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

"Rachel Louise Snyder has done groundbreaking work on this difficult subject and opened up a discourse about how domestic violence involves invisible harms. The bar at which domestic violence becomes a crime often involves visible bodily harm, but victims are broken down in many ways that are not visible. Abuse can be verbal, emotional and digital and legal. Snyder illuminates the failure of government to address this pandemic. There’s a statistic in the book, from the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, estimating that in the United States, the lifetime economic costs associated with intimate partner violence – including lost productivity from paid work, criminal justice and other costs – is $3.6 trillion. The United States spends 25 times more on studying cancer or heart disease than it does on the prevention of intimate partner violence, despite the enormous cost to our communities. Domestic violence is the number one reason for calls to 911, but it’s also one of the most underreported crimes. There is so much shame surrounding this issue in the South Asian community. It would be very difficult to get accurate statistics. And it’s very hard to talk about within the community. I know in my mother’s case, one of the reasons it was so difficult for her to get out is that she didn’t have enough resources, and there was so much stigma surrounding divorce amongst her generation."