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

Snyder takes a trip to a town outside of Billings, Montana to see Paul Monson, an electrical design technician in his early sixties. In 2001, Monson’s son-in-law Rocky bought a gun from a local newspaper advertisement and returned home to shoot Monson’s daughter, Michelle, aged 23, and his two grandchildren, ages 6 and 7, before killing himself.

Snyder backtracks to a pivotal moment in her own life, when she was recently returned from Cambodia and met Suzanne Dubus. Snyder had chronicled harrowing tales of survival in Cambodia, and in America she felt insulated and unfulfilled. Dubus told Snyder that she was working on a program to predict domestic violence homicides, launching Snyder’s 10-year investigation into the issue. 

Domestic violence is so prevalent that Snyder characterizes it as being “as common as rain […] 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe. This does not include men. Or children” (5). Talking to Dubus, Snyder realized that the violence she witnessed all over the world happens every day in the United States, and that her assumptions about domestic violence—about legal solutions like restraining orders and the agency of victims—were all wrong. She also vastly underestimated the problem: “Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives […] Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners” (6). 85 percent of domestic violence victims are female, Snyder says, and in 2017 alone, 50,000 women were killed by partners or family members. These realizations ultimately led Snyder to write No Visible Bruises.

Nearly all of society’s ills—poverty, crime, homelessness, and racial inequality—interact with domestic violence issues, which “cost […] us personally and collectively, in fractured communities, families, people. In severed lives and lost opportunities. In enormous financial burdens to victims, to taxpayers, to the criminal justice system” (7). Medical treatment for domestic violence costs taxpayers over $8 billion annually, and domestic violence is the root of homelessness for many women. Compounding the problem is the fact that domestic violence is often a learned behavior that continues in the next generation, which makes it a self-perpetuating cycle. Mass shootings can also begin with domestic violence, as in the case of Adam Lanza, who killed his mother before opening fire on students at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Snyder’s research led her to Paul Monson, who finds it nearly impossible to speak of what happened to his daughter and grandchildren. Reporters and researchers struggle with the same problem: “One of the most difficult aspects of writing about domestic violence is that you’re writing about a situation of such intense volatility that you risk endangering victims who are already right in the middle of an explosive and dangerous situation” (9). This partially explains why the issue receives so little coverage.

Combatting domestic violence at the federal level falls to the Office of Violence Against Women, a division of the Department of Justice. The budget for this office is only $489 million of an annual DOJ budget of $28 billion. Snyder suggests that if 50 men a month were killed by gun-wielding women, the problem of domestic violence would garner far more press attention and receive far more government money.

Snyder suggests that religion is partly to blame for domestic abuse, given that men have interpreted religious texts to justify controlling women like slaves and animals. Until the 1970s, most American people and courts believed that if a man was violent in the home, it was because his wife provoked him. In several countries, domestic violence is still legal: “These include Egypt, Haiti, Latvia, Uzbekistan, and the Congo, among others. And then there’s Russia, which in 2017 decriminalized any domestic violence that doesn’t result in bodily injury” (12).

In the US, the first real legislative act against domestic violence occurred in 1984, when the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act funded shelters and victims’ resources. In the 1990s, the US criminalized stalking, but Snyder says that even today stalking is not taken seriously, despite the fact that it is the precursor to domestic violence homicide in 75 percent of cases. Two other events in the 1990s also resulted in improvements in the handling of domestic violence. One was the trial of OJ Simpson, accused of killing his estranged wife. Television coverage of the trial listed domestic violence resources on the screen, and calls to shelters and hotlines skyrocketed. The second event was the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which passed in 1994 and grants cities and towns federal funding to address domestic violence. VAWA has to be reauthorized every three years (and was last reauthorized in 2021).

Snyder outlines her central purpose in writing the book: “My goal for No Visible Bruises, then, is to shine a flashlight in the darkest corners, to show what domestic violence looks like from the inside out” (15-16). Section One, she says, will look at why victims like Michelle Monson stay with their abusers. Section Two will look at the abusers themselves to discover why they abuse and whether rehabilitation is possible. Section Three will look at the work that is being done to interrupt the cycle of domestic violence. Snyder also explains that she will use “he” to represent a perpetrator and “she” for the victim, which is not to deny that women abuse men, or that LGBTQ couples experience domestic violence; rather, it recognizes that in the vast majority of cases, men abuse women. Snyder also refrains from replacing “victim” with “survivor” unless she knows for a fact that the victim did survive, and while she recognizes the difficulties inherent in the term “domestic violence,” she chooses to retain that usage for lack of a better, more comprehensive term.