Rachel Louise Snyder

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

There are two stories at play within What We’ve Lost Is Nothing. There is the story of the home invasions and their aftermath. This involves the residents of Ilios Lane as they search for answers and closure to a situation that left them all feeling vulnerable and violated. That they live so close to the border between posh and dangerous escapes no one and adds fuel to their indignation. The other story is Oak Park itself and its push for diversity. As all of the residents struggle to make show more sense of the series of invasions, the push for diversity comes under intense scrutiny. Those who once prided themselves on tolerance and acceptance find themselves battling familiar prejudices having to do with skin color and economic status. These two stories intertwine and intersect but remain distinct from each other, as they both force readers to hold up a mirror and search for one’s own hidden biases.

The force of What We’ve Lost Is Nothing is not its characters. Most of the characters are archetypes, serving the purpose of fulfilling the necessary roles needed in such emotionally fraught circumstances. Names and other details get lost in the action, and one finds that it is not necessary to remember the name of the prejudicial father or kind-hearted older man, the immigrant family on the corner, the young couple still under Daddy’s tutelage, and the not-so-young couple parting ways. They are there to service the story and nothing more.

The stories themselves are surprisingly quiet. There is action, but not as much as one might want or anticipate. The true action occurs internally, as each character works to find meaning in what happened and work through the issues brought up by the lack of answers. For readers, it is a cerebral experience more than an intensely emotional one.

What We’ve Lost Is Nothing serves as a stark reminder that snap judgments serve nothing, and that a situation or a person is always more complicated than it may initially seem. The audacity of the daytime home invasions are shocking, but the residents’ reactions towards their fellow neighbors and others offering help is the truly disturbing part. The unspoken, unrecognized prejudices do more to damage the community of Oak Park than any of the more overt biases. Yet, there is a modicum of hope underwriting the story, highlighting the idea that those championing change and tolerance will eventually succeed. It is this lightness against the dark occurrences and reactions on Ilios Lane, which allow readers to stick with this rather quiet and provocative novel. show less

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 show more 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." show less