According to Rachel Louise Snyder, author of the book, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us, American Culture dictates how people must live especially women. She says that it is entrenched in their minds, that “children must have a father, a relationship is the ultimate goal, family is the bedrock of society, and working out ones’ issues in private is better than being a single mother.”
Snyder, who is a writer based in Washington D.C. explains that these messages become insidious when the government allocates sparse funding towards domestic violence. Women are told both directly and indirectly that they must stay in abusive relationships. This is reiterated when they must defend themselves in court months and sometimes even years “while waiting for a ruling only for their violent perpetrators to get a mere slap on the wrist.” This is what is communicated to abused women when they stand up for themselves by calling the police, and the police “treats domestic violence as a nuisance, a ‘domestic dispute,’ rather than the criminal act that it is.”
Snyder stresses that domestic violence negatively impacts every aspect of modern life in some way, yet there continues to be a collective failure to treat it as a public health issue.
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