No Visible Bruises

71 pages • 2 hours read

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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 3

Part 1, Chapters 4-5

Part 1, Chapters 6-8

Part 1, Chapters 9-10

Part 2, Chapters 11-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-16

Part 2, Chapters 17-18

Part 3, Chapters 19-21

Part 3, Chapters 22-24

Part 3, Chapter 25

Author’s Note-Afterword

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Part 2, Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 2: “The Beginning”

Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Penance”

Jimmy Espinoza is a predator, seeking out young, vulnerable, often fatherless girls to prey upon in his work as a pimp in San Francisco: “His violence […] was against the women who worked for him and the women who had relationships with him, against rival gang members, against just about anyone who looked at him in a way he didn’t like. Rape was a weapon in his arsenal” (107). Now in prison, Espinoza has turned his energy towards sparing women the very violence he used to inflict on them.

Three pivotal occurrences in Espinoza’s life have led him to where he is. Before discussing these, however, Snyder shifts focus to Hamish Sinclair, an 85-year-old man in San Francisco. Sinclair is Scottish, and was working in an Irish B&B when he met an American filmmaker who invited him to come to the US. There he became a social activist, which led him to Detroit, where he concentrated his efforts on bettering the existence of autoworkers.

In 1975, a group of female autoworkers came to Sinclair for the same kind of help he was providing the men. Sinclair was willing, but many of the male autoworkers were vehemently opposed to including women in their efforts. After several meetings about the women’s plea, one male autoworker went home and savagely beat his wife. Sinclair was horrified, but not because the woman was beaten: “At the time, Sinclair said his attitude wasn’t that the husbands should refrain from beating their wives because it was morally reprehensible, but rather because it split up the community” (111). When Sinclair broached the topic again six months later the men still opposed including the women, Sinclair abandoned Detroit and headed to Berkeley, California, where he met Claude Steiner:

[Claude Steiner] was a giant in the field of gender theory, the father of the so-called ‘radical psychiatry’ movement in Berkeley in the 1970s; he wrote about men and women’s ‘internalized oppression’ and advocated for social-justice-based therapies; he helped popularize the idea of emotional literacy (111).

Steiner argued that mental illnesses were best treated through personal change that considered the cultural context of the individual. Sinclair was intrigued, and for the next five years, he worked in a psychiatric facility outside San Francisco and attempted to answer the question of how men came to see themselves as having authority over women. Sinclair believed that violence was necessary when men hunted for food, but now needed to be replaced by intimacy: “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” (113). Women who are violent, he argues, are generally driven to violence in response to violence from men.

Our culture, Sinclair argues, teaches men that anger is the sole acceptable male emotion, while women learn never to be angry and are labelled dramatic or hysterical when exhibiting emotion. For fear of being seen as weak, men quash other emotions. This leads to male violence, but our society is unwilling to actually blame men for violent acts. Men themselves also tend to downplay their responsibility:

Violent men are aware that they are violent and even take pride in the manliness of it to their friends [...] 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 [...] (115).

After five years of pondering these questions, Sinclair was asked to establish a men’s department within the Marin Abused Women’s Services. Sinclair instead proposed creating an intervention program to stop male violence against women. The 52-week program, created in 1980, is called ManAlive. It requires that men take responsibility for their violence, gives them alternatives to violent behavior, and teaches them strategies for creating intimacy. After the Violence Against Women Act passed in 1994, courts began referring men to Sinclair’s program.

In the late 1990s, a prison guard named Sunny Schwartz was dismayed by the cyclical nature of violence and the fact that prison only escalated men’s violent tendencies. Schwartz was convinced that there was a way to reform these men using the ManAlive curriculum and restorative justice—a model of justice that requires the perpetrator to fully recognize the pain he has caused and do everything in his power to reconcile with the victim. Sometimes an abuser will meet with his actual victim, but in many cases the abuser meets with other women, who share what it was like to live as a victim of domestic abuse.

Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “Watching Violence in a Fishbowl”

Victoria is one of the women who visits Schwartz’s prison to share her story of abuse. Her father abused and even tried to kill her mother. Victoria, who was 16 at the time, chose to stay with her father when her mother fled. She became anorexic, and it took years for Victoria to cut her father out of her life and reconcile with her mother. The last time Victoria and her brother met their father for a meal, Victoria’s dad told her he had a gun and had planned to kill her and her brother at dinner, but had decided not to. The prisoners become very emotional listening to Victoria’s story.

Resolve to Stop Violence (RSVP), the program that brings Victoria to San Bruno, is an intensive, immersive program based on ManAlive and restorative justice that has proven incredibly impactful. Recidivism dropped by 80 percent, and the men who did return to jail after their release largely did so for nonviolent offenses. The men enrolled in the program became nonviolent, and many of the men who had gone through the program became active in the prevention of domestic violence when they left prison. Furthermore, while the program cost $21 per day for each participating inmate, the return on investment meant that the community actually saved $4 a day. Yet the program has not been replicated in more than six other jails.

The US spends 25 times as much on research into cancer and heart disease as it does on violence prevention, yet the cost of domestic violence is thought to be far higher than the $6 billion a year estimated by the CDC in 2003. Snyder then recounts a story Sunny Schwartz told her about a man named Tari Ramirez, who went through RSVP but stabbed his girlfriend to death in front of her children when he was released. When Ramirez’s fellow participants in the RSVP program heard about the murder, they were devastated and questioned whether they should go on. Schwartz, however, was undeterred: “You have people going through chemotherapy and then someone dies. Does that mean you stop your clinical trial?” (124).

