I drive my rental car from downtown Billings to a four-story house far outside of town, perched up on a hill, where the man inside can view anything that might come at him. Telescopic observation of the world outside: mountains, plains, escape routes to everywhere in Montana and beyond. The man I’m here to see has avoided me for a long time. Passive avoidance. I’ve come to Billings from my home in Washington, D.C., talked to his daughters, his ex-wife, caseworkers. Returned again. I know the town now. Some of the police, some of the prosecutors, advocates, hotel workers, and even the printer whose wife runs a basement museum dedicated to women. And now, finally, on this maybe my third visit, he has agreed to see me.
I talk to a lot of people who don’t want to talk to me. People who’ve murdered their families, people who’ve nearly been murdered, people who’ve arrested those murderers, people who’ve grown up with people who nearly murdered them. Men like Paul Monson are always reluctant to talk, reluctant to voice the magnitude of what they’ve lost, because what they’ve lost skirts the very limit of their imaginations.
When I arrive I hear shuffling inside the house, and think for a moment that Paul won’t answer, that he’s changed his mind about the interview. I’ve been in Billings for several days already; he knew I was coming. His ex-wife, Sally Sjaastad, has spent many hours with me, but could not get him to agree to meet me the first time she asked. Or the second or the third. I’m surprised, frankly, that he agreed at all. The windowless front door is gray and full of dents.
Finally, the door opens. Paul barely looks at me. He’s a little hunched over, white hair receding, face drawn. He looks his age, early sixties. Paul opens the door wider, gestures me inside without meeting my gaze. He wears a blue shirt, buttoned up, jeans. Looks like he’s clenching his jaw.
The house, which Paul built himself, has a just-moved-in feel to it. Not much decoration, opened boxes here and there in a couple of corners. A telescope points toward the carpet, like it’s resigned its mission. Mountains dominate the view outside. Paul is reserved, quiet, meticulous. We sit at his dining room table and he runs his fingers along the smooth edge, watching his own hands. The table is covered in piles of paper. I make an off-handed comment about my rental car, and it sets us on a safe course.
My father taught me about cars, how to change oil and tires, instructions on measuring fluids and swapping air filters. The mechanics of a piston. Basic stuff, but it’s enough. Paul is an electrical design technician—an engineer type—and so cars are a comfortable topic for him, the familiarity of the machine. An equation that adds up—wires atop plugs create a spark, which fires an engine. They’re predictable. Fixable. Something goes wrong, it’s a mystery that can be solved. I let him talk. He tells me he bought all of his daughters their first cars. Alyssa’s was a Honda Civic. Michelle’s a white Subaru. He says Melanie is “kind of a car eater,” so he’s bought her several. He knows we’re not yet talking of the thing I came to talk about, and I can feel the tension in the room, palpable as humidity.
Rocky was into cars, too. Paul remembers Rocky’s first car, a little green thing. An Opel, he thinks. Rocky was his son-in-law, married to his middle daughter, Michelle. “The first memory I have of him is pulling up to my curb,” Paul says, to come and see Michelle. The car first, then the man. Later, Paul would get the impression Rocky spent half his time working on a Mustang. “He had one he was building, and the other one was a parts car,” Paul says. “That was his interest and it looked like to me that he spent a lot of time in the garage by himself.”
Paul says he and Rocky never really bonded like a typical father and son-in-law. For nearly a decade Michelle and Rocky were together, but Paul can only remember having one conversation with Rocky, about that Mustang. Rocky had once asked Paul’s advice on paint color. “White’s the way to go if you don’t really know what you’re doing,” Paul tells me. The most forgiving of colors. You can screw up with white and the result will still be decent. “White’s a color all by itself,” he says.
In November of 2001, Rocky Mosure bought a gun from the Thrifty Nickel, the classified paper where you can buy everything from a ferret to a tractor to a piano. Then he went home, where Michelle had just fed the kids dinner. A neighbor saw Rocky peering in the windows. Sometime after, one by one, he shot them. Michelle, Kristy, Kyle. Then himself.
