No Visible Bruises

We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything at all to do with us, despite the World Health Organization deeming it a “global epidemic.” In America, domestic violence accounts for 15 percent of all violent crime, and yet it remains locked in silence, even as its tendrils reach unseen into so many of our most pressing national issues, from our economy to our education system, from mass shootings to mass incarceration to #MeToo. We still have not taken the true measure of this problem. In No Visible Bruises, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don't know we're seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence in our country around key stories that explode the common myths-that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and most insidiously that violence inside the home is a private matter, sealed from the public sphere and disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements from across the country, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.

Rachel Louise Snyder is a writer, professor and public radio commentator. Her first book Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade was published in 2007 by WW Norton. An excerpt of the book –aired on This American Life and won an Overseas Press Club Award. Her second book, a novel set in Oak Park, Illinois and entitled What We’ve Lost is Nothing will be published in January, 2014 by Scribner. Her print has also appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, Slate, Salon, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Men’s Journal, Jane, Travel and Leisure, the New Republic, Redbook and Glamour. She hosted the nationally-syndicated global affairs series “Latitudes” on public radio, and her stories have aired on Marketplace and All Things Considered. Snyder has traveled to more than 50 countries and lived in London from 1999 – 2001 and in Phnom Penh, Cambodia from 2003 - 2009. In the summer of 2009, she relocated to Washington, DC, where she is currently an assistant professor in the MFA creative writing program at American University.