No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder

I scored No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder from Libby when I was desperate for something to read. Unfortunately, it wasn't available through Kindle, so I had to read the whole thing on my phone, which was a tiny bit of annoyance and made it harder to take notes. However, the topic was interesting enough that I just kept at it whenever I had a few minutes and time alone with my phone.

As many of you know, I have experience in domestic violence. I have worked as a victim advocate and did court monitoring of domestic violence and sexual assault cases when we lived in Minneapolis. However, it's been quite some time since I've had any training in the field, and I looked at this book as a way to update myself on what's been done in the last decade or so. Honestly, the truth is bleak and it seems like we're no further in destigmatizing domestic violence or preventing it than we were thirty years ago.

Snyder is a journalist and she writes in an interesting manner by framing all of her large points about policy, statistics, and research around stories of victims of abuse, batterers, and family members. I read the book as having a few major threads: 1) Why victims and batterers stay together, 2) What research says about the impact of domestic violence on the greater commonwealth of society and how to prevent it, and 3) what policies should be put in place.

One of the most eye-opening sections for me was a section about the utility of domestic violence shelters. Some critics of shelters call it a "road to welfare" because women are forced to evacuate their homes, go to shelters frequently far from where they live, give up their local support network, jobs, and any routines they may have. Why are the victims the ones who have to uproot their lives in the name of safety? How do we keep women safe in their own homes? Proponents of shelters claim that they provide a safe space to give victims the chance to be comfortable enough to make informed decisions without the stress of an emergent threat. I honestly didn't even know there were criticism of shelter at all. I just assumed (based on my outdated education) that shelter was the best solution. It turns out that shelter is a solution, but maybe not the right solution for every victim.

"More and more victims resist staying in shelters, Dunne said. They wonder whether they can continue in their job or care for their elderly parents; whether they will be able to make a doctor's appointment or a dinner date with friends; whether their child can still be in the school play; whether they can bring family heirlooms; whether they can post on Facebook or Instagram. 'The answer to all of those questions is no,' Dunne said. 'Shelter was this way to get the criminal justice system off the hook. They'd say, "If she's really that afraid, she'll go into shelter," and when women didn't, we'd surmise that they weren't that afraid."" (page 534)

Versus:

"Shelters provide safe housing and trauma support for individuals and families, the vast majority of whom have endured chronic abuse, poverty, and homelessness. It's the place where survivors report feeling safe for the first time in their lives."  (page 537)

Snyder's answer to this debate:

I must concede that these two realities uneasily coexist: that shelter is necessary and saves lives, but it is also an abysmal solution. (page 538)

I have often grappled with the language of domestic violence because calling it domestic violence makes it seem like a private matter, as if it doesn't have long-reaching impacts to the greater community. Intimate partner violence is not entirely accurate, since the violence frequently happens between parents and children or siblings or people without romantic relationships. Snyder argues intimate partner terrorism should be the term we use and cites repeatedly how domestic violence incidents frequently escalate to larger-scale violence.

It's dense, but such a good, important read. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives. (page 26)

No one's putting flags up for battered women, are they? The book also listed a lot of international statistics, so this is definitely not a problem limited to the United States.

Private violence has such vastly profound public consequences...how much it costs us personally and collectively, in fractured communities, families, people. In severed lives and lost opportunities. In enormous financial burdens to victims, to taxpayers, to the criminal justice system. Domestic violence health and medical costs top more than $8 billion annually for taxpayers and cause victims to lose more than eight million workdays each year. It is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half our homeless women...(page 29)

I think it's sort of gross that we need to quantify in dollars how terrible intimate partner violence is instead of just realizing that people harming other people is morally repugnant, but I understand why this is important to do at the policy level.

