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

by Rachel Louise Snyder

One right phrase and Matt will connect with him. In law enforcement parlance, they refer to these as hooks and barbs. Hooks pull Ronnie in, calm him down; barbs set him off.

They have only seconds between each call to discuss strategy. Unlike other crisis situations, where an offender takes strangers as hostages and time can often help deescalate a situation, such time is not on their side in a domestic violence situation. The longer it goes on, the more likely it could escalate and end in violence. They have to be approachable yet firm, confident yet empathetic. They have only their words. It’s a complete departure from how officers normally operate, where there is a clear delineation of powerful and powerless. Using the tools of what Hamish Sinclair would call “to intimate,” they have to compel an offender to relinquish control. They cannot bark orders. They cannot make demands. They cannot throw a noncompliant offender to the ground and handcuff him. All they have, in this moment, are words. And some officers, it’s fair to say, are better with words than others.

masks. Though the numbers are not tracked consistently, around 80% of all hostage situations in this country are a result of domestic violence,

The FBI has only recently begun to track hostage situations, but only when jurisdictions voluntarily submit their numbers. Currently, there are more than seven thousand in their database. And while there are crisis negotiation trainings all over the country for the FBI, for law enforcement, for any number of similar agencies, this one in San Diego is the only one that puts intimate partner terrorism at the center of the training.

in a traditional hostage situation involving strangers, hostages are a bargaining chip. “A bank robber will use his hostages to gain escape.” But with domestic violence, it’s the exact opposite. The hostage taker wants to stay exactly where he is. His end goal is not to escape; it isn’t even necessarily to stay alive. It is to maintain control.

“The abuser wants her to recant, to apologize,” Gregson says. “Or pay a penalty for not going along with him.” That crucial difference factors into every aspect of a negotiation. The relationship between abuser and victim, because it is emotionally charged, intensifies the dangerousness. Violence may be ongoing throughout the negotiation. And coercion. Gregson reminds the participants that they’re dealing with manipulative people, that they must guard against displays of friendship or trust. He reminds them that battered spouses or children will frequently display Stockholm syndrome, identifying or aligning with one’s attacker, even in the aftermath of a hostage situation. (It is sometimes called trauma bonding.)

Law enforcement, it’s fair to say, has a troubled relationship to domestic violence. Police are often, though not always, the first responders to a violent situation in the home. And research has shown that even if there is no arrest, a police response can be a significant deterrent for re-abuse, as well as increase the likelihood that a victim will access local domestic violence services, like protective orders.1 But police can also be the perpetrators themselves—rates of domestic violence among police officers are two to four times higher than the general population.

In a local New Jersey article covering the incident, the police chief said the incident followed a “domestic situation.”2 This, too, is part of the problem. The language we use to describe what is, by any measure, a crime. Domestic disputes, domestic violence, private conflicts, volatile relationships, mistreatment, domestic abuse. All of these are passive constructions, eradicating responsibility not only on behalf of the abuser, but on behalf of law enforcement as well. That domestic violence is a crime shouldn’t be obscured, not least of all by those charged with protecting the public from violence. In my view, although I use the term “domestic violence” in this book because it is the most commonly used reference for what I am investigating, a far more accurate term, and one that captures the particular psychological, emotional and physical dynamics, is “intimate partner terrorism.”

Police departments across the country fail to discipline officers for the same crimes that civilians are arrested for every day.

Victims are reluctant to report domestic violence, fearing retaliation, and police officers not only have access to guns, but they also know the law, and they have relationships with prosecutors, judges, administrators. A police officer’s partner knows, surely, that any call that comes through 911 will show up on the zone car computers of law enforcement across a jurisdiction, showing the address where the call originated, the name of the perpetrator, the incident being reported, and other information that can instantly alert an officer’s friends or colleagues. And even when it comes to specialized training of law enforcement, at least a quarter of departments around the country have no written procedures on how to deal with domestic violence calls.

But the code of silence that often keeps fellow officers from outing colleagues they know or suspect to be violent isn’t simply tribalism: an “us against them,” cop-versus-civilian philosophy (though most police officers I’ve met feel this to some degree). Domestic violence charges brought against law officers can carry an outsized weight for the perpetrator; they often equate to an officer losing his or her job, since convicted abusers are not allowed to possess firearms. At the same time, the stresses of the job result in higher rates of familial violence, as well as alcoholism, divorce, and suicide. The lessons of the male role belief system that I’d learned sitting in classes by Jimmy Espinoza operate every bit as strongly in any given police department as they do in the San Bruno jail.

