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| The most dangerous place for an American woman to be is her own home. |
The 10
best books of 2019
No Visible Bruises
by Rachel Louise Snyder
Domestic violence in America
An explosive new book condemns the male culture that sees 50 women a month in the US shot dead by the men they love
Amy Bloom
Monday 10 June 2019
W
hat do we talk about when we talk about domestic violence? We talk about the scary, rageaholic man and his hapless female partner. We talk about the sudden boiling over. We talk about, as the American journalist and author Rachel Louise Snyder puts it, “the unfortunate fate of the unlucky few”. We talk about the woman’s (they are mostly women, 50 a month gunned down in the US) tragic pattern of filing charges and dropping them, making complaints and frequently recanting, greeting him with hugs and kisses and a hot dinner the day he gets out of jail.
What is also talked about are the more recent remedies (for most of history, assault of a wife by a husband was not any kind of crime) of restraining orders and the need for the safe haven of shelters for abused women and their children.
Snyder is here to tell us, in her clear, smooth and accessible style (never folksy but never academic, and so matter-of-fact you can feel the writer holding herself in check so as not to overwhelm us with painful details), that we have misunderstood. The most dangerous place for an American woman to be – the most dangerous place on Earth – is in her own home. Snyder uses the case of a Montana family, Michelle and Rocky Mosure and their children, to create a strong narrative spine that runs through the book (which has been much praised in the US, described as a book that will “save lives” by the Washington Post). She interviews everyone who can be heard from: family, attorneys, police officers.There is a river of shame and grief in this book, and even the most well meaning wade in it. Even those who seem to refuse responsibility (“The criminal justice system isn’t set up for uncooperative witnesses,” says a former district attorney) do also seem to know better and to regret, genuinely, all the things that went wrong and led to a young woman and her children being murdered by a man who was known to the police and to the courts for having beaten and terrorised them all repeatedly.
In one of the most powerful passages, Snyder describes the home movies of the Mosure family; how Rocky keeps turning the camera on Michelle in her underwear. She asks him to stop, she asks him to stop again. Then she gives up asking and ignores him. It’s just a home movie. He’s just kidding around. And Snyder writes: why is that not OK? Why does her skin crawl, while watching? “Because she asked him to stop. And he didn’t. And eventually she gave up asking. This is loss of power at its most elemental.”
This is the problem with power: most men who abuse are not consumed with constant rage, they are consumed with the need to be treated the way they believe (and they way they have been taught) men should be treated. They should be served. They should be at the head of the table. They should be respected, above all, in their own homes. (And by respected, they mean obeyed.)
It doesn’t come up much, in discourse about domestic violence in the US; this bright red thread of everyday expectations for female behaviour in intimate settings with their partners. But once you read Snyder’s book it is impossible not to see a whole culture (at its most normal – I am including lots of fond dads and grandpas, not Trump and his henchmen) of women fetching and soothing and placating.
There was a charming episode on black-ish, the US sitcom, about making your man a plate of food. I loved it and I cringed. I don’t think that making your man a plate of food is the linchpin of domestic violence. I do think that the casual outstretched hand, eyes on the TV, expecting and receiving service as part of being a man, is not unconnected to the much darker manifestations of furious control and demands of abusive men.
And it’s certainly understandable that most people don’t wish to see those threads as connecting, although abusers in programmes such as RSVP and Emerge in the US often do come to see that they are coercive and manipulative in their relationships with women and that since childhood they have been fed a line of what it is to be a man, which includes a lot of blame, combat, denial of responsibility and resentment. Their testimonies about their lives are classic reports of disappointed narcissists – often charming, quite rational, not more impulsive than the rest of us.
Snyder sums up in the most straightforward way possible. She writes that there are two things that require our careful attention, and, if attended to, can make it so that domestic violence no longer accounts for 15% of all violent crime in the US. It turns out that strangulation (the act of choking someone) is a very reliable red flag for domestic homicide, much more so than a slap or a kick. Take note, police officers. Take note, clinics.
It turns out that if a timeline of activities (threats, stalking, choking, breaking restraining orders) is kept and shared among police and courts in different counties and states – the signs are there and the violence can be predicted.
It turns out that this ancient and unending wave of violence can be, if not stopped dramatically, permanently limited. Snyder lays it out and says: what will it take?
• No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us by Rachel Louise Snyder is published by Bloomsbury US
