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

“An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe. This does not include men. Or children.”

This is the first statistic that Snyder introduces, and it is designed to catch the attention of the reader, who likely had no knowledge of the scope of domestic homicide. The fact that it is an incomplete figure only heightens the effect. 

“Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives.” 

While this statistic is jaw-dropping in and of itself, the question it implicitly poses—why it is that we mourn deceased soldiers but fail to recognize the unbelievable number of Americans killed in their own homes—is also significant. This hints at a subtext that will be present throughout the book: that because domestic violence is largely a “women’s issue,” it does not receive the attention that it should from lawmakers or the press. Just as women aren’t full human beings to the partners who abuse or kill them, they aren’t to society at large either. 

“Domestic violence health and medical costs top more than $8 billion annually for taxpayers and cause victims to lose more than eight million workdays each year. It is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half our homeless women and is overall the third leading cause of homelessness in our country.” 

Snyder uses multiple facts and figures in the Preface in order to get our attention and convince us—quickly and undeniably—that domestic violence is an enormous problem. If we are unmoved by the previous figures about lives lost, then perhaps the economic toll of domestic violence will convince us to read on.

“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. (Pet shelters in the 1990s outnumbered domestic violence shelters by nearly three to one.)” 

This passage speaks to the bias against women that pervades our culture and makes protecting women, whose position in the social and economic hierarchy has been lower than men’s for centuries, less of a priority than protecting animals. This implies that society views women not only as subhuman but as sub-animal (at least in the case of favored animals). 

“Over and over I asked, during the years I was researching this book, whether a violent man could be taught to be nonviolent. The answers almost always fell along these lines: police officers and advocates said no, victims said they hoped so, and violent men said yes.”

Snyder’s mission in Part 2 of the book, which she establishes here in the Preface, is to interview abusers and find out why they resort to violence. The reader may wonder whether intervention is meaningful and whether rehabilitation is possible. By addressing that here, Snyder is managing the reader’s expectations: There will not be an easy answer. Her admission of her own doubts also illustrates the personal tone she will employ throughout much of the book.

“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.” 

Snyder’s objective in Part 1 is to discover why women stay in abusive relationships. Here, in light of the story of Michelle and Rocky Mosure, is the answer. Women stay because they want to stay alive, and the best way to do that, given all of the obstacles to safely leaving, is by staying. Snyder will later cite hard data backing up what many women learn through personal experience, which is that the risk of violence escalates sharply in the immediate aftermath of a woman’s attempt to exit the relationship.

“He cited, specifically, tactics such as monitoring or controlling the regular activities of life, particularly those traditionally associated with women—like parenting, homemaking, and sex. The control runs ‘the gamut,’ Stark wrote, ‘from their access to money, food and transport to how they dress, clean, cook or perform sexually.’”

Snyder is quoting a paper written by Evan Stark, author of Coercive Control, in which he explains how an abusive person intimidates, threatens, and controls his partner without resorting to physical violence. Because these actions do not always lead to physical violence, and because they are not individually illegal, they often go unreported and unprosecuted. These actions are also part of what makes it difficult for victims to speak out, because they collectively work to undermine her sense of self-respect (and even self).  

“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.” 

A common misperception about abuse victims, perpetuated by TV shows such as COPS, is that abused women do not press charges because the abuse was not as bad as they initially made it out to be, and/or because the supposed victim was using the call as a way to punish her partner. Snyder instead points out that women often have to make the choice to prosecute or not while the abuser is still present, and with no guarantee that he will be held in jail more than a few hours. Given this, it’s entirely understandable that the victim often takes the side of the abuser.

“Kristy and Kyle were on her couch, and when she looked at them she saw something that chills her to this day. They didn’t show terror or hysterics. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t crying. They had gone still, their eyes in a kind of catatonia.” 

As Rocky Mosure breaks into his mother-in-law’s house and threatens violence before seizing his daughter, his mother-in-law looks at her young grandchildren. In that moment, she realizes that the children, long exposed to terrifying violence, have learned to cope with it by shutting down. Not only is this a poignant commentary on what happens to children in abusive homes, it is also an indicator that these same children might be future abusers or victims, given their learned ability to disassociate from the trauma of domestic violence.

“In New York, for example, two-thirds of incarcerated women in 2005 had been abused beforehand by the person they killed. 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.”

In yet another disadvantage to women, the judicial system has long disallowed testimony about domestic abuse in the cases of women who kill their husbands. As a result, hundreds of women are incarcerated for resorting to the only way they could think of to free themselves from domestic terrorism. Having been silent captives to abusers for the duration of their relationships, they become silenced captives of the judicial and penal systems. 

“Strangulation turned out to dramatically increase the chances of domestic violence homicide. But only 15% of the victims in the study turned out to have injuries visible enough to photograph for the police reports. As a result, the officers often downplayed the incidents, listing injuries like ‘redness, cuts, scratches or abrasions to the neck.’” 

This passage describes what motivated Gael Strack, whose work to identify strangulation and traumatic brain injuries in domestic violence victims is changing the way medical personnel examine, treat, and document these injuries. Strack further noted that strangulation very often is the definitive sign of escalating violence that will lead to homicide, and her work is helping law enforcement prioritize strangulation victims for increased surveillance and intervention. 

“Instead what Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.”

When Rocky Mosure was arrested for breaking into his mother-in-law’s house, his stepmother bailed him out the following morning. He immediately violated the restraining order and contacted Michelle, saying that he was returning to the family home. What Michelle learned from this episode, Snyder argues, is that law enforcement could not help her leave Rocky—thereby eliminating one more potential path to freedom for Michelle and her kids.