“When the domestic violence stuff came into effect, I could actually see how it made everything more clear,” he says. “It channeled things as to what was going on.” Domestic violence trainings and awareness in the early 2000s began to give police officers a context for why and how abusers were violent, the particular ways that abusers manipulate, how police sometimes re-traumatized the victims, why victims sometimes appeared to want to stay in these abusive relationships.

“You can’t negotiate with a gun.” Diplomacy, he believed, offered more chances for everyone to come out alive, not just the perpetrator.

The idea that a gun can “save” anyone in any situation has always seemed suspect to me. A gun is a passive instrument; it does what it’s told to do by a human. And humans make mistakes. I picture a home invasion, someone in bed, asleep, who wakes suddenly to find a stranger in the dark perched over the bed. How does the gun get into the homeowner’s hands? How does the safety get turned off? How does the bullet find its way into the target in those sheer seconds? Maybe it’s a quiet house; the homeowner is awakened, reaches under the mattress, silently gets out the gun, silently clicks off the safety, silently tiptoes downstairs. He can hear the thief, but the thief cannot hear him. Silently, he finds the thief holding a flat-screen TV and he shoots. Maybe it’s a movie theater. Guy walks in in the dark, starts shooting. Somewhere in the audience is another gun, a good guy. He shoots, too. Maybe it’s a hotel room. Guy starts shooting. A dozen people in the crowd have guns, but they’re good guys. Good guns. They start shooting back. How do you identify the good from the bad? The intentional from the accidental? Maybe it’s a sniper at a gas station. Someone with a Toyota has a gun. He’s a good guy. He shoots, too. Maybe it’s a kid, and another kid has a gun. A good kid with a gun. A good teacher with a gun. How do you know, how do I know, how does anyone know who is who, and which gun is which, in those panicky milliseconds? Where to run, how to hide? How does a plastic seat wi...

For several decades both researchers and law enforcement themselves said domestic violence calls were among the most dangerous the police encountered. And certainly they are among the least predictable. It’s also true that plenty of police across t...

In my first years of asking ride-along questions, police would almost unequivocally answer that domestic violence calls were their most dangerous (occasionally, someone might also include traffic stops). But in the past two or three years, officers have begun to say to me, anecdotally, that it’s active shooters. That’s the scenario they fear most. In a law enforcement report that studied FBI data on active shooter incidents between 2008 and 2012, the authors found that the perpetrator stopped shooting about 40% of the time when police arrived; of those incidents that were ongoing even after police arrived, the law enforcement officers were shot about 15% of the time. Active shooter events, called ASEs in law enforcement parlance, were both on the rise and now among the deadliest for police, the study concluded.8 The idea that many of the active shooter situations officers were likely to encounter began as domestic violence wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the report.

Officers aren’t the only ones who would like to see fewer guns among civilians. A third of women in the United States today live with guns in their homes, yet fewer than 20% say those guns make them feel safer, and more than half want stricter gun laws in the country.9 The risk of homicide to a person in an abusive situation increases eightfold when guns are present.10 A decades-old gun ban referred to as the Lautenberg Amendment, which passed in 1996, was intended to ban convicted abusers with misdemeanor domestic violence charges from possessing or purchasing firearms, but research has shown that this is rarely enforced.11 Misdemeanors, it’s important to point out, have a wide range of definitions from a simple slap all the way to a near-fatal strangulation, depending on the state. States must enact their own statutes requiring abusers to turn in their guns and at the time of this writing, only sixteen states had such a statute in their governance laws.12 The federal law does not generally apply to those who are not recognized legally as married13 (often called the “boyfriend loophole”). Stalking is also not included in Lautenberg, which means that tens of thousands of stalkers are legally in possession of firearms in America today.14

