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

Snyder describes a seminar led by Jacquelyn Campbell, creator of the Danger Assessment, a series of questions used by law enforcement and victims’ advocates to determine whether a domestic abuse case will likely escalate to homicide. Campbell’s Assessment, Snyder says, “has broken through cultural and political barriers, been adapted for use by police, attorneys, judges, advocates, and healthcare workers, among others” (58). It has also saved countless lives. However, during the seminar Campbell estimates that each year 1,200 women are murdered by their abusers in the US. Even these numbers do not reflect the full scope of the problem, since they do not include murdered children like Michelle’s, innocent bystanders, other family members, closeted relationships that are not counted as domestic homicides, victim suicides, homicides disguised as accidents, or murder-suicides.

Snyder recounts a story Campbell tells about a couple in Maryland that typifies the cyclical nature of domestic abuse:

This Maryland couple, the twenty-six-year-old and the seventeen-year-old, also had a two-month-old child, and the woman had three other children by three other men. Her five-year-old watched, screaming, as she was shot and killed. The two other toddlers came running out and so saw their mother dead, too. Three young children, traumatized, and a newborn. One of the toddlers had been abused by her biological father. The mother’s own father had abused her when she was a child. The seventeen-year-old boyfriend’s abuse as a child was so horrific that he’d been removed from his family home for five years. Layers, years, generations of abuse (59-60).

Because victims so often turn into abusers themselves, Campbell looked into what had become of the children of this couple and found that all were in abusive homes.

Campbell began her career as a school nurse, tending to young girls who had no voice or agency in their own lives and often wound up pregnant. One girl, Annie, became pregnant by another student Campbell knew, Tyrone. Annie left school but stayed in touch with Campbell, who was devastated to learn some time later that Tyrone had stabbed Annie to death. Campbell tried to figure out what she had missed and realized that in addition to an occasional black eye, Annie had spoken to her in generalities, “dancing around the edges of the topic by saying things like, ‘We’re not getting along.’ Or ‘We’re having trouble.’ Annie didn’t have the words, and Campbell didn’t know the language of violence yet” (63).

As a graduate student in nursing, Campbell learned that homicide was the leading cause of death for young Black women. She set out to quantify the patterns leading to domestic homicide and compiled 22 warning signs that correlate with an abusive situation turning homicidal, such as drug use, gun possession, threats, alcohol consumption, stalking, and chronic unemployment. She also found out that half of homicide victims had been visited by police before, and that “[l]evels of dangerousness operated on a specific timeline. Dangerousness spiked when a victim attempted to leave an abuser, and it stayed very high for three months, then dipped only slightly for the next nine months” before dropping significantly after one year (64). Snyder says these timelines are often overlooked in the treatment of abuse victims, as are several other things—for example, the fact that strangulation (and subsequent brain injury) occurs in over half of violent abuse cases.

Gael Strack is the CEO of the Training Institute on Strangulation Prevention. In 1995, Strack was an assistant district attorney in San Diego when two teenage girls were strangled to death in her jurisdiction. At the time, San Diego was thought to excel in domestic violence prevention, and these deaths shook Strack and her boss, Casey Gwinn. Strack found that an incident of strangulation dramatically increases the likelihood of domestic homicide, but because strangulation often leaves few visible marks, neither police nor Emergency room personnel were treating it as significant. Strack also found that many of the strangulation victims had urinated or defecated while being strangled, which was a clear sign that they were near death. Yet all of the 300 cases Strack studied were prosecuted as misdemeanors and not attempted murders.

Strack and Gwinn set out to educate people who work with victims about the dangers of strangulation, and thus far, they have trained over 50,000 people, and 45 states prosecute strangulation as a felony. This has led to a drop in violence homicides. ER personnel are now far more likely to look for strangulation injuries, which are often internal, and document them. Yet Snyder says that in her experience interacting with police departments across the United States, officers receive very little training about strangulation.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), Snyder says, is another area that needs improvement, because like strangulation, TBIs are often invisible but leave lasting problems. This has particularly negative effects for victims of domestic violence: “It is not uncommon for victims of domestic violence to have poor recall of the incidents that landed their partners in trouble […] Their explanation of what happened is cloudy, and law enforcement and courtrooms put the burden of proof on them” (70). While medical and legal personnel understand that for athletes and car accident victims, TBIs can lead to hysteria, forgetfulness, confusion, and contradictory stories, they are only now beginning to apply the same understanding to victims of domestic strangulation.

Returning to Michelle and Rocky, Snyder says that while Michelle and her family may not have understood the full danger she was in, Michelle must have known that Rocky posed a significant and escalating threat to her. In the last weekend of her life, she told Alyssa and Ivan as much. Rocky must also have sensed that Michelle was at the end of her willingness to deal with him, which is why he was so enraged when she filed for a restraining order. However, Rocky got away with his violence, and he manipulated Sarah and Gordon into putting up bail money. Michelle went back to Rocky to try to calm him down and buy herself time to figure out how to leave.

Snyder returns to the question she posed in the Preface: Why did Michelle stay? Snyder answers:

Michelle Mosure stayed for her kids and for herself. She stayed for pride and she stayed for love and she stayed for fear and she stayed for cultural and social forces far beyond her control. And her staying, to anyone trained enough to see the context, looked a lot less like staying and a lot more like someone tiptoeing her way toward freedom (73).