It was a case that shocked the entire state. Michelle was young, twenty-three, her kids six and seven. In first and second grade. Learning to read. Drawing stick people and lollipop trees. Paul found Kyle slumped on the stairs, Rocky at the bottom, his face all twisted, scribblings on his arms in what looked like Magic Marker. Michelle’s car was there, and for a few minutes, Paul thought maybe she was alive. He ran to the backyard, then the garage. He saw Rocky’s Mustangs. A bag of family videos. Then the police came. And they found Michelle.
I’d arrived at Paul Monson’s house as most journalists arrive at their most pivotal stories: through a tangled series of people and geographies and years of research. 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.
Less than a year earlier, I had returned to the States after living and traveling abroad on and off, most recently in Cambodia, where I had spent six years. The adjustment had been difficult. I sat in faculty meetings at the university where I was a new assistant professor, feigning knowledge in matters of bureaucracy and pedagogy that felt like a foreign language to me. During my time in Cambodia, I had written about gang rape and post-genocide society, poverty and workers’ rights, stories that felt palpably about survival in a way that nothing in my new life did. Our expat dinner conversations in Phnom Penh had revolved around the war crimes tribunal,1 sex trafficking, ongoing violence, political corruption. Once, while I was walking my dog in a local park, a moto taxi driver who knew me from our shared neighborhood sped up beside me, tossed me across the seat behind him, balancing my dog in my lap, and zoomed away from Hun Sen Park as fast as he could. A man had been shot seconds earlier just fifteen feet away from where I’d been walking, and Sophal, the moto driver, had taken it upon himself to get me to safety. Another time (again with my dog), a man set himself on fire in that same park, and I froze in panic, watching him burn. My friend Mia, who also lived in Phnom Penh, used to say that she sometimes felt we were living on the front lines of humanity.
In the United States, it wasn’t that there were no problems—poverty, disease, and natural disasters all happened here, too—but I’d forgotten how possible it was to live where, if you had the desire and the means, you could fairly easily insulate yourself from a lot of these problems. And my new life insulated me from the kinds of issues and stories I’d covered for decades in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I wasn’t unhappy. Just restless. I’d studied fiction in graduate school, but gravitated toward nonfiction soon after because I understood almost immediately that nonfiction was a more direct source of change. I was pulled toward hidden corners of the world, to disenfranchised people, because I knew in some small measure what it felt like to be an unseen, unheard person, what it felt like to grieve beyond what you thought your body could absorb.
Suzanne and I exchanged small talk on her brother’s driveway that day in 2010. She and the family were still in preparation-and-packing mode for their annual camping vacation into the hinterlands of Maine, and Suzanne had been greeted by her brother, Andre, with a long shopping list. She told me she worked for a domestic violence agency in town, that they had recently developed a new program that she was calling the Domestic Violence High Risk Team. Their primary aim was simple, she said: “We try to predict domestic violence homicides before they happen, so we can prevent them.”
It sounded immediately implausible. So implausible in fact that I thought I’d misheard some elemental piece of it.
“Predict?” I remember saying. “You said predict domestic violence homicides?”
I had come across domestic violence in my reporting over the years, not only in Cambodia, but also in places like Afghanistan, Niger, and Honduras. But it had never been a focus for me; instead it was always adjacent to whatever other story I was writing, so much so that it was practically banal. The young girls jailed for love crimes in Kabul; the Indian child brides who gave interviews only in front of the men who controlled them; the Tibetan women forcibly sterilized by the Chinese government; the teenage brides in Niger cast from their villages after post-pregnancy fistulas made them pariahs; the Romanian women forced to birth multiple children under Ceaușescu and who now, in their early thirties, were grandmothers fated to poverty; the Cambodian street workers beaten and gang-raped for weekend sport by well-heeled Khmer teenagers. All of these women, in every country, were brutalized and controlled by men as a matter of routine. Men made the rules, primarily through physical violence. It was there lurking in practically every story I’d ever covered across the world, a shadowy background so obvious I didn’t even have to ask about it most of the time. It was as common as rain. Until that moment in the driveway with Suzanne Dubus, if I thought of domestic violence in the States at all, I saw it as an unfortunate fate for the unlucky few, a matter of bad choices and cruel environments. A woman hardwired to be hurt. A man hardwired to hurt. But I never envisioned it as a social ill, an epidemic we could actually do something about. Now here was Suzanne Dubus talking about preventative measures for a type of violence that, for the first time, I saw operating along a continuum. The young girl in India married as a child, the Tibetan woman sterilized, the Afghan woman jailed, the housewife in Massachusetts brutalized by her husband—all shared a common privation, what domestic violence victims across the world lacked: agency in their own lives. The forces that brought a Cambodian prostitute to the brink of death were the same forces that killed thousands of women and children and men (but mostly women and children) across America, and the entire globe, every year. An average, in fact, of 137 women each and every day are killed by intimate partner or familial violence across the globe.2 This does not include men. Or children.
