reverse is true: the overwhelming majority of men who kill their entire families are white, middle or middle-upper class, often educated, often well-off, or well-off until just before the murders.

National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative (NDVFRI),

As a journalist, the ethics and practices are clear: one cannot go “off the record” once the record, as it were, is complete.

Like many children who grow up in homes with domestic violence—verbal or physical—O’Hanlon did not describe his father as violent. O’Hanlon fit the mold of the men I’d seen in David Adams’s group the night they discussed their fathers. He downplayed the violence of his father and talked more often about his mother’s behavior. “My mother was no angel,” he told me. “If she had been less provocative, more respectful of his position as a husband …”

2010 book, Familicidal Hearts, in which he identifies two primary types of family killer: livid coercive, or those with long histories of domestic violence, and civil reputable, in which perpetrators are respectable members of society—like William Beadle—with no obvious histories of violence and who kill out of a warped sense of altruism.

Campbell rejects these categories to some extent, arguing that domestic violence is always a shadowy background in cases of familicide, even if there’s a lack of evidence.

possible.) Civil reputable is the category most affected by, for example, an economic recession. It is certainly the category to which Patrick O’Hanlon belongs, the kind of well-respected, upstanding citizen who seems to just “snap” one day.

“What we miss in the ‘he just snaps’ theory is the accumulation of emotional repression,”

Civil reputable killers tend to be middle or middle-upper class. Very often they are Caucasian. (Men make up 95% of all familicide perpetrators in the United States; Websdale’s research showed 154 men versus 7 women perpetrators between 2008 and 2013.) Their families tend to be traditionally gendered, which means the man is the primary support, while the woman takes care of the family and home. (This is not to say women don’t work, but rather they carry the emotional needs of the home.) Rocky Mosure is such an example. They’re often religious compared to the general population, with a fundamentalist outlook, and they can be rigidly constrained in their emotional range, all of which fit...

The altruism materializes with the idea that the family is being saved from a worse fa...

David Adams rejects, to some extent, these categories of Websdale’s in part because he believes they frame the offender as “victim.” To Adams, the categories are less germane than his theory of narcissism. “If you have this outsized sense of yourself, and you suffer narcissistic injury, you’ll lash out,” Adams says. He’s speaking here, not simply of someone with a colossal sense of self-confidence, but with a recognized personality disorder. Such narcissists, Adams says, “live and die by their image.” When that image is compromised, say they’re discovered lying or a secret they’ve borne is discovered, they lash out and “impose” their solution on their partners and children. The solution, in extreme cases, is homicide.

James Gilligan, author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic and the evaluator on RSVP at its inception, sees evidence of both homicide and suicide rates rising under economic duress in his research. “There’s a clear line,” he said. “If a man loses his job, he can feel castrated and emasculated and prone to suicide or homicide or both … It’s an apocalyptic mentality.”

points to economic stressors as well, but warns that under our current social and political conditions things are likely to only get worse. “You can still play by the rules and lose your pension, lose your job, lose your house, and have 50K in college loans still to pay, and when you declare bankruptcy you still have to pay those loans,” he said. “It really is the perfect storm of screwing one section of the population.” The dissolution of the American middle class, he told me, is “a canary in a coal mine.”

Neil Websdale points to many possibilities for the increase in familicides. He says masculinity exacts a heavy burden on men who cannot accept feminism. Domestic violence theory points to an abuser’s need for power and control and asks why the victim doesn’t just leave. But Websdale argues that abusers are just as vulnerable in a sense by their own inability to live without that victim. “My question isn’t ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ ” he says, “It’s ‘Why does he stay?’ Many of these men are terribly dependent on their female partners. They see them as a conduit to the world of feeling that they don’t inhabit, generally. Often these men have an inchoate sense of shame about their masculinity that they don’t understand.” Websdale calls it the great paradox of domestic violence, how an abuser can be both controlling over his or her partner, while simultaneously unable to control that dependency.

Gilligan agrees with Websdale’s assessment of changing gender roles. “Any time any major social change occurs—as happened with the civil rights movement when legal segregation ended—that produced a huge backlash, and I would say the changing sexual mores and gender roles is also producing a huge backlash. [We hear] some of the most bigoted, sexist, homophobic attitudes, even while the public in general is becoming more tolerant.” Gilligan believes violence should be approached as a public health problem, which in its most radical form means that he believes it is preventable. “We talk as if once people are grown up they should be able to deal with whatever happens,” he said, “but the fact is that human beings are so much more vulnerable and fragile than we recognize. Then we’re surprised when we see how vulnerable and fragile they are that they break.”

