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

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Discussion Questions

Themes

No Visible Bruises: The Codependence of Shame and Silence

The book’s title reflects both a goal and a problem: The goal of an abuser is to leave no marks that others might notice, and the problem of abuse lies in the fact that most of it happens behind closed doors, where it remains hidden from view.

Shame and silence intersect with abuse in several ways. The abuser often struggles with feelings of shame that he cannot address, discuss, or channel either inside or outside the home for fear of looking weak. The abuser takes out his rage—at himself, at his own failings, at society—on the person to whom he is closest. For the abused, the injuries she suffers are shameful—something she cannot admit because society teaches us that this violence only happens to ignorant, weak, or lower-class women, or to women who do not love their children enough to leave. Because the abuse is hidden from view, the victim receives neither the attention nor the assistance that someone with visible injuries could expect, and the silence that surrounds the victim only increases her sense of isolation and desperation. Further complicating matters is the fact that physical violence often occurs alongside emotional abuse that gradually erodes the victim’s self-esteem and thus compounds her sense of shame.

Shame and silence allow for the conflation of love and violence, which only furthers the problem. This generally begins slowly; the victim takes the first signs of a man’s jealousy as evidence of love, or the social isolation he enforces as a protective measure. By the time the victim figures out that love and violence have nothing to do with one another, shame and silence are already present, ensuring that the victim is reluctant to seek help or share her story.

This silence also has an institutional counterpart in the programs and structures designed to counteract domestic violence. To begin with, many of these groups and resources did not even exist a few decades ago. Those that have since cropped up have often struggled to coordinate effectively amongst themselves, which allows potentially dangerous situations to fall through the cracks. The same is true of police departments. Records of outstanding restraining orders, for example, do not always transfer from one state to another. Perhaps worst of all, the police themselves have a domestic violence problem that officers tend to ignore.

Toxic Masculinity: What Does It Mean to be a Man?

The idea that men should always be strong, impervious to grief, and without human needs is at the core of “toxic masculinity.” Contemporary conceptions of what it means to be a man have been handed down to us in several ways: as evolutionary holdovers from a time when men were hunters and protectors; from cultural influences like television, movies, and music that glorify violence and portray obsessive behaviors like stalking as evidence of love; and from the three main Western religious traditions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity), in which men sit at the top of a supposedly divinely ordained social hierarchy. The result is a society that teaches men to provide, to swallow back their emotions, and to join other men in glorifying violence.

The effects of toxic masculinity are widespread and often harmful to men themselves. However, this construction of masculinity holds a particular danger for women in romantic relationships with men. Theoretically, these kinds of close relationships rely on intimacy and vulnerability to function, but these are precisely the character traits that society discourages men from developing. As a result, many men struggle to communicate their thoughts and feelings about a relationship. This is of course not abusive in and of itself, but it often combines destructively with another facet of toxic masculinity: the association of violence with manliness. For some men, violence therefore becomes the only way they can express their “love” for their partners. This violence often takes the form of sexual jealousy or anger over other perceived slights, but it doesn’t have to. O’Hanlon, for example, says he “had not one iota of hatred for [his] family the night before [the murders]” (172), but he killed them anyway; his own self-image was so intertwined with his social and financial standing that, threatened with the loss of that standing, he perceived killing them as an act of love.

O’Hanlon’s story also points to the overlap between toxic masculinity and narcissism. Narcissism is a clinical diagnosis that a given abuser may or may not meet the criteria for, but it’s also in some sense the logical end point of male supremacy; when men buy into the idea of their superiority, the women around them become supporting characters or props for their use and validation. Espinoza at one point talks candidly to Snyder about how this dehumanization worked in his own life: “Girlfriends, yes, but even sisters and mothers were bitches. Sometimes, ‘my old lady.’ No woman had an identity; no woman had a name” (132). Ultimately, the combination of toxic masculinity and narcissism makes many men resistant to authority and unable to work within normal corporate and social structures and leads to everything from date rape to homicide. A wholesale change in the way we understand men and their role in society is needed, Snyder argues, to undo the effects of toxic masculinity on generations of men to come.

Collateral Damage: The Price Paid by Bystanders

The cost of domestic violence is quantifiable in many ways: in dollars spent on law enforcement, the healthcare industry, the housing sector, the economy, education, childcare, the judicial system, and so on. Those dollar amounts are staggering. Multiplied around the globe, they show that the cost of standing by while domestic violence continues to rise is unadvisable, untenable, and financially imprudent.

There is another cost to domestic violence, though, that is unquantifiable: the emotional toll that abuse takes on those who experience it. Domestic violence impacts the children who grow up in abusive homes without healthy role models, the friends and family members who encounter only lies when making cautious inquiries about their loved ones’ relationships, the law enforcement officers who return again and again to the same domestic violence calls and never find themselves able to help the victims, the friends and family members who lose loved ones to domestic homicide and can never recover from the loss, the guilt, and the shame, etc. In many cases, this collateral damage then creates damage of its own, thanks to the tendency of abuse to ripple outwards. Boys who grow up in abusive households—even boys who aren’t abused themselves—are more likely to grow up to become abusers, and the stress of police work likely contributes to the high rates of domestic violence among officers.

Taken together, the price of standing by—of acknowledging that there is a problem but failing to take action to curb it—is staggering and immoral. Snyder’s book is a call to action for every person, because each of us, she argues, bears this cost of domestic violence whether we realize it or not.