Everything in my body suddenly came alive that day. I saw all the faces of women around the world from over two decades of work, and I realized how rarely I’d gazed inward, at my own country, at what we got wrong and what it meant. At how it connected to those years of other stories and other faces. The universality of domestic violence and how it crosses geographical, cultural, and linguistic barriers. Maybe all those other stories were in preparation for the day I’d meet Paul Monson and look at the mountains from his living room windows.
I ended up following Suzanne to the farmers’ market, and then to the grocery store, and then to the liquor store as she prepped for her camping trip. I helped her carry ice and peaches and hamburger meat. I asked question after question while she drove and while her mother, Pat, sat in the passenger seat chiming in here and there. How did it work? How many have you stopped? What else can you predict? My questions were vast and endless. Like many people who hold a casual acquaintance with a problem, I believed all the common assumptions: that if things were bad enough, victims would just leave. That restraining orders solved the problem (and that if a victim didn’t show up to renew a restraining order, the problem had been solved). That going to a shelter was an adequate response for victims and their children. That violence inside the home was something private, unrelated to other forms of violence, perhaps most notably mass shootings. That a lack of visible injury signaled a lack of seriousness. And, perhaps most of all, that unless we stand at the receiving end of a punch, such violence had nothing at all to do with us.
Over the next few years, Suzanne Dubus and her colleague, Kelly Dunne, patiently taught me about the scope and history of an issue that still today is too often hidden. I learned why past approaches had failed, and what we could do more effectively today. Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed; during that same period, domestic homicide in the United States claimed 10,600 lives. (This figure is likely an underestimate, as it was pulled from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, which gather data from local police departments, and participation is voluntary.) Twenty people in the United States are assaulted every minute by their partners. Former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called violence against women and girls the “most shameful human rights violation”3 and the World Health Organization called it a “global health problem of epidemic proportions.” A study put out by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime cited fifty thousand women around the world were killed by partners or family members in 2017 alone.4 Fifty thousand women. The UNODC report called home “the most dangerous place for women.”5 And despite growing awareness that men, too, can be victims of domestic violence, the overwhelming majority of victims—about 85%—are still, today, women and girls.6 And for every woman killed in the United States from domestic violence homicide, nearly nine are almost killed.7 The story of how Suzanne Dubus and Kelly Dunne created a program to predict domestic violence homicide became my first piece for the New Yorker, in 2013.
It also became the seed for this book when I realized so much more needed to be said. Several years into my reporting, domestic violence began to seem like something we could actually address if we just started to pay attention. Over the next eight years, I would go on to learn more and more, including how domestic violence sits adjacent to so many other problems we as a society grapple with: education, economics, mental and physical health, crime, gender and racial equality, and more. Those who push for prison reform butt up against domestic violence over and over as perpetrators go to jail for a time, get little or no treatment, return to civilian society, and repeat the cycle. Private violence has such vastly profound public consequences. I met people in Florida, California, Maryland, Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Oregon, and elsewhere trying to survive their own private war, and I saw, through them, how much it costs us personally and collectively, in fractured communities, families, people. In severed lives and lost opportunities. In enormous financial burdens to victims, to taxpayers, to the criminal justice system. Domestic violence health and medical costs top more than $8 billion annually for taxpayers and cause victims to lose more than eight million8 workdays each year. It is a direct cause of homelessness for more than half our homeless women and is overall the third leading cause of homelessness in our country. The overwhelming majority of incarcerated men today first witnessed or experienced violence as children in their own homes, and children who grow up in violent homes are at far greater risk for developmental disorders.9 And those mass shootings that seem to plague us more with each new year?