“One team member, a retired forensic nurse, is so outspoken about her hatred for guns that the other members tease her endlessly. Every time she says it, she’s holding needles, knitting away, wearing a sweater vest. When it comes time to make recommendations, she will take Beki’s giant Sharpie and write guns, guns, guns all over the white pages. ‘You want to get rid of homicide?’ she’ll ask. ‘Get rid of guns.’” 

Snyder is attending a review meeting in which law enforcement officials and domestic abuse counselors, advocates, and interventionists go over case files to see what was missed along the way that might have indicated that the abuse would end in homicide. The argument about guns runs throughout the text, as Snyder repeatedly points out that the prevalence of and ease of access to guns leads to homicide. She backs this up with interviews with murderers who say that had there not been a gun present, they would not have committed the crime. 

“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.”

As the review team examines the case file of a couple named Timothy and Ruth, Snyder recognizes that many aspects of their relationship have been identified as precursors to abuse, and that these red flags were also present in the story of Michelle and Rocky. This underscores the widespread and systemic nature of domestic violence, which occurs in predictable ways that reflect overarching societal trends and realities.

“[M]en learn to be men by defining themselves as superior to each other and to women, and much of the violence in our communities is due to men’s ongoing enforcement of this learned belief in their superiority, be it spousal abuse, gang turf wars, street assaults, armed robbery, and all the other crimes that men in the jails had been charged with. Men…had learned that it was normal to use force and violence in all of the forms above to enforce their social obligation to be superior.” 

Snyder is quoting the work of Hamish Sinclair, founder of ManAlive, a domestic violence intervention program. Sinclair paraphrased the words of an assistant sheriff describing the social norms around boys and men in a way that sums up the concept of toxic masculinity (especially the violence and narcissism associated with it).

“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.”

This passage is a rebuttal to the idea that the best way for women to protect themselves from violent men is to arm themselves. Snyder agrees with Sinclair that this is not addressing the problem; the real problem is that men are violent, not that women are unarmed. The passage also foreshadows the story of Bresha Meadows, who shot her abusive father and was nearly tried for murder as an adult afterwards. Given how unforgiving the legal system tends to be of women who kill violent men, the suggestion rings all the more hollow. 

“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.” 

This passage identifies a commonality between Hamish Sinclair, founder of ManAlive, and David Adams, founder of Emerge. Both are intervention programs to counteract domestic violence, and though they differ somewhat in program specifics and approach, Hamish and Adams both came to their work at the prompting of women. This underscores one of the recurring motifs of the book, which is that communication and collaboration between groups working towards the same goal is critical to actually achieving that goal.

“‘The most surprising thing is that [abusers] seem like such normal guys,’ says Adams. ‘The average batterer is pretty likable.’ For Adams this is the whole point: that we look for talons and tails, but find instead charm and affability. It’s how abusers attract victims in the first place.”

One of the exercises virtually everyone in the book undertakes is to look back at a domestic homicide situation and wonder what they failed to see. In an effort to understand why domestic abusers are so often “missed,” Snyder points to the fact that abusers are often endearing, charming, and utterly “normal.” This normalcy also speaks to a broader problem—namely, that domestic abusers truly are “normal” in the sense that they’re simply extreme examples of the kind of masculinity society promulgates.

“When Adams first began studying how to change the behavior of abusive men, before he’d made the connections to narcissism, 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.” 

One of the systemic and social barriers to women in their attempts to escape domestic abuse is the fact that the victims themselves have traditionally been blamed for “causing” the abuse. The idea that women provoke men to violence inflicts further shame on the victim, increasing her isolation and unwillingness to seek help. It also reflects the culture of toxic masculinity that sees violence as a reasonable response to anything at all and characterizes women’s purpose in life as serving and placating men.

“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.” 

Just as toxic masculinity pervades society with destructive ideas about what it means to be a man, so do ideas of femininity. Society feeds women destructive ideas about the roles they are duty and gender-bound to play, encouraging them to subordinate their own needs to everyone else’s. As with Michelle Mosure, who did not want her children to come from a broken home, social pressure—and the idea that a broken family is a woman’s failure—plays a role in keeping women in abusive relationships.

“My question isn’t ‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ […] 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.”

Snyder is quoting Neil Websdale in this passage—specifically, Websdale’s belief that just as women feel trapped in abusive relationships, so do abusive men. Websdale’s point is that for these couples the codependency runs both ways, and the men often need to stay in the relationships in order to ameliorate the way they feel about themselves. They want to control the women, but at the same time, they themselves are controlled by their need to be in the relationship that offers them social normalcy.

“Dorothy told Dunne she hadn’t done anything wrong, so why was she the one who always had to leave? She believed that William knew most shelter locations anyway, so there was no point hiding from him.” 

Snyder uses the story of Dorothy Giunta-Cotter not only as yet another tale of escalating violence that ultimately resulted in homicide, but also to show that the solutions we have in place now—namely shelters for women—tend to punish the victim. Along with her  young children, she often is forced to simply abandon her life, community, family, and support network in order to escape her abuser. Giunta-Cotter’s story will lead Kelly Dunne to advocate for a different kind of shelter—one that does a better job of keeping the victim’s life intact while also protecting her.

“Whatever the situation, the Survivor Resilience Fund is simply a means to get them past that first big financial hurdle and keep them in their own communities.

‘For me,’ Hacskaylo said, ‘it’s been this total paradigm shift, because I’ve worked in shelter and transitional housing my whole career.’” 

This anecdote illustrates the evolving approach to victim’s shelters, as evidenced by the Survivor Resilience Fund, which offers victims a lump sum of money to be used to rent housing, buy food or furniture, or clear debt, so that the women can begin to rebuild their lives without uprooting and living in a shelter.