Our perceptions around domestic abuse tend to lack nuance. This realisation is precisely what Rachel Louise Snyder wedges between the reality of life for victims and perpetrators of what she calls “domestic terrorism”, and our generally complacent perception of it in No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us.
Domestic terrorism. The phrase is an odd one – somehow both jarring and clarifying, encompassing the terrible spectrum of abuses that can occur within intimate relationships, from emotional to physical, sometimes peaking in murder of a partner or familicide (murder of a partner and family).
Snyder reports directly from the ugly face of domestic abuse, carefully deconstructing lazy stereotypes and ignorant assumptions, placing it within a wider web of violence and social problems, and sharing accounts that reshape what we think about when we imagine the victims of “intimate partner terrorism”.
The book is deeply impactful and thoroughly researched. While it focuses on the unique setting of the US, with its own particular set of legal, structural, economic and other challenges and contextualises just how it can be that more than half of all murdered women in the US are killed by a current or former partner, No Visible Bruises reset something in me. Oh, I thought. Oh.
Somehow, I hadn't thought of my parents' relationship as on the abuse spectrum in the same way that outright violence is, but Snyder's book changed my mind
Transported to a moment, aged nine or 10, when, walking home from school, I happened to look behind me on the long, straight main road and see the unmistakable shape of my father. I was minutes from home and ran until my chest burned. He’s ignored the barring order again. Nothing new there – follow the usual procedure. Get in. Tell my mother. Bolt the door. Hide away from the front door so he can’t see us. Wait.
He appears, as he had so many times, shouting through the door, trying to shoulder it in, kicking it, veering between wheedling entreaties and threats. Call the Garda. Wait for them to come. Somehow, I hadn’t thought of my parents’ relationship as on the abuse spectrum in the same way that outright violence is, but Snyder’s book changed my mind. That incident and so many others came back. Oh, I thought. Oh.
As an investigative journalist working all over the world and an associate professor of creative writing at American University in Washington, DC, it became clear to Snyder that domestic abuse featured in some capacity within so many of the violent and social issues that she reported on, but it seemed a footnote within wider global unrest and conflict.
She confesses in the book to having consigned it to being a feature within the lives of damaged people, a destination you end up at through perpetuating modelled relationships and maybe making some unwise decisions, through being unlucky. She robbed the issue of complexity, as so many of us do.
No Visible Bruises is a masterful attempt to counter that position. It does so by telling the stories of women who have died preventable deaths in situations where, in retrospect, all the signs were there.
Snyder delves at length into the story of Michelle Monson Mosure, murdered in her Montana home along with her two children Kristy and Kyle by her husband Rocky in 2001. Rocky carefully bagged the family’s home movies, taken mostly by him, after killing his family and before taking his own life. They feature camping trips with the children, routine family life, and footage of Michelle in her underwear. She asks Rocky time and again not to film her like this. He ignores her requests. Eventually, she stops asking. It is a tiny signifier in a relationship in which he cut her off from everyone around her, financially isolated her, destroyed her confidence, and made her feel utterly powerless.
They met when Michelle was 14 and Rocky was in his mid-20s. Snyder devotes a good deal of time in the book to examining whether the terrible outcome of Michelle and her children’s deaths was inevitable, preventable, or otherwise. It becomes clear that there were so many points at which something could have been done, if the help had been available and those around Michelle and Rocky understood how to read the signs of what Snyder calls “fatal peril”.
No Visible Bruises also takes the novel and rather brave approach of engaging with abusers and batterers to gain a sense, through how they talk and think about their crimes and their victims, of how they came to be the way they are, and whether it is possible to rehabilitate a person with the hallmarks of an abuser – narcissism, deep insecurity, a confused relationship with gender roles, and so often, an abusive father in their own history. The result is both enlightening and frustrating as she follows men through rehabilitation programmes, often only to see them end up back in prison for the same crimes or others.
Snyder’s openness to the humanity within abusers while acknowledging the horror of their actions and her own circumspection around their ability to reform themselves is something rarely encountered in this kind of writing. So too is Snyder’s account of victimhood, which manages to sidestep cliches and make a victim’s life seem less far away from one’s own.
“What we might conjure, if anything at all, is a punch. Someone we’re dating, one punch, and we’d be gone. But that’s not how it happens ... A partner who might not like your makeup. Or a suggestive outfit ... Then a few months later, he yells a little louder than you’ve heard before ... And that one friend you have, the loud one? He knows she doesn’t like him ... neither the control nor the abuse tend to come at once, lit up like a punch. They leak out slowly over time like radon.”
Where the book falls short is in its wider contextualisation of how abusers and victims come to be, and the cycles in which they both become locked. Snyder bases her argument on premises around cultural determinism – the idea that we are all psychological products of our environment – without ever really exploring what these concepts mean.
She doesn’t consistently apply concepts such as free will, so while she uses psychological phrases around crimes being “multi-determined” (notably different from multi-causal, which contains no inherent implication of inevitability), she also impresses heavily on the importance of individual victims making decisions which will extricate them from horrific situations, or the decision by abusers to try to take responsibility for their actions.
In short, the philosophy and psychology of abuse is far vaster than Snyder has scope, and perhaps inclination, to examine. However, the book is a truly unique and beneficial account of abuse and its cultural context.