Most of them, too, are domestic violence.
In April of 2017, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety published a report that claimed 54% of mass shootings in America today involved domestic or family violence.10 The statistic traveled far and wide across the media. The link between mass shootings and domestic violence made its way into news articles and op-eds across the country, with one small alteration. Instead of “involved” the media began to use the word “predicted.” As in, “domestic violence predicts mass shootings more than half the time.” When a reporter from the website PolitiFact called the Everytown statistic into question, citing a much lower percentage from the research of Northeastern University professor James Alan Fox,11 the most important point was buried halfway down the piece in a quote by Fox, who told the PolitiFact reporter, “You could certainly say about half the cases of mass shootings are extreme incidents of domestic violence.”
In other words, it’s not that domestic violence predicts mass shootings. It’s that mass shootings, more than half the time, are domestic violence.
Consider, for example, Adam Lanza of Newtown, Connecticut, who began his killing spree at home with his mother before making his way to Sandy Hook Elementary School. Devin Patrick Kelley tied his wife to their bed with handcuffs and rope before driving to the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.12 You can go further back to what is widely considered to be the United States’ first mass shooting—when in August of 1966 Charles Whitman opened fire on students at the University of Texas at Austin and killed sixteen people. What many people have forgotten is that his rampage began the night before, with his wife and his mother.
But domestic violence lurks in the other 46% of mass shootings, too. It’s there, in the backgrounds of so many of the shooters. Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the Orlando Pulse nightclub in June of 2016, had strangled his first wife—an act that is a felony in the state of Florida, where he lived, and could have put him behind bars for a decade according to federal law. Yet he was never charged. Then there were the three terrifying weeks in October of 2002 when a sniper named John Allen Muhammad kept Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., under siege, shooting people seemingly at random. Elementary schools had indoor recess during those weeks; gas stations hung tarps to conceal customers. In fact, Muhammad had a long history of abuse against his estranged wife, Mildred. The attacks had been a cover. He told police he thought killing random strangers would conceal his ultimate plan—to kill Mildred. And what if we’d provided services and support for a young Dylann Roof, witness to years of alleged extreme abuse by his father to his stepmother?13 Might that have saved nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June of 2015?
These, sadly, are just the incidents that linger in the public consciousness. There are many, many others. In the United States, we generally define mass shootings as four or more victims, which means the overwhelming majority of mass shootings get coverage only in local or regional news, if any. And they disappear after a day or two, the thousands of women, men, and children killed each and every year. Cases like these and so many others make clear that domestic violence, rather than being a private problem, is a most urgent matter of public health.
All of this eventually brought me to the dented front door of Paul Monson in the spring of 2015. I had known most of his family for several years by then and had heard Michelle and Rocky’s story from Michelle’s mother and sisters. Paul found it nearly impossible to talk about the murders. To me his pain seemed overwhelming, the guilt sometimes suffocating. Domestic violence is hard to talk about. It is also, I learned in the course of this research, among the most difficult of subjects to report on. It is vast and unwieldy, but it’s also utterly hidden. As a reporter, you can stand in the middle of a war zone and describe what you’re seeing. You can go to the site of a famine or a plague and report on it in real time. You can visit an HIV/AIDS clinic, a cancer center, a refugee camp, an orphanage, and you can write about the struggles. You can write about what these social and environmental and public health and geopolitical problems look like from the inside out as they’re happening in front of you. Even if you’re writing about a postwar issue, as I so often was in Cambodia, you can assume a degree of safety for the interviewees simply by dint of the war or the natural disaster or whatever the disruption that brought you there having ended.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing about domestic violence is that you’re writing about a situation of such intense volatility that you risk endangering victims who are already right in the middle of an explosive and dangerous situation. Yet the ethics of journalism mandate that everyone has a chance to tell their side of the story—victims and abusers alike. This meant, in several cases, that I spent months or even years interviewing victims, only to have to toss all those hours of interviews because to even ask the abusers for an interview would have compromised a victim’s safety. One woman I spent over a year interviewing, for example, had to withdraw from our talks for her own protection. She’d spent years with her abuser, and he used to hold her up naked to the heating pipes in their apartment or toss a blanket over her head and duct tape her around the neck. Her story of abuse and eventual freedom was among the most chilling stories I’d heard. Even now, writing this of her, I can include just these details because they don’t identify her, and the particulars of her story—the heating pipes, the blanket—appear in so many others’ stories, too.
