Book Club

Intimate partner violence takes many forms. It’s physical violence but also emotional abuse, digital abuse, legal abuse, and verbal abuse. According to the Centers for Disease Control, one in four women and one in 10 men will experience some form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime. And those forms include stalking and harassment.

Our book for the month of October is No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill – June 9, 2020 by Rachel Louise Snyder (Author)

No Visible Bruises, won the Hillman Prize and made countless lists for the top books of 2019. 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.

What made this book so impactful for me is how Snyder stacked it with data and statistics about the prevalence of this problem. Did you know? Domestic violence is the number one reason for calls to 911, but it’s also one of the most underreported crimes.

I look forward to you joining us the month to share in discussion/dialogue of the title No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill!