No Visible Bruises Quotes

“Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent?”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“the elephant in the room.” That we won’t say, simply, that it is men who are violent. It is men who take their violence out on masses of others. School shootings are carried out by young men. Mass murders. Gang warfare, murder-suicides and familicides and matricides and even genocides: all men. Always men. “Every commonly available domestic violence and official general violence statistic, and every anecdotal account about domestic and all other kinds of violence throughout the United States and around the world, point clearly to the fact that men almost monopolize all sectors of violence perpetration,” Sinclair wrote.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“He began to understand violence as the result of a belief system men all seemed to share, which told them they were the authority in their lives, that they were to be respected, obeyed. Top of the human hierarchy. It was a belief system that not only distanced them from people around them, but also limited their range, kept them boxed in by their own narrow ideas of what men could be and how men could behave.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“men are taught violence, but they are not taught intimacy. “Violence is a skill that we all had to learn just to stay with the pack growing up,” he said. “The trouble is, it doesn’t work for intimacy. That’s a whole different set of skills.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Campbell’s slideshow lists grim domestic violence statistic after statistic: second leading cause of death for African American women, third leading cause of death for native women, seventh leading cause of death for Caucasian women. Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 That figure does not count children. And it does not count the abusers who kill themselves after killing their partners, murder-suicides we see daily in the newspaper. And it does not count same-sex relationships where one or the other partner might not be “out.” And it does not count other family members, like sisters, aunts, grandmothers, who are often killed alongside the primary victim. And it does not count innocent bystanders: the twenty-six churchgoers in Texas, say, after a son-in-law has gone to a service to target his mother-in-law, or the two spa employees in Wisconsin killed alongside their client by her ex. The list is endless. And it does not count the jurisdictions who do not report their homicides, since homicide reporting is voluntary through the FBI’s Supplemental Homicide Reporting Data. So how many people are killed as a result of domestic violence each year? The bystanders, the other family members, the perpetrators’ suicides? The victims who just can’t take it anymore and kill themselves? The accidents that turn out not to be accidents at all, victims pushed out of cars and from cliffs or driven into trees. Tragedies forever uncategorized.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“We now know it’s the ones who don’t show up in court, who don’t renew the restraining orders, who are in the most danger.”3”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Leaving is never an event; it’s a process.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Campbell says twelve hundred abused women are killed every year in the United States.1 That figure does not count children.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Victims who side with their abusers during police calls do so not out of instability, as many law enforcement officers assume, but out of a measured calculation toward their future safety.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“You could certainly say about half the cases of mass shootings are extreme incidents of domestic violence.” In other words, it’s not that domestic violence predicts mass shootings. It’s that mass shootings, more than half the time, are domestic violence.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“And for every woman killed in the United States from domestic violence homicide, nearly nine are almost killed.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Lynn Rosenthal. Rosenthal was the first White House liaison to the Office of Violence Against Women, a position created by the Obama Administration that remains unfilled two years into the Trump Administration”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“This Person You Love Will Take Your Life”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn't extend to their partners.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“They stay in abusive marriages because they understand something that most of us do not, something from the inside out, something that seems to defy logic: as dangerous as it is in their homes, it is almost always far more dangerous to leave.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Why victims stay isn’t the question we need to be asking. Rather, I think a better question is: how do we protect this person? No qualifiers. No musing about why she stayed or what she might appear to be doing or not doing. Just one simple question: how do we protect her?”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Sinclair is unapologetically unabashed about the gender specifics here. It is 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.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“The police acted as if the victims—Sally and Melanie—were overdramatizing the entire event. Some guy taking his own kid. It’s his kid after all. The gendered messages are crucial: men are strong; women are weak. Men have the power; women are powerless. Men are rational; women are hysterical. Whether you are a violent abuser or a law-abiding officer, the men on both sides of the Monson equation sent a message to the women.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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?”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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 appreciation,” he says of his past girlfriends, of Kelly. “I never had a bad partner. I had a bad attitude.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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 families and friends to collude with them by approving it.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“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 shooting, but the term “drama kings”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“Though in many states today, still, victims are barred from using their long histories of enduring violence at the hands of their partners in their own defense. One woman I spoke with who is incarcerated in North Carolina for first degree murder, Latina Ray, says she endured over a decade of abuse. Her partner beat her so badly that she lost the sight in her right eye entirely, yet her long history of victimization with him was never used in her case.”
― Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us