With domestic violence, often there is no end date for the victims. Women who do manage to break free of their abusers still spend their lives negotiating with them if they share custody of children. And even if children are not involved, many victims remain on the lookout long after they escape abuse—particularly if incarceration was a result of the abuse. If they find a new partner, it can put both of them at risk. One woman I interviewed called it keeping her “head in the swivel”—at least until their children were grown. Visitations and drop-offs are notoriously dangerous even for victims who manage to get away. One woman I know had her face smashed into a stone wall while her children were watching from the backseat of their car during a custody drop-off. She’d been divorced for years by then. Indeed, as I write this, six people in Bakersfield, California, including the shooter’s ex-wife and her new boyfriend, were killed just yesterday, September 12, 2018 (a Google search for “estranged husband” and “killed” brings up more than fifteen million results). Escaping an abusive relationship hardly ensures that the danger is over. As a result, I have tried, wherever possible, to balance the ethics of journalism with the safety of the people brave enough to let me interview them. As often as possible I’ve interviewed multiple people about any given incident or relationship, but there were times when it was simply too dangerous for a victim to allow me to seek out her abuser. In several cases, other participants or witnesses were no longer alive. Some of the names of interviewees have been changed and their identities kept secret for their own safety and privacy. My methodology was to redact information rather than alter it, with the exception of names. I have noted all these instances in the text.
Domestic violence is like no other crime. It does not happen in a vacuum. It does not happen because someone is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our homes and families are supposed to be sacred territory, the “haven in a heartless world,” as my college sociology teacher drilled into me. (Her class was the first place I’d ever heard the phrase.) This is part of what makes it so untenable. It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you. It is most often hidden from even one’s closest confidantes, and on many occasions the physical violence is far less damaging than the emotional and verbal violence. I can’t tell you how many abusers I’ve heard bemoaning their inability to stop loving the same women they assaulted so severely it landed them in prison. It is, perhaps, a powerful aphrodisiac, the idea that someone is gripped by love so intensely he or she is powerless in the face of it. Though the intellectual coercion required to make a man believe that his love and his violence stem from the same place inside himself is of course utterly duplicitous. I came to learn that there is a high incidence of narcissism in perpetrators. And a high incidence of other factors that can make duplicity a matter of survival—addiction, poverty, and other acts of desperation can be particularly deadly when combined with a certain toxic masculinity.
We live in a culture in which we are told our children must have a father, that a relationship is the ultimate goal, that family is the bedrock of society, that it’s better to stay and work out one’s “issues” in private than to leave and raise kids as a single mother. Michelle Monson Mosure said this over and over when she insisted to her mother that she didn’t want to raise her children in a “broken home.” As if a home with one adult abusing another adult isn’t broken, as if there are degrees of brokenness. The messages are insidious and they are consistent. We see those messages when our politicians wrangle over reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, and then fund it so sparingly it’s practically a hiccup in the federal budget. VAWA has an entire budget of just under $489 million at present.14 To give a frame of reference, the entire annual budget for the Department of Justice, which oversees the Office of Violence Against Women, is currently $28 billion.15 Another way to think about it might be this: the wealthiest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, who is estimated to be worth $150 billion, could fund VAWA’s current budget for three hundred years and still have millions upon which to carve out a meager subsistence.16
But we give victims the message to stay in other ways, too. When our court system puts them on the defensive, asks them to face a person who may have tried to kill them, a person they know only too well may kill them for real next time. We see it in court rulings that give violent perpetrators a mere slap on the wrist, a fine, maybe. A few days in jail after a brutal assault. We get the message when law enforcement treats domestic violence as a nuisance, a “domestic dispute,” rather than the criminal act that it is. I have to believe if the tables were turned, if women were beating and killing men in such vast numbers—fifty women a month in the United States are killed by their intimate partners using guns alone—the problem would be the front page of every newspaper in this country. Vast pools of funding would surface for researchers to figure out what’s wrong with women today.