Last updated JANUARY 5, 2023 . In 2018, Kansas passed legislation to restrict some people who have been convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors or who are subject to domestic violence protection orders from legally acquiring and possessing guns.1 However, Kansas law still does not: Require courts to notify people when they become prohibited from possessing firearms or ammunition under state or federal law due to domestic violence; Require the surrender of firearms or ammunition by people who have become prohibited from possessing them under state or federal law due to domestic violence; or Explicitly authorize or require the removal of firearms or ammunition from the scene of a domestic violence incident. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE MISDEMEANORS Kansas law now prohibits a person who has been convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor offense from knowingly possessing guns within five years after conviction.2 However, federal law law generally provides a stronger lifetime prohibition on firearm possession by people convicted of domestic violence offenses. Kansas defines domestic violence to involve the use or attempted use of physical force, or the threatened use of a deadly weapon, committed against a person with whom the offender is involved or has been involved in a dating relationship or is a family or household member.3 DOMESTIC VIOLENCE RESTRAINING ORDERS Kansas law now also prohibits people from knowingly possessing firearms while subject to certain domestic violence restraining orders.4 An person is prohibited from possessing guns if he or she is subject to a court order that: A) Was issued after a hearing, of which the person received actual notice, and at which the person had an opportunity to participate; (B) Restrains the person from harassing, stalking or threatening an intimate partner of the person, or a child of the person or intimate partner, or that restrains the person from engaging in other conduct that would place an intimate partner in reasonable fear of bodily injury to the partner or the child; and either Source: https://giffords.org/lawcenter/state-laws/domestic-violence-and-firearms-in-kansas/#:~:text=Kansas%20law%20now%20prohibits%20a,convicted%20of%20domestic%20violence%20offenses. (C) (i) Includes a finding that such person represents a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child; OR (ii) by its terms explicitly prohibits the use, attempted use or threatened use of physical force against such intimate partner or child that would reasonably be expected to cause bodily injury.5 Kansas defines intimate partner to include the spouse of the person, a former spouse of the person, an individual who is a parent of a child of the person or an individual who cohabitates or has cohabitated with the person.6 MEDIA REQUESTS

Surprisingly, they found that the federal domestic violence misdemeanor firearm prohibition offered no reduction in such killings.15 Zeoli says there are likely multiple reasons for this, including a lack of enforcement, a lack of knowledge about the restrictions by local jurisdictions, and judges in some states with wide discretion when it comes to putting the prohibition in place. The laws can also be confusing. “If you have a law that says this person can’t have a firearm, but doesn’t follow up with who’s supposed to take it, how it’s removed, where it’s stored and who shoulders the cost … you’re leaving it to local jurisdictions to figure out what may work for them … this gives people who may not want to put the law in place a lot of discretion.”

Where the laws do seem to have significant impact, however, is in the twenty-four states that have firearm restrictions for those with restraining orders, temporary or otherwise. Currently, eighteen states also have laws that allow police to confiscate firearms at the scene of a domestic violence incident.16 Zeoli’s study found that intimate partner homicide decreased by 25% in cities where the restraining order laws were clear and enforced.

“It’s not always an issue of being shot,” says Teresa Garvey, a former prosecutor and attorney advisor for AEquitas, a prosecutor’s resource for domestic violence law. “[Guns are] used to make threats, to back up threats, or to add to the environment of intimidation.”17 They are used as blunt force instruments, and as reminders of who holds the power. Like Donte Lewis, who hit his girlfriend so hard with his gun, she foamed at the mouth. Thirty-three thousand domestic violence firearm incidents occur annually in the ...

The single most common argument in favor of gun ownership is that it makes women safer. That it doesn’t matter if you prohibit abusers from purchasing or possessing firearms; if they want to inflict harm on another person, they will find a way to do it. But Zeoli says, “This simply is...

“Eleven of the fourteen men who used a gun said that they would not have killed if the gun were not available,” Adams told the committee. “Many serious abusers already have the motive to kill their intimate partner or ex-partner; let’s stop making it so easy for them to have the means to do so.”20 Kit Gruelle told me this was the most significant misunderstanding about guns and domestic violence. “[Guns] increase women’s danger exponentially,” she told me. “Until a gun comes into the relationship, she still feels like she has some capacity to deal with what’s going on, whether it’s to run, to lock the bedroom door, or whatever.”21 The pro-gun argument that asks women to arm themselves is asking them to behave as their abusers behave, Gruelle notes. Such views have conscripted the narrative, putting the blame on victims for not doing all they could to protect themselves. “It’s not a character flaw if [women] don’t have a natural tendency to turn and fire on the father of [their] children,” she said. Gruelle told me that if she had ever pulled a gun on her abusive husband “he’d have taken it away and laughed at it.”

him. I went over to Dan, my ride, and told him she claimed to have a history of abuse from the guy. Dan nodded. “Unfortunately, he’s the one who called. So we have to arrest her.” The teenager came back out just then and began screaming at the police. “You’re arresting her? Her?” The officer in the field found the knife and held it up. “You should be arresting him!” “He’s the one who called us,” said Dan.