Snyder meets Jimmy Espinoza while participating in the RSVP group meeting at San Bruno. One of the group leaders tells Snyder the following:

[F]or many of these guys it’s not becoming nonviolent that blows their minds about themselves; it’s learning that they’ve been fed a line about what they’re supposed to act like and who they’re supposed to be, a line about what masculinity means and what being a man means (126).

Snyder now returns to the three key moments in Espinoza’s life that she teased in the beginning of Chapter 11. Espinoza came from a decent home and neighborhood, but one day when he was eight or nine, an older man bought him alcohol and molested him, repeating the act two or three times in the ensuing months. This is not unusual: “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%.)” (128). Soon, older girls were molesting Espinoza, including a babysitter. Espinoza explains how this affected him, saying, “The molestation from the man was worst, […] That right there made me violent. Made me a rageaholic, right? Lying, right? Just all these defects of character started growing at that moment” (129).

Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary: “The Fatal Peril Club”

Donte Lewis is another RSVP intern Snyder meets. Lewis had kidnapped his girlfriend and been sent to jail; a week after he got out, he pistol-whipped her and would have killed her had a friend of his not intervened.

Lewis grew up in Oakland, California, where violence was nearly impossible to avoid. Lewis met his girlfriend when they were young teens, and Snyder notes that relationships that rapidly become intense between very young people often lead to violence.

Like Espinoza, Lewis is employed by Community Works, an antiviolence and justice reform program in Oakland. The men in the group Lewis and Espinoza lead have multiple problems and multiple convictions, in part because domestic violence rarely happens in a vacuum: “[A] home with intimate partner violence might also have child abuse, alcoholism, and employment or housing instability. Traumatic brain injury or other serious medical conditions might be present. Education may not be a priority” (133).

The second pivotal moment in Espinoza’s life occurred when he was estranged from his girlfriend, the mother of one of his kids. Espinoza coerced her into meeting him, rammed a rented U-Haul into her car, pulled her out of the car and pushed her into the U-Haul, then drove to her house and dragged her inside. After that, he cannot remember what he did. Espinoza’s girlfriend has a very different version of events, which includes being kidnapped and held hostage for eight days in a hotel room. When Espinoza was finally caught, his girlfriend recanted much of her original complaint. Espinoza received a four-year sentence and served one.

Two months after Snyder attends an RSVP meeting with him, Donte Lewis disappears. She finds out that he has been arrested riding in a car with a gun present and in possession of crack cocaine. Snyder says the odds were stacked against Lewis:

He’s got a job, and a seven p.m. curfew. Community Works, Jimmy Espinoza, RSVP, they were all doing everything they could for Donte Lewis, but they were all also fighting the same systems with their other priorities, and with racism and classism embedded into their architecture, with limited resources and limitless need (146).

Snyder eventually receives a call from Lewis, who tells her that he had taken a ride from a friend and had intended to sell the crack to start putting away money for a place to live. The car’s driver, seeing police lights behind them, crashed the car into a wall, and Lewis woke up in the hospital. He received six more years in a federal prison thousands of miles from California. Snyder then tries to reach out to Jimmy Espinoza but is unable to find him.

Part 2, Chapters 11-13 Analysis

In looking at the abusers themselves, Snyder’s primary goals are to see what external factors contributed to their behavior and whether rehabilitation is possible. This makes the beginning of Chapter 11 an effective hook; Snyder implies that Jimmy Espinoza has turned his life around but withholds further details.

Snyder uses Sinclair’s backstory and theories to introduce readers to toxic masculinity as a concept. Sinclair argues that cultural norms, which support the social dominance of men, are largely to blame for the violence men perpetrate against women. The glamorization of violence as masculine coupled with the stigmatization of most emotion as feminine is a destructive combination; many men never learn to express any emotion but anger, and that only aggressively. In retrospect, this fits what Snyder has told us about Rocky Mosure. Rocky was not particularly secure in his masculinity, and his insecurity tainted whatever feelings he had for Michelle. This is nowhere clearer than in the note Rocky left professing his love for Michelle immediately after killing her; for men like Rocky, “love” largely takes the form of jealousy and anger.

As terrible as the actions of many of these men are, they are therefore in some sense victims of society as well. When Snyder returns to Espinoza’s story, and the molestation that changed the course of his life forever, she underscores this point. Juxtaposed against the scene that precedes it, in which a woman explains how one act of violence had repercussions far beyond the single incident, it is clear that Snyder wants the reader to understand Espinoza’s story similarly. Like Victoria, Espinoza was at one point an abused and defenseless child, and as in Victoria’s story, the repercussions of that violence ultimately extended far beyond the incidents themselves. What Espinoza experienced warped his ideas of trust and intimacy, leaving him with anger that he did not know how to handle.

In Chapter 13, Snyder shifts the focus of the narrative once again to Donte Lewis, a graduate of the RSVP program who is an intern for Espinoza. As Snyder reveals more of Espinoza’s story, it becomes clear that the two men have many things in common. This makes Lewis’s rearrest all the more ominous, and Chapter 13 closes with a cliffhanger that implies Espinoza might also have fallen back into destructive behavioral patterns.