And, after all of this, we have the audacity to ask why victims stay.
The reality is that many victims like Michelle Monson Mosure and her children are actively and stealthily trying to leave, working within the system that exists and step by step, with extreme vigilance, doing everything they can to escape. In so many cases, including hers, we mistake what we see from the outside as her choosing to stay with an abuser, when in fact it’s we who don’t recognize what a victim who is slowly and carefully leaving actually looks like.
None of this is surprising, given that we didn’t recognize domestic violence as wrong for most of human history. Jewish, Islamic, Christian, and Catholic religions all traditionally believed it was within a husband’s purview to discipline his wife in more or less the same manner as he might discipline and control any other of his properties, including servants, slaves, and animals; of course, the holy texts—Koran, Bible, and Talmud—from which such beliefs stem were simply interpretations by (of course) men of the time.17 Some of these interpretations even gave instruction on the manner of wife beating, such as avoiding direct blows to the face, or making sure not to cause lasting injury. In the ninth century, the Gaon of Sura believed assault by one’s husband was less traumatic than a stranger’s assault since a wife was, according to the law, subject to her husband’s authority.18 In the United States, the Puritans had laws against wife beating, though they were largely symbolic and rarely, if ever, enforced. Instead, abused wives were believed to have provoked the violence of their husbands—and this belief threads through hundreds of years of literature on domestic violence, nearly everything written about spousal abuse, in fact, prior to the 1960s and ’70s. On those very rare occasions when a case of private violence did make it to a courtroom, the rulings tended to side in favor of the man so long as the wife’s injuries were not permanent.19
It’s only been in the last century or so that laws against wife beating have been written in the United States, and even those early states—Alabama, Maryland, Oregon, Delaware, and Massachusetts—that began writing legislation against spousal abuse in the late nineteenth century rarely enforced their own laws.20 The American Society Against the Cruelty of Animals predates laws against cruelty toward one’s wife by several decades, meaning, I suppose, that we held our dogs in higher regard than we held our wives. (Pet shelters in the 1990s outnumbered domestic violence shelters by nearly three to one.21) In the fall of 2018, as I write this, there are still more than a dozen countries where violence against one’s spouse or family member is perfectly legal—which is to say that no specific laws against domestic violence have been written. These include Egypt, Haiti, Latvia, Uzbekistan, and the Congo, among others.22 And then there’s Russia, which in 2017 decriminalized any domestic violence that doesn’t result in bodily injury.23 There’s also, of course, the United States, whose first appointed attorney general under the Trump Administration believed domestic abuse was not grounds for asylum and that such an “alien” merely suffered the fate of “misfortune.”24 In other words, these days if you have the good luck to be terrorized outside your home by your own government’s forces, you can claim asylum, but if that terror exists behind closed doors? Well, that kind of bad luck means you’re on your own.
So much of what exists in the United States around domestic violence today in terms of legal precedent happened very, very recently. It wasn’t until 1984 that Congress finally passed a law that would help women and children victims of abuse; it was called the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act, and it helped fund shelters and other resources for victims.25 Stalking wasn’t identified as a crime until the early 1990s and still today is often not seen for the threat it truly is—not by law enforcement, abusers, or even by the victims actually being stalked, despite three-quarters of women killed in America having been stalked beforehand by these same partners or ex-partners.26 Nearly 90% of domestic violence homicide victims were both stalked and beaten in the year prior to their deaths.27 A national hotline for victims of domestic violence was not established in this country until 1996.28
Suzanne Dubus taught me that there were essentially three movements across the country revolutionizing how we address domestic violence today. One was her program begun in 2003—the advent of High Risk Teams within domestic violence agencies that try to quantify the dangerousness of any given domestic violence situation and then build protections around victims. Another was the 2002 opening of the country’s first family justice center; begun in San Diego by a former city attorney named Casey Gwinn, family justice centers put victim services under one roof—police, attorneys, victim compensation, counseling, education, and dozens of others. (San Diego’s opened with thirty-five different agencies. Other geographies have varying numbers of partners.) And the third was the Lethality Assessment Program, begun in Maryland in 2005 by a former police officer named Dave Sargent, which primarily addressed how law enforcement dealt on scene with a domestic violence situation.29
It was no mere coincidence that all three of these programs began around the same time. The women’s movement in the 1970s and ’80s had brought battered women to the attention of a nation just beginning to accept the idea of equality. The focus, in those years, was on shelters—building them, funding them, getting abused women away from perpetrators. But in the 1990s, that began to change. Across the country, advocates, attorneys, police officers, judges, all told me that two primary events caused this. The first was the OJ Simpson trial.
