eBook, 320 pages
English language
Published Oct. 5, 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing.
We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem.
In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths-that if things were …
We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem.
In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths-that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.
This is a very important book. It made me terrified. I am terrified.
An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.
And for every woman killed in the United States from domestic violence homicide, nearly nine are almost killed.7
New Analysis of Mass Shootings in America Reveals 54 Percent Involved Domestic Violence and 25 Percent of Fatalities Were Children
As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness.
we didn’t recognize domestic violence as wrong for most of human history. Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any other of his properties, including servants, slaves, and animals
The American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several …
An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.
And for every woman killed in the United States from domestic violence homicide, nearly nine are almost killed.7
New Analysis of Mass Shootings in America Reveals 54 Percent Involved Domestic Violence and 25 Percent of Fatalities Were Children
As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness.
we didn’t recognize domestic violence as wrong for most of human history. Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any other of his properties, including servants, slaves, and animals
The American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several decades, meaning, I suppose, that we held our dogs in higher regard than we held our wives
Russia, which in 2017 decriminalized any domestic violence that doesn’t result in bodily injury.
Nearly 90% of domestic violence homicide victims were both stalked and beaten in the year prior to their deaths
Section one tries to answer that most dogged of questions: why victims stay. (Kit Gruelle told me once: “We don’t say to bank presidents after a bank’s been robbed, ‘You need to move this bank.’ ”)
I’ve found, in the face of overwhelming tragedy, that women often talk and talk, and men fall silent. Sally carries a swirl of memories like a nest around her; Paul holds those memories like stones inside him.
how could they have once believed that an open, honest conversation about something as common in this world as divorce or remarriage or moving to a new state was so bad it could not be addressed aloud? Would it have explained something to Rocky that he needed an explanation for? Would it have reset his pain somehow?
in as many as 20% of relationships where domestic violence is present there might be no physical abuse at
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. Sally eventually saw this
It would require meticulous planning and preparation. Leaving is never an event; it’s a
kids became pawns, a way for him to keep her obedient, conciliatory. A way for him to make sure she didn’t leave
She recanted to stay alive. She recanted to keep her children alive.
“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.”
access to a gun by an abuser is one of the three highest risk indicators for domestic violence homicide
"They stay because they choose to live. And they die anyway."
In fact, death from medical errors in hospitals is now the third leading cause of death for adults in the United States
Short courtships—let’s call it love at first sight—are a hallmark of private violence
“He had all these temporary restraining orders with other women,” says one of the team members. “But not Ruth. He killed the one who didn’t leave.”
The variety of red flags are things everyone in domestic violence has seen before: the quick courtship, the isolation and control, the unemployment, the medications, the narcissism and lying and stalking.
"Why is it not okay that he filmed her over and over and over in her underwear?
Because she asked him to stop.
And he didn’t.
And eventually she gave up asking.
This is loss of power at its most elemental."
He treated his partners the same way he treated his working girls: as items he owned or discarded at will. He hit them or he didn’t. He fucked them or he didn’t. It was up to him where and when and how. Their role was in service to him
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? Or better yet, why couldn’t he stop his violence?
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.
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.”
Roughly 12% of male inmates in jails like San Bruno today were sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen. (In state prisons, the number is higher, and for those boys who grew up in foster care, the numbers are shocking, nearly 50%.
"How do you stop a thirty-year-old from beating his wife?
Talk to him when he’s twelve."
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
How one violent act by one person begets another. How violence matched with more violence never really solves any kind of problem
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.
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?
“The most surprising thing is that [abusers] seem like such normal guys,” says Adams. “The average batterer is pretty likable.”
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
when he’d claim I wasn’t listening to him, that I was indeed listening. What I was doing was disagreeing
The risk of homicide to a person in an abusive situation increases eightfold when guns are present.
This is the battle, for him and for all the guys he works with, this pull toward their previous life. Toward drugs, toward the streets, toward the life he used to live
For many abuse victims, this is what eventually pushes them, when their child gets hurt. It’s one thing for an adult to abuse another adult, but a child? This is often the moment victims decide enough is enough.
We contain the offender so the victim doesn’t have to be contained.”
No victim of domestic violence—man or woman, adult or child—ever imagines that they’re the type of person who would wind up in such a situation
No Republican has ever won the electoral vote in Washington, D.C
I told him his tears made him stronger, in my eyes, as a man, as a husband, as a father, that he didn’t fear his full range of human emotion. It’s a lesson I wish I could impart to all men.
Why we don’t have a hotline for abusers in the way that we do for victims in crisis, or for alcoholics about to take a drink? Why don’t we have sponsors for those who graduate from a violence intervention program?
my task as a journalist is to write the story, not change the story as it’s being told.
If there was a required reading list for every human, this would be on it. So much interesting info that hasn’t typically been covered in the domestic violence literature that I’ve read—batterer intervention programs and bail statutes, especially. While the book’s subject matter was obviously tragic, it was heartening to learn about how much progress has been made in just the past 20 years with agency cooperation, laws and policies, and education. A+ read that I’ll be recommending to everyone I know.
Excellent. 5/5 stars for what it is, the only reason I'm giving it 4 is because I only give 5 stars to books I super, super love, and this one is too hard to love. For the right reasons.
Excellent. 5/5 stars for what it is, the only reason I'm giving it 4 is because I only give 5 stars to books I super, super love, and this one is too hard to love. For the right reasons.
