Podcast on Crimes Against Women

Episode 2 - No Visible Bruises: Examining the Data of DV

June 01, 2020 Conference on Crimes Against Women
Podcast on Crimes Against Women
Episode 2 - No Visible Bruises: Examining the Data of DV
Show Notes Transcript

Award-winning journalist Rachel Louise Snyder examines the impact of her research in No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us a year post publishing. An outspoken journalist on issues of domestic violence, Ms. Snyder’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New Republic, and others. No Visible Bruises was awarded the prestigious 2018 Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard's Nieman Foundation. Content warnings for this episode include: abuse, suicide/self-harm, and violence.

Female Speaker: The subject matter of this podcast will address difficult topics. Multiple forms of violence and identity-based discrimination and harassment. We acknowledge that this content may be difficult and have listed specific content warnings in each episode description to help create a positive safe experience for all listeners.

In this country, 31 million crimes, 31 million crimes are reported every year. That is 1 every second. Out of that, every 24 minutes, there is a murder. Every 5 minutes, there is a rape. Every 2 to 5 minutes, there is a sexual assault. Every 9 seconds in this country, a woman is assaulted by someone who told her that he loved her, by someone who told her it was her fault, by someone who tries to tell the rest of us, it's none of our business. And I am proud to stand here today with each of you to call that perpetrator a liar. 

Maria McMullen: Welcome to the podcast on crimes against women. I'm Maria McMullen. It's been a year since the book, "No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us" was published by award-winning journalist, Rachel Louise Snyder. An outspoken journalist on issues of domestic violence, Miss Snyder's work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Slate Salon, The Washington Post and many others. No visible bruises was awarded the prestigious 2018 Lucas work-in-progress award from the Columbia School of Journalism and Harvard's Neiman Foundation. Over the past 2 decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has traveled to more than 50 countries covering issues of Human Rights. She's lifting Cambodia and is currently an associate professor of creative writing and journalism at the American University in Washington, D.C. Rachel, welcome to the show. 

Rachel Louise Snyder: Thank you for having me. 

Maria: As an investigative journalist focusing on human rights, I assume research must be key to pursuing a story. Can you tell us about the research you did in domestic violence and what sources you pursued? 

Rachel: Sure. I mean, the thing about domestic violence that I learned very early on was how little I knew. I carried all the assumptions that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave that if a victim got a restraining order, then, good. Problem solved. The things I've got really bad, maybe an abuser would be taken a jail. So the first thing I realized was just how little I knew. And one of the things that is so important in journalism is in the old days we used to talk about beats, like my beat is city crime or whatever. We don't talk so much about that anymore but those specializations, we call them, are really important because you find out where the research is and who you need to talk to and who's doing cutting-edge stuff and who's doing new stuff. And so, when I started to research domestic violence the very first
thing I did was just read books, was just read up. Read up books and reports and try to find out what we had learned over the course of 20 or 30 years of research of domestic violence. I've read the research of Jacqueline Campbell, her name is like on every single research paper in domestic violence today. So I started to read more and more and then the other thing you do is, you do a lot of background interviews where you're not asking people to go on the record. You just simply asking people, what do I need to know? What is the work today? And it's funny because I know so much now that I can look at court cases and I can look for example at expert witnesses that are brought forward and I can tell if they have kept up with the research or not.

I just did a story recently that actually isn't in no visible bruises, but appeared in the New Yorker on a case out of New York. A woman killed her abuser and was sentenced just this past February and the expert witness at the prosecution talked at length about battered women's syndrome, which is something that has been disproven for 20 years now. I mean, that is an example of someone who just hasn't kept up with the research. So, I spent probably the first 2 years, just trying to learn where the situation was particularly in America. And then from that, you have this chain of people, right? You never finish an interview without saying who else should I be talking to? Then, they give you 3 people and those 3 people give you 3 more and they give you 3 more and it goes on and on and on and on.

Maria: What was most surprising to you? Maybe there were some details or statistics that were really surprising to you in the research you did?

