NO VISIBLE BRUISES

WHAT WE DON’T KNOW ABOUT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE CAN KILL US

RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER Scribe, 320pp, £9.99

American journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has uncompromising truths to tell about domestic violence, challenging assumptions that it is ‘the fate of the unlucky few … [involving] a woman hard-wired to be hurt [and] a man hard-wired to hurt.’ In the Times, Rosamund Urwin praised a ‘powerful book – part reportage, part polemic.’

In the New York Times, Parul Sehgal laid out the harsh statistics. ‘Between 2000 and 2006, 3,200 American soldiers were killed in combat. During that same period, in the United States, more than three times as many women died at the hands of their husbands and boyfriends.’ And in the Guardian, Amy Bloom pointed out that in the US, 50 women a month are shot dead by their partner. The World Health Organisation has called it ‘a global health problem of epidemic proportions’.

Bloom praised Snyder’s ‘forensic eye’ and ‘clear, smooth and accessible style (never folksy but never academic and so matter-of-fact you can feel the writer holding herself in check so as not overwhelm us with painful details)’. Using case studies, Snyder tells us that ‘the most dangerous place for an American woman to be – the most dangerous place on Earth – is in her own home’.

‘Domestic violence is like no other crime,’ wrote Snyder in the Atlantic. ‘It’s violence from someone you know, from someone who claims to love you.’