A large TV dominated the room, playing cartoons. The two younger kids were glassy-eyed with exhaustion. They displayed no emotion at all. No fear, no joy, no curiosity, no surprise. The teenager was combative with the officers, and I wondered what it all looked like from her point of view, six large men standing in her living room, looming over her as she sat on the couch. One or two walked down the hall, shined a flashlight into chaotic rooms. She wasn’t forthcoming with any information, and I thought of the negotiation class. It’s not an interrogation; it’s an interview. None of these officers seemed able to step back and read the room for a minute, to crouch down to her level, to offer her just a simple comforting phrase, to ask, for example, how they could help. Was there someone she could call? Did she need food? Instead, they towered over her collectively with their bulletproof vests and their guns and their gear and their hissing radios. They were leaving her in this disastrous house where a grown man who abused them would return, probably in a matter of hours, and a grown woman who may have been equally abusive but was at least a sometime protective presence may or may not return. It was shocking to me in a sense. None of these officers was anything but polite. They knew the law. But they were also absolutely ill-equipped to act or think in any way that suggested they recognized the psychological complications at play, the implications of what they looked like from...

A large TV dominated the room, playing cartoons. The two younger kids were glassy-eyed with exhaustion. They displayed no emotion at all. No fear, no joy, no curiosity, no surprise. The teenager was combative with the officers, and I wondered what it all looked like from her point of view, six large men standing in her living room, looming over her as she sat on the couch. One or two walked down the hall, shined a flashlight into chaotic rooms. She wasn’t forthcoming with any information, and I thought of the negotiation class. It’s not an interrogation; it’s an interview. None of these officers seemed able to step back and read the room for a minute, to crouch down to her level, to offer her just a simple comforting phrase, to ask, for example, how they could help. Was there someone she could call? Did she need food? Instead, they towered over her collectively with their bulletproof vests and their guns and their gear and their hissing radios. They were leaving her in this disastrous house where a grown man who abused them would return, probably in a matter of hours, and a grown woman who may have been equally abusive but was at least a sometime protective presence may or may not return. It was shocking to me in a sense. None of these officers was anything but polite. They knew the law. But they were also absolutely ill-equipped to act or think in any way that suggested they recognized the psychological complications at play, the implications of what they looked like from a child’s view. This was trauma happening in real time. They weren’t interested in either the messiness of human emotion or any future fallout from this moment. At the same time, their jobs had prepared them only for right and wrong, criminal and civilian. Snyder, Rachel Louise. No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (p. 191). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

In Massachusetts, I’d been on a call once where a brother had assaulted his sister. She’d come in, crying, to the station to make the report. The officer took her statement, and then offered her a drink of water or a cup of coffee, asked if she’d like to stay at the station for a while just to get ahold of herself (she agreed). Then he talked to her just for a minute or two about familial violence, how hard it could be on people, how it was good she’d come in. Just general stuff. He hadn’t done much—offered her a drink, a minute to gather herself, a statement of empathy. But that is sort of the point. He had done so little and yet still it amounted to an acknowledgment of their shared humanity and in the end would mean so much to her.

In Massachusetts, I’d been on a call once where a brother had assaulted his sister. She’d come in, crying, to the station to make the report. The officer took her statement, and then offered her a drink of water or a cup of coffee, asked if she’d like to stay at the station for a while just to get ahold of herself (she agreed). Then he talked to her just for a minute or two about familial violence, how hard it could be on people, how it was good she’d come in. Just general stuff. He hadn’t done much—offered her a drink, a minute to gather herself, a statement of empathy. But that is sort of the point. He had done so little and yet still it amounted to an acknowledgment of their shared humanity and in the end would mean so much to her. Snyder, Rachel Louise. No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (pp. 191-192). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

There’s a line of about a dozen people now who seem to have just materialized. I am one of three whites, so far as I can tell. The lopsided racial injustice of incarceration spelled out right there in the anecdotal demographics of the waiting room. It’s also nearly all women.