Rachel: Oh gosh. You know that question really gets at one of the philosophical underpinnings of my book, which is that domestic violence intersects nearly every social issue that we're facing today. It's certainly intersects gender, inequality, healthcare inequality, employment and unemployment, and homelessness. It's the leading cause of homelessness for women in this country. It intersects mass shootings and there's just all these ways in which domestic violence is like the origin story of so much other violence, and so many other social issues. That's one of the biggest things. The other things were things that every time a reader reads my book and has a like, "Aha moment", it's because I had an aha moment. I mentioned a couple that things were bad enough victims would just lean. If someone didn't show up to renew a restraining order, I thought that meant the problem was solved. I thought that if you were in a situation of domestic violence, it was because you had a bad luck or had made bad choices. I thought that violent people had 0 desire to be nonviolent. There's just like an endless set of myth-making attached to domestic violence. That still to this day continues to blow my mind. 

Maria: Have you been able to dispel some of those myths? 

Rachel: I sure hope so. I mean, that was really the intention of my book. I
realized very early on while I was still kind of informing myself about domestic violence that there hadn't been a book like this. There's a lot of really great books on domestic violence that are academic or their memoirs, or maybe they're kind of self helpy, but there isn't one that's written from a journalistic point of view. I don't have a first-person story of violence. Although, I am asked repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, which itself is a kind of gendered question a male journalists don't get asked that question nearly as often as female journalists do. But even though I wanted to dispel myths about for example of victims leaving, the fact is, victims leave all the time, but we don't know what leaving looks like. We think leaving looks like you have a suitcase packed at the door and you're headed out to Vegas for the weekend. That's not what leaving looks like. Leaving happens in the background. Leaving happens over the course of years. Victims have to lay the groundwork to be able to safely leave. Leaving is the most dangerous time for victims that research has been proven again and again, and again. And so, I spend really the first third of the book deconstructing what leaving looks like so that anyone who reads the book will never ask that question again, I hope.

Maria: Have you been able to ascertain if your work is informing victim services and maybe the judicial system?

Rachel: This feels a little like a self-serving question, like "Yes, I'm making [inaudible] on social change." But the truth is, I am hearing from people literally all over the world who are using this book. I was just asked to speak at Parliament when we're able to travel again. I've been asked to speak at the UN. I've had judges write to me, not enough judges, I need more judges to read this book in a [inaudible] inform themselves about the particulars of domestic violence crime. I like to talk about this one community in Massachusetts, one county, Berkshire County. The DA got hold of this book and not only made it a cornerstone of change in her office, but she she worked with the local domestic violence agency, who worked with a local bookstore creating this like virtuous circle of they were able to under write books for victims, they created 50 different book groups in their County and those book groups culminated in bringing me there as a talk. And then, I love this part, the health care workers who attended my talk got credit for continuing education. So she arranged that and it was just this whole sort of way in which the DA had this vision of how their entire county could be involved in that change and I'm hearing things like that all over the country that it really is a roadmap. It's been stunning to me to just see how far and wide it has travel. Before I wrote it, what I thought was, "I'm going to write something for the general public who know nothing of domestic violence. I'm going to write a book the people who are uninterested in domestic violence, but are interested in social issues will read.", that's what I had in my mind. It's shocked me to see just how massively welcomed it's been in domestic violence circles by experts, by advocates, by the judiciary, by congressional members. A woman in California is using it to to rework some bills that she wants to put forward in their state legislatures around things like strangulation and self-defense so it's amazing. It is truly been an amazing thing to watch. I feel like so much pressure now, how am I ever going to follow it up? 

Maria: It sounds like you have sparked a movement of sorts of all different types of groups coming together and trying to get a better understanding of the issue from different angles. Do you think then, you mentioned the general public and writing for the general public, what would you like for the average person to know about domestic violence?

Rachel: That's a tough question. I mean, I guess I would like the average person to know that just because you're not standing at the receiving end of a punch doesn't mean that domestic violence doesn't affect you in any number of ways or your community. We all, to some extent, are paying the price of domestic violence, maybe through our taxes, maybe through the gender inequality it keeps women from having a true Egalitarian status in the workplace, or in their homes, or in society, we're talking right now in the midst of a pandemic that is pushing feminism and women's places just back by years, decades in some homes as women try to continue to work but are also now doing 100% of the childcare or 90% of the childcare, 90% of the at-home teaching, the cooking, the cleaning and the etc. I am one of those women.. I'm a single mother. So I guess I feel like domestic violence is an issue of feminism and it's an issue of human rights and it's not about women. It is not a woman's problem. If anything, it's a men's problem, we don't beat ourselves, right?

