20 Quotes by Rachel Louise Snyder

Read any news story today about domestic violence homicide and you’re likely to see some version of the question why didn’t she leave? What you almost surely won’t see is why was he violent?

Michelle saw was what so many other women before her had seen: that an abuser appears more powerful than the system.

The average batterer, Adams told me, “is more likable than his victim, because domestic violence affects victims a lot more than it affects batterers.

The very fact that intimate partner violence is so often addressed in civil court, rather than criminal court, gives insight into how we as a society still view it.

Victims often side with their abusers publicly, to family, to police, to prosecutors. Because long after the police leave, even after charges are filed and a sentence meted out, it is with the abuser that a victim must continually negotiate her life. And the life of her children.

They didn’t show terror or hysterics. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t crying. They had gone still, their eyes in a kind of catatonia. My god, Sally thought, they’ve seen this before. They’ve seen their father like this.

When I questioned whether she believed he really had changed, she said yes, but she also said she believed she could probably trigger him again in a minute.

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.

The police acted as if the victims – Sally and Melanie – were overdramatizing the entire event. Some guy taking his own kid. It’s his kid after all. The gendered messages are crucial: men are strong; women are weak. Men have the power; women are powerless. Men are rational; women are hysterical. Whether you are a violent abuser or a law-abiding officer, the men on both sides of the Monson equation sent a message to the women.