Rachel Louise Snyder talks about the personal history behind her award-winning book, No Visible Bruises, which charts the shocking rise of familial violence against women in the US

In 2002, Dorothy Giunta-Cotter was shot and killed in her own home in Massachusetts by her husband and relentless abuser of 20 years, William Cotter. He then turned the gun on himself. Dorothy, 35, had fled from him with their two daughters a few days earlier because Cotter had begun to hurt their 11-year-old, but she had refused the offer of a refuge. She told the police that if her daughters were with her, Cotter would find them, and kill all three. “She attempted to avert the worst of two terrible outcomes,” wrote the American journalist Rachel Louise Snyder in an article published in the New Yorker in 2013, “the loss of her daughters’ lives along with her own.”

That article, A Raised Hand, became part of eight years of research from one of the frontlines of what the World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed “a global epidemic”. Snyder’s work is now an award-winning book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us. In the UK, the issue of domestic abuse is not “taboo”, which Snyder says the subject still is in the US. Here, while it may be a family secret, it is recognised and discussed nationally; the impact of austerity on closing refuges, slashing legal aid and axing specialist domestic abuse services, has kept the issue high on the UK agenda. It’s a crime that impacts on men too but women make up the overwhelming majority of victims. Eighty women were killed by a partner or ex in the year to March 2019, an increase of 27% on the previous year, while an incident of domestic abuse is reported every minute in England and Wales. The government estimates that the social and economic cost of domestic abuse is a staggering £66bn a year.