For many, Nicole Brown Simpson became the face of a new kind of victim. She was beautiful, wealthy, famous. If it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. OJ’s history of violence with her had been known to law enforcement. He’d been arrested, then bailed out, then sentenced to “telephone counseling” by a California judge (after which the case was dropped). Nicole’s 911 tapes allowed listeners in to a rare scene: a woman under siege by a man who claimed to love her. The threats, the coercion, the terror, it was all right there. Her murder hurled into the forefront a conversation that advocates had been having for years—that it could happen anywhere, to anyone. How to reach victims who didn’t reach out to them was one of their biggest problems in those days. But when local papers ran stories about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, for the first time nearly all of them listed sidebars with where to go for help. Victims suddenly began to access resources in unprecedented numbers. Calls to domestic violence hotlines, shelters, and police skyrocketed in the wake of the trial.30 Domestic violence edged its way into the national conversation.
Simpson’s case also became a rallying cry for victims of color who asked, rightfully, why it took a rich, white, beautiful woman to get the story of domestic violence homicide out in the public’s view. After all, women of color experienced private violence at the same or even higher levels as white women, except they bore the added weight of racial inequality. That part of our post-Simpson national conversation is today slowly being addressed in Native American, immigrant, and underprivileged communities on a larger scale than ever before thanks in part to the second major event that changed how we treat domestic violence: the Violence Against Women Act.
VAWA put intimate partner violence before lawmakers who had, until then, seen it as a private family matter, a problem for women rather than the criminal justice system. It had first been introduced to Congress by then-senator Joseph Biden in 1990, but it wasn’t until the fall of 1994 that the bill passed, just weeks after the OJ trial wrapped up. Finally, for the first time ever, cities and towns all across the country could get federal funding to address domestic violence in their communities. These funds allowed for targeted trainings of first responders, the creation of advocacy positions, shelters, transitional housing, batterer intervention classes, and legal training; VAWA funds meant victims no longer had to pay for their own rape kits and if an abused partner was evicted because of events related to her abuse, she could now receive compensation and assistance; victims with disabilities could find support, as could those in need of legal aid. These and many other systems and services we have to address domestic violence today are a direct result of the passage of VAWA. At the time, then-senator Biden told the Associated Press, “[Domestic violence] is a hate crime. My objective is to give the woman every opportunity under the law to seek redress, not only criminally but civilly. I want to raise the consciousness of this country that women’s civil rights—their right to be left alone—is in jeopardy.”31
VAWA requires reauthorization every five years. The 2013 reauthorization was held up because Republicans didn’t want the bill to include same-sex partners, Native Americans living on reservations, or undocumented immigrants who were battered and trying to apply for temporary visas. After heated debates in both the House and Senate, the reauthorization finally passed. The next reauthorization is up for renewal as I write this. Advocates all across the country that I spoke with feel keenly the tenuousness of their positions and their funding in a political climate where our commander in chief displays open hostility and sexism toward women, and has himself been accused by more than a dozen women of groping and assault, as well as sexual assault by his first wife. (She later said she didn’t mean this in a criminal sense, but rather in a sense of having been violated.32) Trump kept his staff secretary, a known abuser, in the White House, until media and outside pressure—and not a moral imperative—forced Rob Porter out. Indeed, we live in a climate in which the right to own guns seems ever more to supersede the right to life. “The consequence of [Trump’s] words and deeds are so profound for women,” Kit Gruelle, a survivor and activist, said to me. “We are leaping backwards at an obscene pace.”
