No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us

“In the summer of 2010, I’d been standing on my friend Andre Dubus’s driveway in New England when his sister, Suzanne, drove up. She and the rest of the family were all going on a holiday. The next few hours would turn out to chart the following decade of my life.” 

Rachel Snyder had recently returned to the US from Cambodia and was in the midst of a period of dissatisfaction: Her work in the US felt less meaningful than her work overseas did, and she was struggling to see her path forward. Snyder’s conversation with Dubus about preventing domestic homicides led to 10 years of research, travel, and investigation, and ultimately resulted in the book No Visible Bruises. This illustrates the impact that a single instance of breaking the silence surrounding domestic violence can have.

“An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe. This does not include men. Or children.”

This is the first statistic that Snyder introduces, and it is designed to catch the attention of the reader, who likely had no knowledge of the scope of domestic homicide. The fact that it is an incomplete figure only heightens the effect. 

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

While this statistic is jaw-dropping in and of itself, the question it implicitly poses—why it is that we mourn deceased soldiers but fail to recognize the unbelievable number of Americans killed in their own homes—is also significant. This hints at a subtext that will be present throughout the book: that because domestic violence is largely a “women’s issue,” it does not receive the attention that it should from lawmakers or the press. Just as women aren’t full human beings to the partners who abuse or kill them, they aren’t to society at large either.