Gabby Petito died of strangulation. Far too many other women have, too
Most women who are strangled by their husbands or boyfriends don’t cooperate with law enforcement. Because strangulation, when it doesn’t kill, frequently causes traumatic brain injuries, these women sometimes can’t speak in a way that seems plausible to the police. Their testimonies aren’t always clear or consistent; they may misremember timelines, change details on repeated telling, or feel unsure about crucial bits of information. In many cases, a strangulation victim also won’t cooperate with the police because to do so would likely anger the man who strangled her. And he has already shown what he’s willing to do to enforce his will.
and:
Though victims and perpetrators appear among all kinds of people, the dynamics of strangulation are deeply gendered. A large majority of people who are strangled are women; nearly all of those who strangle them are men. Usually, the victim and perpetrator are current or former romantic partners. Aside from rape and sexual assault, few acts of violence have such a reliably gendered breakdown. Statistically, it is possible that the strangulation that killed Petito was not the first such incident she had experienced. Half of all domestic violence victims are strangled at some point during the course of their abuse, according to the gender violence expert Rachel Louise Snyder. Often, they’re strangled repeatedly.
According to one study, 43% of women who are murdered by their intimate partners had been strangled by them in the past year. Once a woman has been strangled by her partner, the likelihood that he will strangle her again rises tenfold. The likelihood that he will murder her rises nearly eightfold. Because strangulation is a sign of increasing violence in an abusive relationship, and because the act of strangulation is so physically dangerous for the victim, it is usually the last escalation that the abuser makes before he kills her. According to the psychologist Sylvia Vella, who has worked with the San Diego police’s domestic violence unit, women who have been strangled by their partners even once are in a position of acute emergency. “Statistically, we know that once the hands are on the neck, the very next step is homicide,” Vella has said. “They don’t go backwards.”
and this
But police interventions in strangulation cases remain clumsy and often unhelpful. This is in part because in strangulations, many of the victim’s injuries are internal, and don’t leave clear, visible markings that can be easily photographed for a police report. Sometimes, the most visible injuries that result from a strangulation incident are on the perpetrator – the scratches and bruises on his hands and face inflicted by a victim trying to pry his hands off her neck. This can lead police to identify the abuser as the victim.
More here at link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/14/gabby-petito-wyoming-strangulation-domestic-violence
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