Welcome to Nobody Told Me.

I'm Laura Owens, and I'm Jan Black.

It's estimated that one in four women and one in seven men in the United States have been victims of severe

physical violence by an intimate partner. And joining us on this episode is investigative journalist

Rachel Louise Snyder, whose latest book is called No Visible Bruises. What we don't know

about domestic violence can kill us. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me.

What inspired the title, No Visible Bruises?

Well, two things. One more interesting than the other.

The less interesting version is that it was the title of a piece I wrote for The New Yorker,

and it really sort of captured what domestic violence is like.

And this is the more interesting answer is that as I went around interviewing people,

you know, our associations are with physical violence that we can actually see.

And so much of domestic violence is invisible to us. Either,

you know, it happens behind closed doors or it doesn't even involve physicality at all.

There's all kinds of coercion. There's, you know, using children as leverage, using money as leverage. In my book,

I talk about a woman whose husband had a rattlesnake, a poisonous rattlesnake. He kept in a cage

in the house and he would force her to do what he wanted. Otherwise, he told her he was going to

put it in bed with her or in the

shower with her. It's unimaginable. Absolutely unimaginable. It is, it's why I think intimate terrorism is a

better term, because when you live under that sort of anxiety and stress, it is like living under a

terrorist threat all the time.

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