Abstract
In No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives a human context for domestic violence (DV) homicide through her powerful storytelling based on in-depth interviews and extensive research. DV is a global epidemic that is especially fatal in the United States because of America’s easy access to guns. For example, DV claimed 10,600 lives in the United States between 2000 and 2006, which is three times the number of American soldiers killed in combat during the same period! Written in the form of literary journalism, No Visible Bruises gives us access to a deeper understanding about the lives of women killed by their intimate partners, the advocates and researchers whose efforts are saving lives, and the ways in which we all can make a difference for women who are subject to DV.
No Visible Bruises is organized into three parts: The End, The Beginning, and The Middle. Part I: The End chronicles the story of Michelle Monson Mosure from the time she meets her husband, Rocky Mosure, to the day Rocky kills Michelle, their two young children, and himself. Through Snyder’s powerful storytelling, we come to know and care about Michelle, and we experience heartbreak and profound sorrow when we reach the end of her story even though we had known all along how it will end. Thus, each reader of the text also arrives at the same agonizing question that invariably confronts families and friends of women who are killed: “What could I have done to prevent it?”
For the rest of the book, Snyder takes us on her quest to answer the question of what we can do to prevent death by DV. Snyder does not start with the “usual” path of focusing on what the women failed to do or not do (some variations of “Why didn’t she leave?”). Instead, she begins with the source of the problem, men who commit violence against women, and batterer intervention programs that are designed to rehabilitate the thinking and behavior of offenders. We learn that when it comes to familicide, the killing of one’s family and oneself, middle- and upper-middle class white men dominate the field. Misdemeanors are “warning shots” in DV, the author informs us through the insights of an experienced advocate. This is a critical point at which the system can intervene to prevent escalation of violence to homicide. Yet the system often let these white men off the hook because of their social standing and connections with people in key positions of authority, thus they are often not “in the radar” for intervention until it’s too late.
In Part III: The Middle, we meet people on the frontlines of DV whose commitment and creativity are making a real difference. They also stand on the shoulders of those who came before them and work to extend the accomplishments achieved by earlier actors in the DV movement. As we gain more data, knowledge, tools, and understanding, DV homicide prevention is a field that continues to grow and evolve. Identifying and filling critical gaps in the preventive system alone can make a difference between life and death. The DV High-Risk Team, a team-based approach that involves advocates and law enforcement, does exactly that: It uses the Danger Assessment tool to identify and target intervention and resources toward women who are identified as being at high risk. There is also a growing recognition that we need to rethink the current system in which DV shelters are often the only solution and build a system that does not banish the victim from her daily life and community. In one community, they were able to put fewer than 10% of the survivors into local shelters.
The two key factors that are making the biggest difference for DV homicides are early intervention (at the misdemeanor phase) and communication. The sharing of information and coordinating and collaborating efforts across sectors to detect and intervene early save lives. Surprisingly, all this does not cost very much, especially when you consider the real costs of DV and how it impacts victims, their family members, friends, neighbors, and coworkers. With a complex, widely diffused, and deeply rooted issue like DV, it “takes the whole village,” not just DV advocates, to diminish and put an end to DV. Snyder leaves open the ending of the story she is telling, reminding us that, when we all do our part, however small that may be, another and much improved ending could be written for the Mosure family and every other household that is tormented by DV.