Websdale told me that aviation has gotten considerably safer over the past two decades, whereas medical mistakes still happen far more often than they ought. (In fact, death from medical errors in hospitals is now the third leading cause of death for adults in the US.)...In medicine...there is a pervasive hierarchy that keeps the lines of communication closed. (page 221-222)

This was sort of sidebar in which the author talked about how the difference between aviation and medicine is that there are lots of panels to get together to discuss aviation mistakes, not least among them the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. In medicine, there's still a bit of the "doctor as god" and malpractice isn't examined carefully. A handful of states have started implementing domestic violence review teams, mostly centered on fatality reviews. These draw together people from a wide of range of backgrounds - medical, legal, police, social work, education, advocacy - to get together and figure out what went wrong in a case and how it could have been prevented. Having everyone in one room talking to one another is crucial in communication and problem solving.

He had multiple restraining orders against him in other states that Montana's law enforcement did not know about, because systems across states rarely communicate. Nor, presumably, did Ruth. Even today, in this world of hyper-connectivity, where we can get a drone to deliver our toilet paper, we still seem unable to create a database that speaks across state lines and across civil and criminal courts when it comes to violent people and their histories. (page 229)

This is something that has come to light over and over again in these fatality review boards. 

It's that thing, right, where men can relate to wanting their own daughters kept safe, kept from men like themselves, but somehow it doesn't extend to their partners. This view has always sat uncomfortably with me; must we always see ourselves, our own stories, to make someone else's mean something? Can't we just believe that all people should be safe and not just those who resemble our own mothers and daughters? Is relatability necessary for empathy? (page 497)

This is something that is deeply upsetting to me. Framing every murder as "someone's daughter" or "someone's wife" is gross. They're just someone. People shouldn't physically violate other people, period.

"The key with domestic violence," says Dunne, "is addressing it in the misdemeanor phase." One of the more challenging elements of domestic violence is that ideally you want to stop abuse from escalating. But for that to happen, misdemeanors need to be taken far more seriously than they generally are in intimate partner violence cases. (page 563)

Prevention detention statues emerged from federal legislation called the Bail Reform Act of 1984, which allows a defendant to be held pretrial if he or she is deemed dangerous enough to another person or a community. A determination of dangerousness includes factors like the nature of the crime, the evidence against the defendant, and the history of criminal activity, among others; most often, these statues have been used in gang or drug cases, though Massachusetts has seen a marked increase in their use for domestic violence. (page 566)

"The Constitution tends to frown on punishing prospective behavior," (page 567)

These three things are all in conflict with one another. There's an interesting tool called a lethality assessment that uses a 20-question survey and a calendar to assess risk of death to a victim. When implemented correctly, it can help prevent deaths due to domestic violence. But we don't want police to go around arresting people for a potential crime, so the truth is that we need to make sure misdemeanors are treated seriously and victim safety is taken seriously. It's a tricky line to walk, to be honest.

Fifty American women are shot and killed every month by intimate partners; a further untold number are threatened with those guns, kept in the line, kept quiet. (page 654)

Guns are bad.

"In some ways, men have been the biggest beneficiaries of the women's movement," she said. "Look at all the men who  have a very different relationship [today] with their children. They go to school events; they talk to their kids. In my neighborhood, the guys are always walking their kids to daycare, to school. Look at how involved young fathers are." (page 661)

Interesting. I sort of wanted more about how men benefited from the women's movement because this description is more "a few men benefited."

Things I looked up:

Crawford v. Washington (page 574) - 2004 Supreme Court case that ruled cross-examination is required of witnesses at trial unless a witness was unavailable (e.g, sick or dead). The Court said that a defendant had the Constitutional right to face his accusers, that testimonial statements by witnesses who did not appear at trial were unadmissable hearsay. This meant that victims who were too terrified to appear in court but were otherwise were healthy could no longer allow prosecutors to use previously made statements in court, but had to appear in court. When witnesses in domestic violence cases are uncooperative (as happens in more than half of case), prosecutors can't do much.

 Lance Mason (page 651)  - Former judge and Ohio state politician with a known history of domestic violence who killed his ex-wife, Aisha Fraser.