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

Although Snyder often weaves her own thoughts and feelings into No Visible Bruises, the Author’s Note and Afterword render domestic violence personal for her in a way that it hadn’t previously been. Particularly in witnessing her friend Michelle struggle to deal with the fallout of her brother’s actions, Snyder becomes part of the collateral damage of domestic violence. This is a situation more and more people find themselves in: “[D]omestic violence homicides have been on the rise since 2015 and have increased 33% since 2017” (288). Other countries are facing their own epidemics of domestic abuse. Snyder explains that “[t]he aggressive behavior, the gendered roles, the coercion, the psychology of a victim’s actions and, perhaps most importantly, the risk indicators: they appear again and again, in cases all across the world” (289).

Snyder argues that we need to follow up with the men who go through intervention programs, address domestic violence’s impact on children, and stop promoting stalking as a form of love in movies and television: “[W]e ought to try everything, every idea, all of it, leaving nothing off the table, because this problem is so enormous, and lives so fragile, that we simply cannot afford to lose any more—not more time, and certainly not more lives” (290).The Afterword functions as a summation to the book, and its power resides in Snyder’s willingness to share the traumatic and horrifying event that made Snyder herself part of the devastation wrought by domestic violence.