Book title and author: No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us Rachel Louse Snyder reviewed 1-3-24

Why I picked this book up: Preparation for working with a young woman that experienced DV.

Thoughts: This covers the sad commonality of Domestic Violence. Choking nearly always precedes a homicide attempt; teach police to recognize the signs and instruct doctors to assess women for traumatic brain injury. This book is written in 3 important portions. It is a pervasive, concerning, and real problem mostly for women as the victims, yes males experience DV too but it is usually the male abuser and the female victim. The demographics are broader then male/female but the drew a fine point in my mind about this problem and need for treatment.

Why I finished this read: I learned more about the cycles, they dynamics, suggestions, problem solving.

Stars rating: Given the heavy hitting DV in ours society 5 of 5 stars ( )

Domestic violence, or more accurately described as domestic terrorism, may be the only crime where the victim lands in jail before the perpetrator. What I mean here is that the victims are placed in shelters to protect them from assault and worse often before their abusers are located and locked up for any length of time.

And the reason for this is that in many cases the perpetrator is literally unstoppable in civil society today.

Why?

For one thing we tend to silo information in bureaucracies such that the breadcrumbs that would lead us to anticipate violence and homicide are spread across government agencies that do not coordinate their information. Sometimes we do this to protect individuals against the abuses against privacy, sometimes it is simply because civil and criminal institutions operate separately.

Another reason is the sheer power perpetrators exercise over their victims that prevent them from coming forward. They may not want to disrupt the family home even more than the abusers already do. Sometimes they fear with justification that the justice system will move too slowly to protect them before it’s too late.

Sometimes front line law enforcement are insufficiently trained to recognize the markers of abuse, or are insensitive to the victim’s situation, or may even be abusers themselves.

In many cases society hasn’t created the institutions that can cope with the epidemic of domestic violence. Not all jurisdictions have laws against strangulation, for example. There may be insufficient courts to cope with the flood of complaints. And the funds to finance enforcement of restraining orders are often lacking.

One need only look over to India to find a society drowning in its unpreparedness to prevent violence against women in domestic situations.

I can’t remember having read a book that so upset me and in which I marvelled at the bravery of the author — she went into rooms with murderers and offenders to get their side of the story — as in Rachel Louise Snyder’s “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.”

Over years of researching the topic she suffered through the stories of the victims and the perpetrators, the front line case workers, with the academics who slowly over years pieced together what was going on, and suffered along with the families (and the guilt of the families) who didn’t recognize lethal situations or recognized dangerous situation but didn’t to do anything about it because it would break unwritten norms to keep family secrets. She writes clearly and I would not be surprised if she were not herself suffering PTSD from writing this book.

But let’s go back to the shelters: caseworkers try to helicopter women and children out of dangerous situations for their own wellbeing, literally keeping them out of the comfort of their own homes, sometimes tearing them away from familial obligations to elderly parents, allowing the perpetrators to destroy family financial and physical assets, disrupting friendships, schooling, and disrupting the mundane things we do in normal households.

It shouldn’t be this way. The victims have suffered enough.

It is all in an effort to stop serious crime before it happens. Like Minority Report.

Which raises a new question: how effective can any strategy be to contain the violence that only reacts?

Snyder believes the longer term approach is to show younger men at an earlier age that being a man should be less about control than about making the home a safe place for all.

But the problem is large and pressing. In 2006 Washington, DC, alone had 30,000 complaints registered with the police. I checked the numbers in my own home town Toronto and saw comparable numbers for the increased population: about 45,000 women victimized in 2017 including cases where the victims were not related to the perpetrator. That means that every day an average of 123 people are being assaulted or strangled or shot or beaten in the city I live.

The problems are exacerbated by the easy availability of guns in America. And even where the guns are not being used to commit a felony their presence in the family home gives the abuser leverage over other members of the household.

Given the numbers of attacks we are talking about I can’t help but think the main reason American men worry about government taking away their guns is not because they are worried about outside attackers invading their home, it’s because they don’t want their own power in the home diminished.

When the attacks are not reported in America it also raises the question of why women don’t report them even more often. Do black women only report the attacks as a last resort because they know what the ultimate fate will be for a black man entering the American justice system?

Then there is the disruption caused by evictions of families being terrorized by the man in the household. There is the role of opioids and alcohol, or unemployment and the disruption of jobs lost through automation.

Domestic violence is spawned by silence and our unwillingness to address the imbalance of power in the home. It is neither unusual nor unpredictable. It is literally all around us. ( )

This took me a long time to read, because Snyder's research is so harrowing that I could only read it in chunks. But this is vital reading. I was so encouraged to read of the many people across the country trying to get a toe-hold anywhere to addressing how law enforcement, judges, clergy, social workers, and families can work together to save lives of the abused. This book will tear you up, might even cause you to judge the women and men whose stories you read. Don't.

As Snyder writes, "No victim of domestic violence ever imagines that they're the type of person who would wind up in such a situation. Whatever we envision when we envision a victim, there is one universal truth to each and every one of those images: none of us ever picture ourselves."

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It's one thing to take you through a domestic violence (or, as we could call it, intimate partner terrorism) and answer the question "why do victims stay?" It's something else to ask another question: "Why do we ask victims to leave? Why don't we ask abusers to stop?"

Whatever answers we have to that question, Snyder's decision to ask it--and to ask us why we don't--hit me in the gut. Of course, I think abusers should stop. But like everyone else, I always asked first why the victim didn't leave, because that's what I was taught to ask. No Visible Bruises is more than a catalogue of systemic failures, though there's plenty to show. Snyder is also interested in deeper questions--about violence and gender and about our society's relationship to gendered violence.

She focuses primarily on physical violence and its ultimate endpoint, murder. But physical violence doesn't exist on its own. It's intimately tied to emotional terror and control, and understanding that is key to any solutions. Snyder seeks to answer her own questions about teaching abusers to stop by looking at programs that try to teach abusers to change. This is difficult to read--I came away feeling that the programs are important and necessary, but that as a woman I could never afford to risk trusting any of the men in them.

There are a lot of systemic failures to document, but there are also efforts aimed at correcting those flaws and improving knowledge--understanding which women are in the most danger, why shelter is a flawed answer, improving police and advocacy.

The stories in this book--and the questions they raised--hit me in the gut and as I do so often, I came away feeling that there was so much more to discuss.
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Very clearly written, covers all aspects of domestic violence. Domestic violence affects more areas of our lives than I knew. She goes over the old and current responses to police calls and possible changes to the process. She also considers the changes in people's attitudes. There is more to the problem than most people know. Highly recommend this book for its even- handed consideration of a volatile subject. ( )