Maria: Right. Right. And you make that point in the book. I think it's well said, well received. You also receive some feedback about the stories featured in No visible bruises specifically, how the book addresses communities of color and marginalized groups. What's your response to that? I've read some of the articles where you've talked about it and listen to interviews, but I'd love to hear you respond to that intersection. 

Rachel: It's an interesting question because there are ways in which it's relevant and ways in which its dismissed. And one of the things I will say, is that the book doesn't go into race nearly as much as another book should and could and I hope that it does because my intention was to get a book out there that would address the general public to kind of get people up to speed. But there's all kinds of places where I don't fully address things. Like, for example, mass incarceration, and domestic violence, which is just almost exclusively a problem for people of color. They're the ones who are bearing the brunt and bearing the burden of that. And so, no visible bruises had to have an endpoint at some point you have to end a book and so I don't spend a lot of time in that, but I've spoken about it since then. And the thing you find is, there are multiple ways in which the intersections matter. There are more women of color who are single mothers than white women, for example. So they bear the brunt of child [inaudible]. There isn't more domestic violence in communities of color than there are in white communities. And that's one of the things that is a misnomer that somehow it happens in poor communities or among communities of color and not with us wealthy white people, that is not one of our problems and it's a way in which we and I include myself in that, as a white middle-class woman, we have been able to dismiss this problem by saying, "It is not a problem for us. It is a problem for poor people. It is a problem for the ghetto or for communities of color." And statistically, our communities are just as likely to have violence. The difference is that our communities don't pay for it in mass incarceration for example, or having to go live in a shelter because we have more resources. So it gets at not only the discrepancy or the disparity and violence, but also the question of equality, the question of systemic racism that keeps these communities from having the same resources. 

Maria: So, curious to those points, if you had to go back and do this book again or possibly write another book to continue the work, would you address the socio-economic and racial backgrounds more directly in another work?

Rachel: That's a good question. Would I? You know, I'm not sure. I wouldn't do it in this book because the way I set up the book structurally, it wouldn't have made sense. There are a number of people in my book who are people of color that I don't identify as people of color, because I'm using pseudonyms. And in those cases, I gave them all very kind of milquetoast white names so that their identities would be hidden. So it's been interesting because some of the criticism is that I don't spend enough time on race or socioeconomics and it was a conscious choice for me in a certain way not to do that to keep people's identities from being known and assumptions that people make about everybody in the book being white or whatever. I also think, I'm not sure I'm the one to tell that story. I mean, I think in the literary community, which is different than the domestic violence community, and I [inaudible] both communities, we have had an ongoing, very public conversation around who gets to tell what stories and I feel like there needs to be more voices added to the kind of national conversation around domestic violence and not just people of color, but men too. And not just men who are out there touting non-violence because they are educated in their leaders, but men who are formerly violent who are now not violent. 

You know that county that I mentioned earlier, Berkshire County in Massachusetts, after my talk, I was doing a book signing and one of the great things this DA had done was the talk was in a theater or local big beautiful theater, she had invited all the social service agencies in town to come and set up tables and pass out their information about what they do. So they had people there from Child Protective Services and Trafficking and LGBTQ groups. It was really great so they could sort of communicate to those who came about all the different things that are happening in their town. And I had one man come up to me and tell me that he had been a violent husband to his wife and terribly violent, and he had gone to prison for more than 10 years and he was out and had been out for a long time. He was probably in his 60s, and he had tears in his eyes, and he told me how much he wished he had known these things when he was younger. And I'll tell you that guy, he's the only one that's ever come up to me and said that. I've given talks to thousands of people, he's the only one. We need his voice in that. We need those voices. I guess,  I've gone a little far afield of your question, but I guess it's an invitation to bring others into the conversation. I don't think one book can do it all. 

Maria: And that's definitely for sure. You touched on the structure of the book and I thought it was really unique that you begin with "The end." And then it kind of goes into the middle and the beginning. So the end which is the start of the book is the personal story, which is central to the theme of the book. That being the murder suicide of the Moser family. But more specifically, tell us about why you chose this structure? Was it deliberate? 