“Accountability,” Jimmy says. Four ways they get into a moment of fatal peril. The first is denial. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.” The next is minimize. “To lessen the impact of my violence,” he tells them. Words like “but” and “only” are clues. “I only hit her once. I only pushed her a little. But she came at me first.” Blame and collusion are the other two ways. “She hit me first,” he says. “She was in my face.” That’s blame. Collusion is, say another guy is sitting there beside you. “Oh, dog, you going to let her talk to you like that? Yo, man, if I was you, I’d let her know what’s what.”

The work starts at fatal peril. Break that word in two. Fatal means dead, right? Peril. Deadly danger. You know, you’re driving down the highway and someone cuts you off and you’re like, ‘Fuck!’ Your hands come up”—he demonstrates with his hands, a defensive posture. One of the guys says, “Your manhood’s been challenged.” Jimmy nods. He tells them their heart rate increases, their muscles go hard, their face goes into a grimace. It’s all subconscious. They won’t know it, but it’s the limbic system’s response to threat. He demonstrates, outsized, clownish, and they laugh.

He says how they all learned as little kids that boys don’t cry. “Our dad or mom said, ‘Don’t cry now. Shake it off,’ right? Why not? It hurt. Why not cry? What’s wrong with crying? Boys didn’t get to cry because they were in pain, falling on gravel, but my daughter? Man. She was scooped up and held and kissed, and my son was told to stop crying.” He shakes his head. “Now, with the education I got, I’m like, ‘Come here, little man. I feel like crying with you. I know that hurt. It’s okay. Cry.’ ”

He talks about how he grew up believing women served men because he watched his grandmother and his female cousins all make the food and bring the food and clean up the food, and the boys sat watching the ball game. What were they all being taught? And now he’s a grown man and he knows, because he had to learn, how to feed himself, how to make his own damn omelet. “I had no concept of appre...

And when I’m busy impressing the person I don’t know, I’m hurting the people that love me.”

his inner hit man. The inner compulsion that tells men to be violent, that hides men from their authentic feelings, that reinforces this male belief system.

It’s that thing, right, where men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn’t extend to their partners. This view has always sat uncomfortably with me; must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else’s mean something? Can’t we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy?

“Why do you get to decide for grown women—daughter, mother, ex-girlfriend—who they can talk to and who they can’t?” That’s when Jimmy stopped talking to me.

She didn’t particularly like that she had to sacrifice her own privacy for his recovery, and for the recovery of men she’d never meet. But she’d made her peace with Jimmy, rebuilt her life, and said she’d learned enough that she would never take shit from any man ever again.

Years later, when she did finally work up the courage to leave him, she said people told her she was “giving up” on him. She felt a lot of guilt, but she never went back.

Just before we hung up, I asked if she thought a violent man could ever truly become nonviolent. She thought about it a moment. “I think they can become ninety percent nonviolent. But there’s a small part of them that you can never fix.”

Jimmy told me once about how he knows women want to “fix him.” That he recognizes a certain fetish women have with a survivor story, a formerly violent man who’s been reborn as a man who doesn’t fear his own vulnerabilities and feelings. Nothing sexier than a man in touch with his emotions, right? When I look at his Facebook page, I can see that he’s not lying. With every post, women are dripping with platitudes, inspired by his story of survival. He said one woman once flew across the country to meet him. And it makes me a little uncomfortable. It might even piss me off a little. Men like Jimmy are not remarkable. They’re not noteworthy. They’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing—which is not beating up women. If there’s any triumph at all, it is in their very averageness. David Adams is skeptical, too, of this potential fetishization our culture has with a good survival story. It’s the potential narcissism, again, the charisma they all naturally seem to have in the first place. “They can become charismatic loose cannons,” he told me once, “who never really took responsibility for their own abuse.”

The one that guts him the most. It’s not a long story, or an unusual story. But he calls it the most painful day of his life. “Twelve years old,” he says. His daughter was sexually molested, by someone they all knew. “I had to make some serious decisions,” he tells them. “Either I go and knock this motherfucker’s head off, because I had all the right reasons, you know? Do some time for the next thirty years, but it’s not a big deal. I’m a gangbanger anyway. I live comfortably in every facility, any facility. Do I kill this motherfucker or do I not do a thing?” That’s what he thinks his decision was in the moment when he received the news. Kill the guy, or not. But really, he says, he realized that wasn’t his decision at all. The decision was actually “Do I make it about me and go kill this motherfucker? Or do I make it about my daughter, and be there for her?” If he kills the guy, he takes himself out of his daughter’s life at the moment she needs him the most. “Shit,” one new guy whispers. “I’m going to make sure, each and every one of you, that your partners are not afraid when you go home,” Jimmy says quietly. “I work front line for the victim, and I want to see you better your life, because that’s one more safe woman in the world.”

