Rachel Louise Snyder

very, very hard to read --it took me two full months, and i was constently working at it, managing a few pages or a chapter a week. a lot of this is very new, and a lot of it is very, very familiar.

-- this book was written during Trump Presidency The First (pub. 2019, so just prior to covid), and i'm living through Trump Presidency The Second, and i don't want to get especially political here but it is amazing, astonishing, horrific, to see how a serial domestic abuser -- which Trump is -- show more slide so easily into the need to control everything, everyone, everywhere, forever. "Why does he stay?" asks the book, and we can answer: he is full of shame and fear and emotional poverty, and inflicting that on someone else is the only way he can, briefly, feel okay. show less

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 show more 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. show less

“The culture that tells women to keep the family intact, to find love and be loved at all costs, is the same culture that emasculates and shames man in abusive situations, that tells men if they are victims, it is because they are weak and not real men. It is the same culture that tells them violence is acceptable as a response to any external threat or internal pain, but tears are not. It is a culture that limits both victim and perpetrator, the abused and the abuser.”

I am learning and show more I am hurting. I spent a considerable amount of time on this review and on processing No Visible Bruises. This book is acutely, vitally important. Considering the Violence Against Women Act, which expired a year ago to date. Considering the murder of women by intimate partner violence has increased 11% since 2014. Considering the majority of mass shootings in the United States begin as domestic violence. Considering the CDC found in 2017 that more than eight million girls experienced rape or intimate partner violence before the age of eighteen. Considering over 50 women are killed every month in the United States by intimate partners. We are floundering and we are suffering.

This book is an educational revelation that will keep you up at night and instill you with the need to publicly roar about this profound yet under addressed issue that is corrupting and razing our communities. No Visible Bruises is the ideal balance of storytelling, science, and statistics, as Snyder moves us, informs us, and incites change in us. She approaches the issues from all angles, considering not just the victims, but also the perpetrators, the lawmakers, the shelter workers, the advocates, the police officers, the medical professionals, leaving no stone unturned. Snyder shreds notions we’ve internalized involving victim blaming and the inherent misogyny in how we report on and discuss intimate partner violence. Parts of No Visible Bruises made me sob, others made me queasy, and still others made me rage with indignant recognition.

“If men are taught not to cry, women are taught crying is acceptable. If men are taught anger is their sole allowable emotion, women are taught never to be angry. Men who yell are being men; women who yell are shrill or they’re drama queens or they’re hysterical...Sinclair calls this ‘the elephant in the room.’ That we won’t say, simply, that it is men who are violent. It is men who take their violence out on masses of others. School shootings are carried out by young men. Mass murders. Gang warfare, murder-suicides and familicides and matricides and even genocides: all men. Always men.”

Snyder applies her journalistic expertise to seemingly every challenging aspect of domestic violence including the essential gagging of medical professionals by HIPAA laws; the often insurmountable challenges rehab programs for batterers face; the sometimes deadly communication failures between police, shelter staff, and hospital staff; the survival mindset many victims of domestic violence embody, which often looks like acquiescence to outsiders who lack understanding of the framework; and, finally, a systemic viewing of domestic violence as just that, a domestic issue, which leads to poorly written laws, gaping loopholes, and a lack of understanding of how domestic violence escalates, resulting in the deaths of countless women. No Visible Bruises firmly rejects any easy explanations, cop outs, oversimplified solutions, and insistence that our society and our system has done anything other than fail women left dead by intimate partner violence.

“Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent? Or better yet, why couldn’t he stop his violence?”

Reading things like “Domestic violence didn’t become a crime in Washington D.C., until 1991” and “The United States spends as much as twenty-five times more on researching cancer or heart disease than it does on violence prevention” and “In many states today, still, victims are barred from using their long histories of enduring violence at the hands of their partners in their own defense” and “Nearly 30% of [police] officers with domestic violence complaints were still employed in their same positions a year later” makes my stomach plummet to the ground. Snyder juxtaposes chilling statistics and harsh realities with tangible solutions, insisting that despite dismal realities we can be catalysts for change. No Visible Bruises is a fluid read and by far one of the most compelling nonfiction narratives that I have ever read, coming at a critical time in our society and enduring as a symbol of hope. Absolutely essential reading. show less

What We've Lost Is Nothing by Rachel Louise Snyder is an incredible, very highly recommended debut novel.

In What We've Lost Is Nothing, Rachel Louise Snyder details what happens to the people over a 2 day period after all the homes on their neighborhood street are burglarized during the day. The street is Ilios Lane, a cul-de-sac in an area of Oak Park, Illinois, well known for its Diversity Assurance program. When one of the residents optimistically writes that "What we've lost is nothing" show more in reality it is not quite the truth. The neighbors may have lost things that could be replaced, but what the burglaries really opened the door to were hidden secrets, repressed emotions and attitudes that were all just below the surface.

As the news crews follow the story and the online community is weighing in with their thoughts and opinions, the neighbors find themselves part of a larger discussion. Clearly the neighbors have lost the feeling of security and safety they thought they had in their own homes. This encroachment on their homes really left them feeling violated. The neighborhood is awash in suspicions, insecurities, and hidden racism.

Who is to blame? Could the perpetrators be the nearby poor black neighborhoods? Why is one neighbor lying about his vacation? Why was the teenage daughter of a neighbor home? Are the tough-looking Cambodian teens part of a gang? And why don't the parents speak English?

What We've Lost Is Nothing goes on to explore a plethora of emotions and attitudes swirling around the neighbors who are all now victims. The main family Snyder follows is the McPhersons. Michael feels he should be the one to organize the neighborhood and be a liaison with the police. Susan actually works for the Diversity Assurance program and believes it is a great idea. Their daughter, 15 year old Mary Elizabeth was home during the burglaries. She and another neighborhood teen were experimenting with ecstasy at the time. Mary Elizabeth's brush with fame on the TV news leaves her open to the attention of high school bad boy Caz. The emotional rollercoaster everyone is on is heading for a major crash.

This dynamic debut novel is expertly crafted and smoothly moves from one character to another, carefully revealing the truth behind everyone's words along the way. It could be that Snyder's background as an investigative journalist worked to her benefit in this novel. She presented what we needed to know as expediently and succinctly as possible while also allowing the tension to exponentially build up to the final conclusion. And the conclusion was wholly unexpected but in many ways the novel was leading up to something of that magnitude.
I really enjoyed this novel!

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of Scribner for review purposes. show less