Rachel: Yeah, it was deliberate. So for anyone who might be listening who hasn't read the book, the first third of the book is called the end. The middle third is called the beginning and the final third is called the middle and let me tell you, when you are editing a book, I'm working with an editor and she says to you, "Well, at the end, when we talk about blah, blah, blah" and you're like, "Do you mean end end under the first end?" It made it really difficult to edit. So, I kept thinking, when you're a nonfiction writer, the key to knowing how to tell your story is structure. I have a background in fiction. I have a graduate degree in fiction and I kept asking myself, my second book was a novel, No Visible Bruises is actually my third book and so, I kept asking myself, if I was writing this as a fictional story and I knew the end, if I knew that the Moser family was going to all wind up dead, how do I compel someone to read from sentence to sentence? If you know the end of a movie why watch it, right? And then, we watch because we can't look away because it's so tense that we're taken with the story, and that's what I felt I really had to do with this whole book not just with that section. And so for a long time, I kept thinking well, the most boring way to tell the story is to do a chapter of every kind of segment that touches domestic violence, right? You'd have a chapter on victims and a chapter on abuser and a chapter on the cops and a chapter on a DA and that's like the most obvious and most boring way to tell it. But the thing that really gets people to read a book,
is when they are immersed in a story. Some of the most successful activism we've had I think for example of like Erin Brockovich is because we were just taken with these characters and with story. 

And so, when I [inaudible] maybe a longer answer than you wanted. I could talk about like writing choices all day. It's one of my favorite things to talk about, but when I was thinking about this, I thought we have to be able to tell the story fully and a lot of domestic violence stories can be told fully because people are in dangerous situations.  You can't talk to a victim who is still on the run from an abuser, right? You're going to put that person in a very dangerous situation. So in order to help to tell the story fully, you have to have as many different viewpoints as possible. And so in the Moser family story, Michelle's family was willing to talk to me but so was Rocky's and that is rare. And Rocky's best friend spend many hours with me. So that was one thing that I was able to tell that story from so many different viewpoints and get really inside of Michelle and Rocky's heads based on this testimony of the people who knew them the best, but the other piece of it was what about the abusers? We don't hear the voices of abusers and I know the people would make an argument that like, "Well, they're violent. They are causing all the trouble." and I think "Well, yes. That is why we need their voices." How can we ever hope to stop violence if we don't understand where it starts? And so, it was really important to me to spend a lot of time. In this case, it was all men to spend a lot of time with men who were trying to be nonviolent and to see what that struggle is like because what you learn in domestic violence is that people who are adult abusers were victims as children. Either they've witnessed it, or they were victims themselves. Not always, but most often, and I thought, "If we want to stop it, we have to go back to those stories."

Maria: From talking with Rocky's family and his friends, do you feel like you better understood why he was violent because of hearing more about him?

Rachel: That's a difficult question. I like that question. Yes, I mean in a way, yes. I had a researcher say to me, I think it might be in the book. But it was Neil [inaudible], he said to me once, "For many of these men and these abusers, their partners are a conduit to a world that they they cannot access." And he meant really like an emotional conduit but also, there are conduit in so many other ways who takes care of families social life, holiday plans, community, connectivity, all those things that make up the rich experience of life, those are all carried so often by women and in Rocky's case I think and in many, many abusers, that's what you see. That it is women who are carrying the world because these men for whatever reason cannot figure out how to access it. Maybe they think it is a weakness in them, maybe they've isolated themselves emotionally, I think it's any number of things but I do think that was true in Rocky's case that he he knew that Michelle and those kids were really all he had in his life and that it was Michelle in the kids who were keeping him connected to his own family, keeping him grounded in the world in some measure. James Baldwin wrote the most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose and I think that statement is true of abusers around the world. They become more dangerous when they have nothing to lose. 

Maria: I want to talk a little bit about the language in the book. Specifically, the term intimate partner terrorism. Why did you choose that specific way to describe domestic violence? 