Not long ago, I had lunch with a woman named Lynn Rosenthal. Rosenthal was the first White House liaison to the Office of Violence Against Women, a position created by the Obama Administration that remains unfilled two years into the Trump Administration. I asked her if money was not an issue, if she could do whatever she wanted with whatever she needed, how would she solve domestic violence? She said she would take a community, study what worked, and then invest everywhere. “You can’t look at one little piece of the system and say, ‘Oh, that’s the magic bullet.’ That’s what … people want to do. If we could invest in one thing, what would it be? Well, the answer is, there’s not one thing.” And that’s the whole point: private violence affects in some way nearly every aspect of modern life, yet our collective failure to treat it publicly demonstrates a stunning lack of understanding about this very pervasiveness.
My goal for No Visible Bruises, then, is to shine a flashlight in the darkest corners, to show what domestic violence looks like from the inside out. I’ve written the book in three sections, each of which tries to tackle one primary question. Section one tries to answer that most dogged of questions: why victims stay. (Kit Gruelle told me once: “We don’t say to bank presidents after a bank’s been robbed, ‘You need to move this bank.’ ”) Michelle Monson Mosure’s life and death shows us what we don’t know we’re seeing, that the question of leaving versus staying disregards the cavalcade of forces at work in an abusive relationship.
Section two, perhaps the most difficult section to report, interrogates violence at its core, with abusers. Too often we’ve overlooked their important view by speaking only to victims, advocates, and police. In the current climate of toxic masculinity I wanted to know what such a man looked like, how he viewed himself in society and within his own family. Over and over I asked, during the years I was researching this book, whether a violent man could be taught to be nonviolent. The answers almost always fell along these lines: police officers and advocates said no, victims said they hoped so, and violent men said yes. This last response felt to me less like a theory and more like an expression of their willingness. The most common aphorism in the world of domestic violence is “hurt people hurt people.” So if a hurt person took his own pain and grappled with it, rather than turning it outward toward the people in his life, how would that happen?
In the third section I shadow the changemakers, people on the front lines of domestic violence and domestic violence homicide, like Suzanne Dubus, Kelly Dunne, and others. I look into what can be done, and who’s doing it. Here I delve into advocacy, the judiciary and law enforcement initiatives to explore how they look from street level.
Throughout this book I generally refer to victims as “she” and perpetrators as “he.” This is not because I don’t recognize that men can be victims and women can be perpetrators, or that I am unaware of the relative lack of resources available for same-sex partners, or the grim statistics of domestic violence in LGBTQ relationships and communities; rather, my reasoning is twofold: first, men remain the overwhelming majority of perpetrators, and women the overwhelming majority of victims by nearly every measure. And I use she/he/they pronouns for consistency in the writing. Please assume that when I write “she” for victims or “he” for perpetrators, I recognize that anyone can find themselves in either of those two roles regardless of gender.
Similarly, while there is a movement afoot to refer to domestic violence victims as “survivors” or in some situations “clients,” I often refrained from doing this unless I knew unequivocally that they were survivors, that is, that they had managed to escape their abusive relationships and build new lives for themselves and their families. Additionally, I refer to most sources by their full or last names, and those who shared extended narratives with me—who became, in the nonfiction sense of the term, “characters”—by their first names.
Finally, the term “domestic violence” has long been a source of contention among survivors and advocates. “Domesticating” violence implies some kind of softening, that somehow assaults from a family member deserve lesser attention than those of a stranger. There is a trend these days in advocacy circles to use the term “intimate partner violence” or “intimate partner terrorism.” This, too, has obvious problems, not least of which is that it leaves out violence by anyone other than a partner. “Spousal abuse” has similar limitations. “Private violence,” as a term, has gained usage in the past decade or so. Though all of these terms are euphemistic in the sense that they fail to capture the particular constellation of forces—physical, emotional, and psychological—at play in such relationships. I have, for years, tried myself to coin a better term, and I’ve yet to conceive of anything, though I believe the word “terrorism” comes as close as any to what such a relationship feels like from the inside. Nevertheless, because we have a collective understanding of the term, I generally refer to “domestic violence” or “private violence” in the book, unless I am quoting someone or there is an obvious contextual redundancy, in which case I have on occasion used the other terms noted above.
And now I return to Paul Monson’s house and the waning afternoon. We eventually finish talking about cars and turn at last to that topic he’s been avoiding, the source of his most elemental grief: the daughter and grandchildren he used to have.