The Term ‘Domestic Violence’ Is a Failure
The phrase is cold and sterile, conveying nothing of the terror that victims feel.
I met a woman once whose husband threw golf balls in front of her face as she drove down the highway, in an effort to both terrify her and establish his dominance and fearlessness. Then there was the teenager who told me how her father used to sit at the kitchen table and spin his pistol around as a reminder of his power and authority; he kept his loaded guns hanging on the wall like art. In researching my new book, No Visible Bruises, I met a woman whose husband had brought home a rattlesnake and kept it in a cage, threatening her with its presence to ensure her compliance.
The English language has a name for this kind of viciousness, a catchall phrase for this particular brand of human meanness: domestic