Rachel: Well, it wasn't really my choice. It's what the research has been using for 2 decades now.  Domestic violence is still used but really what you find in most academic work is that term, intimate partner terrorism. And I wrote a thing after the book came out with Deborah Tannen, who is one of our generations foremost linguists. We wrote a kind of back and forth on what we should call it. She addresses a little bit in her most recent book called, "You're wearing, what?!" I love that title. She addresses specifically,  mother and child abuse, which is a dynamic that is often left out of domestic abuse. We can think of man on woman, but we don't think of parent on child as much or woman on man or whatever. Anyway, she felt and I agree with her that, the word terrorism although very weighted in our country today and in the world today, is the closest word we have to access what the experience is of living in a home with the threat of violence. You are
living in a state of perpetual terror. The phrase walking on eggshells is used all the time. I hate clichés and I especially hate that cliché because it doesn't hurt to walk on an eggshells, right? You walk out an egg shell, a little tiny crunch you move on. It is much more. Domestic violence is much more like, walking over sheets of broken glass or something more dramatic, that is not captured by that phrase. But I think to me, intimate terrorism even gets at
the experience a little bit closer because it's not always your partner, right? Sometimes it is a sibling. The book educated Tarah Westover's beautiful, beautiful memoir talks about the violence she endured from one of her older brothers, that is intimate terrorism. So I feel like you get at what the experience is like using that language more than you do in domestic violence which is so abstract and arbitrary.

Maria: Yeah, that is a good point. I think listening to you describe it helps us understand in a much more personal way what is in compass within domestic violence or intimate partner violence or those relationships.

Rachel: Talking about Rocky and Michelle, I mean, you'll know from reading the book, Rocky was not all that physically violent. There was not much evidence that he was physically violent. We do have an affidavit from Michelle where she speaks of his physical violence. But otherwise, she wasn't walking around with injuries and things like that all the time. What are the things he had done is, he had gone and got a rattlesnake from the outskirts of Billings Montana where they lived and he kept it in a cage. And that's what he used to threaten her. I'm going to put that snake in bed with you or I'm going to put that snake in the shower with you if you do something that pisses me off, that level of terror, you don't need physical violence. But it is certainly living inside of that kind of terror. 

Maria: Yeah, that's certainly is. I think that is terrifying and could be classified as a form of terrorism, for sure.
 
Rachel: Yes. In Montana, it would be a criminal endangerment but he was never charged with that it and it's a felony. Anyway, go ahead. 

Maria: I was reading in the book that and I'm going to paraphrase for a minute that when it comes to people we know, we have trouble seeing the violence or seeing them as an abuser through your research, were you able to uncover anything that can help us understand why it is more difficult for someone to see their friend or maybe even their own son as an abuser? And any idea of how we can change that, how we can change those perceptions, so that we might be able to recognize abuse even in our own family?

Rachel: I don't think we can recognize it because we're looking for monsters and abusers are not monsters, right? Some of them are very loving, some of them are wonderful coworkers. I mean, abusers are not rage-a-holics, right? The reason that Ray Rice was sent to anger management rather than abusers education which is very different and speaks to a deep misunderstanding that the judge in that case had of domestic violence, but the reason he was sent there was because everybody has a different image of Ray Rice, he's this Champion. He's this great football player, same with OJ for that matter. He had a much different association than an abuser.
Abusers are not people who are generally having anger and rage problems. They are generally people who want and need some kind of power and control over a particular person or maybe set of people, their own family. But they know perfectly well how to behave outside of the home. They would be losing jobs left and right if they treated their boss or their co-workers the way they treat their significant others or their family members. So I don't know that there's anything we would recognize unless we saw a violent act. The only way we're going to recognize it is by opening up the discussions, by creating spaces free of shame and judgment for people to be able to come forward. And I mean, both victims and abusers. 

Victims don't come forward either because it's deeply shameful. There's the assumption until the 70s in this country, the literature said, if you are enduring violence at home, it's because you have done something to bring it on. That was until the 70s well into my lifetime. So I think that we still have a long ways to go to create spaces where people feel free to talk about what's going on at home. And I think it also takes educating. Michelle Monson Moser may not have recognized that a rattlesnake in her house, was domestic violence. If you'd asked her, she may have recognized that it was wrong and she certainly recognized that it was terrifying, but did she know it was a crime? Did she know it was domestic violence, right? I don't know. So, this is one of the ways in which I feel like the me to movement has been really critical for the domestic violence movement to show us a way to move forward, to talk with our family members, to invite clergy, in a way [inaudible] talks to a domestic violence agency, I say to them, "You should never do a training without inviting clergy from the area", right? Because victims go to their clergy members far more often than they go to their domestic violence agencies because they may not know what violence is, they may not know that coercion or financial abuse or emotional abuse is just as deadly, in a sense as physical abuse. 

Maria: Do you want to talk about the danger assessment? 