Certainly, we are living in an age in which progress and the attendant backlash that Gilligan cites are extreme. Plenty of men are spewing bigoted, racist, misogynistic rhetoric in manifestos before they kill—Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, Alek Minassian. At times our highest leaders in office today seem to normalize these killers’ brand of sexist and racist vitriol, their sense of entitlement. It’s hardly a secret that presidents from Thomas Jefferson to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have all been accused of rape (in Jefferson’s case, of course, the accusations have long been confirmed). The difference to me compared to all of these other moments—from Jefferson’s pre-suffrage systemic rape to John Kennedy and Bill Clinton’s serial philandering and even to Donald Trump’s bleating misogyny—is not only that today’s heated rhetoric unleashes, in my view, extreme violence, mostly in the form of mass shootings—but also that such violence is happening at the same time the majority of women are very publicly and very vociferously demanding better. It is no longer assumed that we will endure harassment at work, or assaults on campus, or even endless womanizing from our partners. Women are ...

Many researchers, including Websdale and Adams, also talk about the incendiary possibilities of extreme shame. In a now-famous TED talk called “Listening to Shame,” Brené Brown, who calls herself a “vulnerability researcher,” talked about the correlation of shame with violence, depression, and aggression, among others. She said shame is “organized by gender.” For women, it’s about a competing set of expectations around family, work, relationships; for men it’s simply, “do not be perceived as … weak.” Calling shame “an epidemic in our culture,” Brown cites the research of James Mahalik at Boston College, who studied what our ideas were of gender norms across American society. For women those no...

it isn’t so much about individual men endorsing violence as it is about a general cultural response in the United States. He cited foreign policy and civil unrest and how our collective first response veers toward violence: police in riot gear in Ferguson, for example, or military action in the Middle East. Even in Hollywood’s portrayal of men, violence is “a prominent part of moviegoing,” he said. “Somehow we’ve equated violence with problem-solving.”

If you ask O’Hanlon why he did it, he’ll say he does not know. If you ask him what advice he’d offer in terms of prevention, his answers vary. And I asked him every time I ever spoke to him. Here is a compilation of what he said over the course of our interviews: “Don’t take on too much. Don’t be prideful. Don’t be greedy for promotion, for financial gain. Don’t work so hard. Lower your expectations. Don’t be too ambitious. September 11th. We need to address how we treat mental illness in this country. We need to look at the medication they’re taking. Survivor’s guilt. I should have read the Book of Job. You don’t know how far I drive on my commute, what my life is like. Insomnia. When you have cancer, you can ask your friend for help. Not so with depression.” The thing is, he’s not really wrong about any of this.

On evaluation sheets from this time when asked if he was having suicidal thoughts, O’Hanlon always checked the “no” box, but he says that wasn’t true. He was having suicidal thoughts. But he didn’t want to mark that box, because he would have lost his security clearance and possibly his job. He couldn’t think how to support the family without his work. He knew he was sick, very sick, but he also knew in every practical sense that he couldn’t admit to it.

In today’s interpretation of Christianity, God literally sacrifices his own son, the ultimate filicide, so that the world can be saved. The Romans may have committed the act of putting Jesus on the cross, but it was all part of God’s master plan. Other examples abound in the Bible. Abraham brought his son, Isaac, to the altar, prepared to sacrifice him, but God stopped him at the eleventh hour, the knife at Isaac’s throat, his arms and legs bound up. God said Abraham had passed the test, had proven his love. O’Hanlon refers to Isaiah 53:8–9: He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. In a religion in which family killing is not only rationalized, but also celebrated as the ultimate form of love, devotion, and faith, perhaps the connection is not a stretch today. O’Hanlon himself says it took three lives to save his: Jesus Christ, Dawn O’Hanlon, and April O’Hanlon.

He was, by his own admission, a “lukewarm” Christian until the murders. “I ask God, ‘Why? Why? Couldn’t there have been any other way?’ ” In his interpretation, the murders seemed to be a way for God to get O’Hanlon’s attention, to straighten up, to restore his faith in the Lord, to serve. He said God is working miracles through him, saving other prisoners. At several points he suggests I title this chapter “Triumph Over Tragedy.” Where is the triumph? I ask him. Because the tragedy part is clear. He says it hasn’t come yet, but it will. He tells me to research the pastor Rick Warren and his son’s suicide, or Creigh Deeds, the former congressman whose son stabbed him before killing himself. O’Hanlon sees mental illness and turning a negative into a positive as the link between himself and these others. But he also sees them all, himself included, as victims.

Researchers use the term “multi-determined” to explain a situation in which there are potentially many causes for an event or action. Depression, insomnia, shame, loss of status.

a fatality review team member also told me that she had yet to come across an investigation where there were not “unmet mental health needs.”) How much of this refusal to attribute O’Hanlon’s actions to mental health may or may not stem from mental health biases in this country? We tend to have easy empathy for people suffering mental health issues when they are universally beloved and when their actions affect only themselves (a Robin Williams, say), but our empathy falters, perhaps rightly so, when those actions affect the lives of others, such as what happened with O’Hanlon.

James Gilligan says we ought to treat people like O’Hanlon as research subjects. “We must be able to look horror in the face if we are ever to understand the causes of the human propensity toward violence well enough to prevent its most destructive manifestations,” he wrote in Violence. “Suicide is no solution to the problem of homicide; both forms of violence are equally lethal.”