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

Snyder describes a seminar led by Jacquelyn Campbell, creator of the Danger Assessment, a series of questions used by law enforcement and victims’ advocates to determine whether a domestic abuse case will likely escalate to homicide. Campbell’s Assessment, Snyder says, “has broken through cultural and political barriers, been adapted for use by police, attorneys, judges, advocates, and healthcare workers, among others” (58). It has also saved countless lives. However, during the seminar Campbell estimates that each year 1,200 women are murdered by their abusers in the US. Even these numbers do not reflect the full scope of the problem, since they do not include murdered children like Michelle’s, innocent bystanders, other family members, closeted relationships that are not counted as domestic homicides, victim suicides, homicides disguised as accidents, or murder-suicides.

Snyder recounts a story Campbell tells about a couple in Maryland that typifies the cyclical nature of domestic abuse:

This Maryland couple, the twenty-six-year-old and the seventeen-year-old, also had a two-month-old child, and the woman had three other children by three other men. Her five-year-old watched, screaming, as she was shot and killed. The two other toddlers came running out and so saw their mother dead, too. Three young children, traumatized, and a newborn.