Rachel: Sure, the danger assessment is really one of our most useful tools in domestic violence for recognizing a level or giving some kind of sense of level of dangerousness for anyone in a situation of domestic violence and it does so in a couple of different ways. First, it lists the 20 highest risk indicators for domestic violence homicide. And there are things like access to our ownership of a gun, prior incidents of domestic violence, strangulation, which is a different category of dangerousness than say a punch or a kick to the ribs. Unemployment is is a stressor, drug and alcohol use, children in the home that are not biological children of the abuser, all of these are in the danger assessment. It waits the answers to those questions so that you get a score and depending on your score, the higher your score, the more potentially lethal your situation is. But the other thing that it's helpful for is domestic violence agencies and police jurisdictions and precincts all over the country are doing forms of the danger assessment now. 

Police made some shortened forms called lethality assessment, where they may ask 3 or 5 or 7 or 10 questions and maybe not all 20, but domestic violence agencies by and large are using this really around the world, but so many of them don't do a timeline along with it. And what the timeline is for victims to be able to write down incidents of abuse when they happened, what happened in each incident. Ad the reason it's so important is because it gives you a sense of whether or not things are escalating. Had Michelle Monson Moser done a danger assessment and a timeline, she would have seen that incidents with Rocky were escalating and seeing that knowledge is empowering, right? And she would have been able to maybe say like, "Okay, I can see things are getting really bad. I've got to act, I've got to do something really dramatic here" but unfortunately, she was never given that danger assessment and timeline. But victims can go and look on dangerassessment.org. I think it is the website they can look themselves at these risk indicators and try and empower themselves to figure out exactly where they are in their own situation. And they also feel I think by and large, less alone when they're able to see, like, "Oh, what is happening to me in my house? This is normal, and this is bad."

Maria: Thank you for that. Our final 3 questions that we are asking all of our speakers in this series, in the conversation of domestic violence, what word do you wish people would stop using about domestic violence? It could be a phrase. Could be something you'd prefer they use. 

Rachel: I mean, I wish they'd stop using domestic violence. I wish they'd use intimate terrorism. It's closer to what it actually feels like what's going on. I know a lot of people feel like they don't want to use the word victims. Yeah, I mean, a lot of times we use survivors, but in my book, I only use survivors if I knew for sure that they had survived and that they were truly free. That's a tough question. I guess I'd have to go with domestic violence. I wish we could call it something else. 

Maria: What inspires you?

Rachel: Art and poetry inspires me. When I was writing this book, I found it so emotionally taxing that I could only read poetry. I couldn't take in a whole narrative so I would have to say poetry inspires me.

Maria: That's really brilliant. And in fact, you already answered the next question I was going to ask you I think you did. Anyway, if you found your work intense and what you do to combat burnout? It sounds like poetry might be one of the solutions?

Rachel: Yeah. Poetry is definitely a solution. It took a long time to get to the place where I read poetry regularly and I'm 51 now. And I was probably 45 or something before I read it regularly even as a writer, which is sort of shameful but I'm not great at recognizing and adapting myself when burnout starts to hit. I do talk very briefly in the book about a period of time where I had to just take a year off from researching domestic violence. It was just too much. It was too many stories. And during that year, I read and I painted, I do a lot of visual art as well. My daughter and I made an art set up in the dining room. We don't even have a dining room table anymore. We just
have art on top of it painting. In any point in our home, there's pieces of art happening and so I think art is, one place I go. We feed our bodies with food and we feed our minds with intellectual pursuits and for me, art and poetry is a necessary kind of soul food, but I think that's going to be a lifelong pursuit of mine is to keep myself from burnout and to just stop and say, "I got to go do some yoga now or something", you know?

Maria: Yeah, that's incredibly smart. Do you write any poetry? Do you think you will write poetry?

Rachel: I don't write any poetry. I mean, as I said, I do write fiction but my grandfather was a poet and a journalist and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. And before he died, I asked him what he thought the difference was for him between poetry and journalism and he said, "Oh, there's really no difference. It's just that journalism is only here today and poetry last forever, but they both capture something important about how we live right now." So I very much keep that in DNA in some way or in my body. I believe that all of these genres are real [inaudible] human-caused sparks fiction and nonfiction poetry and they all speak to one another. So whether or not I ever write poetry, it kind of measures less than the [inaudible] it played in my life still. 

Maria: That's so beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Where can people find you and learn more about your work? 