All of these critical gaps in the system often make the biggest difference between who lives and who dies—including the lack of communication between criminal and civil courts—and it still persists not only in this particular county in Massachusetts, but also in states and counties across the nation. The very fact that intimate partner violence is so often addressed in civil court, rather than criminal court, gives insight into how we as a society still view it.

The single biggest indicator for domestic violence homicide is a prior incidence of physical domestic violence,

But often it’s the escalation that is missed.

The risk of homicide unfolds on a timeline, Campbell said, spiking, for example, when a victim attempts to leave an abuser, or when the situation at home changes—a pregnancy, a new job, a move. The danger remains high for three months after a couple splits, dips slightly for the next nine, and drops significantly after a year.

Like how strangulation is a different category of violence than, say, a punch to the face. Or that abusers tended to fall into two categories when it comes to their pregnant partners: those whose abuse escalates, and those who lay off entirely for those nine months. Forced sex is a risk marker, as is controlling most of a partner’s daily activities.

Dunne’s goal was twofold: one, identify and create action plans for high risk cases; and two, keep victims out of shelters as much as possible.

They went over what services they could try to incorporate into the safety plan for any given scenario. Could the office of probation help with getting judges more informed? Could police identify some of the risk factors on a call? Could the emergency room help identify potential domestic violence victims? Could police share reports with the crisis center advocates? Could batterer intervention groups share their information with the crisis center? At each stage, they talked through the practices, the legal issues, the privacy standards, and most of all how they could share information across bureaucratic lines. They scoured state statutes and privacy laws, learned what kind of information they could legally share with other offices and what they could not.

Sharing information meant departments that had been siloed were communicating. Perhaps the most significant cultural barrier existed between the police department and the crisis center. Every possible gendered stereotype that exists about these two entities had to be addressed on a personal level. Dunne’s office was primarily made up of women, the police department primarily men. Wile told me once that, prior to the formation of the High Risk Team, the local police officers viewed Dunne and the other crisis center advocates as the “Men Hate Us Club.” “We didn’t deal with them,” he said, because the common feeling among police officers was that the women who worked in places like crisis centers, well, “they don’t like us.” Dunne laughed at this characterization. “We were the feminazis, and they were the assholes who cared only about overtime,” she told me. But as they talked to one another, advocates to officers, they learned about the unique set of problems and barriers each faced. In talking to Wile, Dunne began to see how officers could get frustrated going to the same house again and again. And officers like Wile began to understand the intractable circumstances that keep victims in place. Dunne was able to explain how victims who appear hostile and show solidarity with their abusers when the police show up are often taking a safety measure, sending a message not to police but to their abusers. See my loyalty? Please don’t kill me when the cops leave.

Back when the women’s movement brought domestic violence into the national consciousness, shelter seemed the most viable answer to the problem. Get the victim out of harm’s way. Many states still did not have laws against battering one’s wife. Intimate partner violence was seen as a private family matter and what research existed around domestic violence still carried a residue of such incidents being the fault of victims inciting their abusers. It would be decades before the idea of men being held accountable for their violent behavior even became part of the national conversation. Creating shelters was the first nationally coordinated attempt to address intimate partner violence, and throughout the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, even well into the ’90s, it was more or less the only solution offered to women in dangerous situations.

Over the course of four decades, the shelter movement expanded, and today there are more than three thousand.

The definition of shelter varies widely; it can mean a bed in a hotel room for a night, or a group house with two dozen families. Cities with dense populations sometimes have small apartment buildings or single occupancy motel-type residences. Outside of major cities, shelters tend to be single-family homes in residential areas, where victims and their children are allotted one room and share kitchens, bathrooms, and dining and living rooms with five to eight other families. There are rules governing curfews and chores. Historically, boys over the age of twelve and pets have not been allowed in shelters, and most contact with friends or family, including a victim’s employer, had been discouraged, for safety’s sake. (New York is currently creating what it’s calling the country’s first 100% pet-friendly shelter; Arkansas, meanwhile, opened the country’s first shelter for men in 2015.) Shelter doesn’t simply mean a safe place to sleep; it means walking entirely out of your life, having your children walk entirely out of their lives. It means disappearing from view.