Rachel: I'm on Twitter @RLSRIGHTS. My website is Rachel Louise Snyder and I live in Washington, DC. You can find me at American University.

Maria: Perfect.

Rachel: Although not next year. I'll be on a Guggenheim Fellowship next year. 

Maria: Wow, that sounds really exciting. Maybe we can visit again and talk about that. 

Rachel: Yes, awesome. 

Maria: Please join us as we listen to the author read a portion of the afterward for the upcoming paperback edition of No Visible Bruises that includes a personal story.

Rachel: On June 7th, 2019, I got off a plane to a frantic voice mail from my friend, Michelle. I was in the middle of the book tour for no visible bruises and on that June morning, I stood on the Jet Bridge in Washington, DC, waiting for my luggage and I heard Michelle say, only that something was happening at her brother's house and she didn't know what and could I call her. It was urgent. I didn't listen to the entire message, I just called. She answered before it even rang. "Something's happening at Jason's", she said. I asked, "What?" "[inaudible] hurt or he's hurt himself?" "I don't know." Michelle was speaking in fragments between frenetic breaths, repeating, everything twice, she'd been calling his phone over and over. She was talking to me from O'Hare airport trying to get a seat on the next flight out.
On that June morning, I ran from the Jet Bridge ran through the airport, called my ex-husband who lived a couple of blocks from Jason and Lola and asked him to go see if they were okay. When he arrived, the SWAT team was there. Paul, my ex, put me on the phone with the SWAT leader and I gave him Michelle's contact information. The girls names, the daughters of Jason and Lola, and then the school. Jason and Lola's older daughter was one of my daughter's best friends. The officer took down my information. By the time I arrived from the airport, their house had been designated a crime scene and either Jason or Lola, we never knew which of them it was had been taken to the hospital by ambulance. All of our daughters were still in school and we talked about logistics, how to collect them and where to take them and for how long, how to tell them. Slowly, we gathered at my house. First, Paul and my daughter. And then Michelle and her mother and her cousin who was a child trauma therapist. And some of our other friends and we sat filled with the nervous energy that one feels from being blindsided. We would not know for many hours what had actually happened and it would be weeks before we would begin piecing together all the details. I knew at some point early in the afternoon that Lola had not made it. By evening, we learned Jason was also dead. This is how Michelle says it now, "My brother took his own life after taking that out of his wife's." 

This is the story of domestic violence homicide. The immediate victims, yes. But also the riptide that tears through the lives of those left behind. The families, the friends, the co-workers, the neighbors, the entire community. Before last June, I had a privilege I wasn't even aware of having reporting on domestic violence from the outside. In No Visible Bruises, I talked to families who've gone through this very thing and now all those stories, all that terror and trauma had barreled right into the heart of my house and my life and perhaps even more to the point the life of my daughter and my dear friend and 2 other little innocent girls whose lives would be forever transformed.
Most days, I still do not have words for this.

No Visible Bruises tell stories from the United States but the pattern of rising intimate terrorism and domestic homicide are the same no matter what country you're in. The aggressive behavior, the gendered roles, the coercion, the psychology of the victims actions. Countries around the world will have this book and translation soon. But for me, the goal of No Visible Bruises was simple, to get something about domestic violence launched into the public's view, a very basic book that could perhaps destabilize the status quo, and the status quo was to largely ignore it for far too long. I didn't write it for the experts though I've been heartened at the number of experts who have read it and reached out to me. I wrote it to give a view into the victims and perpetrators and to the frontline advocates. But mostly, I wrote it for the layperson, the one who knew nothing, but assumed everything, the woman who questioned the very nature of her suffering, the man who believed that this was still a woman's problem, the LGBTQ youth who feels entirely unseen, and for people like me who bought into myths, she didn't even know she was buying into. In this way, I suppose I wrote it for the person I once
was before I learned all that I know now.

Maria: To learn more about this topic and other issues impacting crimes against women, visit conferencecaw.org. That's conference, CAW.org and find us on social media at National CCAW. Thanks so much for listening until next time, stay safe.

Female Speaker: Interested in learning more about the topics you've heard on this podcast? Listeners of the podcast on crimes against women can
receive $25 off of registration to the 34 part web series beginning on June 2nd. Visit www.conferencecaw.org/register and enter podcast 25, that's podcast 25 at checkout.

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