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.

Dorothy Giunta-Cotter, shot dead by her husband, William Cotter, in 2002. Photograph: Boston Globe via Getty Images

Snyder, 51, combines the forensic eye of the investigative reporter with her skills as a professor of creative writing but there is an added empathy. She explains that when she was nine, her mother died. Her father remarried two months later and became unstinting in his beatings to rein his daughter in. “Violence swirled around me,” she writes. It’s this personal experience that perhaps helps her to coax women, their families and the men who have abused and killed to speak out. “Patrick”, for instance, a retired federal official, middle-class, narcissistic, who murdered his daughter and wife and believes they will be waiting for him in heaven “with open arms”.

Snyder also talks to the criminologists, public health workers, domestic abuse advocates, police and lawyers who are fighting to stop the harm – working in an arena that has its own unique frustrations and challenges. As Snyder writes: “Love is what makes domestic violence different from other crimes.”

Visiting an intensive prison programme to help abusers to change, Snyder tells a circle of men that she too had been a high-school drop-out; she too knows about violence. “I was a rebellious teenager,“ she tells me now on the phone from her home in Washington DC. “I was smoking cigarettes at 10, pot at 12. [After her mother died] My father married a woman I met on the day of the wedding and took my brother and me to live 500 miles away… My dad believed women were secondary to men. My brother, me and two step siblings were spanked often in an assembly line. I wasn’t afraid to fight back.”

In September 1985, all four teenagers “were kicked out of the house”. Snyder dropped out of high school at 16. She worked as a waitress, living in her car. “The manageress let me sleep on her couch for a month. They were good people.” At 19, she says, “I knew the life I’d lived for the past three years would also be my life for the next 60 unless I got an education. On my mother’s side, I had an uncle who was a heart surgeon. Another had devised the TV show The Addams Family, my grandfather was a professor and a poet.”

In 1988, Snyder, without any qualifications, presented herself to Rick Spencer, responsible for admissions and grants at her local university, North Central College in Illinois. “I knew she had been on a rough road but there she sat. That took guts. She still has that spark,” says Spencer, now vice-president of institutional advancement at the university. He gave Snyder her chance. “Two weeks into my first semester, I loved it,” says Snyder, now a tenured professor.

I had to tell my daughter that her friend's daddy killed her friend's mummy, then killed himself

After her studies, she became a foreign correspondent, reporting from more than 50 countries before returning to the US in 2010. Once she began investigating domestic abuse on her home patch, she says, she realised that here was a crime that linked many of the issues she had covered abroad including child brides in Romania and the forced sterilisation of women in Tibet. Across the world, 137 women are killed every day by familial violence. Domestic abuse, she writes, “is as common as rain”.

No Visible Bruises was published in the US last year. Halfway through a national book tour last June, Snyder, flew home to Washington DC to attend her 11-year-old daughter’s fifth grade graduation. At the airport, she received a voicemail from a close friend, Michelle. “Something’s happening at Jason’s,” she said. Michelle’s brother, Jason Rieff, 51 and his wife, Lola Golumova, 45, both diplomats based in Washington DC were due to finalise their divorce. Lola had been given custody of the two daughters and intended to take them overseas on a four-year posting. At 9.25 am on the morning of 7 June while the girls were at school, Jason – who had bought a gun 10 days earlier – shot and killed Lola and then shot himself. In the US, 50 women a month are shot dead (90 a month are killed in total) in familial violence.

Lola Gulomova, shot dead by her husband in 2019. Photograph: CBS Media

“I had to tell my daughter that her friend’s daddy killed her friend’s mummy, then killed himself,” Snyder says. Her daughter, Jazz, knew how death was delivered. “With a gun,” she said.

I ask Snyder why she thinks the rates of killings and abuse are escalating. “The #MeToo movement calling out male behaviour has triggered a backlash,” she suggests. “Just because women are seen to be ‘winning’, though, doesn’t mean those men are ‘losing’. And, in Britain and the US, we have elected macho, misogynistic, authoritarian leaders that set a tone. The violent response has become increasingly normative.”

Ten years ago, on her return to live in the US, Snyder met Suzanne Dubus and Kelly Dunne who worked at the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center in Amesbury Massachusetts. Up till then, Snyder writes, she had always thought that domestic violence was, ”the unfortunate fate of the unlucky few”. She believed that restraining orders kept women safe; that victims could easily leave a relationship if it became bad enough; that courts punished men who were violent. Dubus and Dunne taught her otherwise.

In 2002, they had tried to help Dorothy Giunta-Cotter, supporting her when she filed a restraining order on her husband, which he broke, and finding a room for her and her two daughters in a long-term shelter, which Dorothy refused. In the wake of Dorothy’s death, Dubus and Dunne were prompted to create the first Domestic Violence High Risk Team (now emulated in the UK and many other countries) to work out how to deal with abusive men more effectively. The team brings police, hospitals, courts, state legislature and other professionals together to share information and prevent domestic murder by intervening early. In Dorothy’s case, detectives had no knowledge of the times William Cotter had hospitalised his partner. “Communication between professionals is what makes a difference,” Snyder says.

Thirty years ago, a breakthrough in understanding and communicating the clues that point to domestic abuse came in the form of the work of Jacqueline Campbell in Maine and her danger assessment tool, which helps health professionals to identify victims. She now travels the US teaching others how to use the tool. Among the 22 risk factors Campbell identified are threats to kill, extreme jealousy, forced sex, stalking and a woman’s isolation. Strangulation is also a vital clue. Strangling to the point of loss of consciousness can cause brain damage and internal injuries often not recognised, yet 60% of victims in the US are strangled at some point in an abusive relationship.

Across the board the violent men I met didn’t want to be violent. What they don’t know is alternative behaviours

Drawing a timeline to identify a pattern of abuse as it unfolds, sharing the information among frontline collaborating professionals, is vital, Campbell stresses. In this way, an escalating pattern of control and/or violence is revealed and understood as so much more than an isolated “accident”. Yet still, in the UK, according to Davina James-Hanman who reviews domestic abuse murders for the Home Office, scarce resources mostly go to high-risk cases, for instance where attempted murder is flagged up, and not to lower-risk cases where intervention much earlier in an abusive relationship gives the woman a chance to break free.

Snyder says that after the deaths of Jason Rieff and Lola Golumova, among the first to send their love and support were the mothers of Michelle and Rocky Mosure. Michelle had had two children with Rocky before she was 18. Rocky appeared the perfect husband but he was also exercising coercive control over Michelle, a crime in the UK since 2015 but not in the US. But in 2001, aged 23, Michelle was breaking free. She had returned to education and had a restraining order on Rocky. He broke the order, Michelle went back to him. Snyder says women return for a variety of reasons, including their lack of finances, the paucity of protection, the fear. Soon after, Rocky shot dead Michelle, his two children and then himself.

Michelle Monson Mosure, with her children, Kristy and Kyle. All three were shot dead by husband and father Rocky Mosure in 1999, Montana. Photograph: Billings Gazette

Does Snyder believe abusers can stop, turn themselves around? “Jimmy hasn’t abused for years,” she says. Jimmy Espinoza was a drug addict, pimp, rapist and serial batterer. He had also been sexually abused as a child. He became a group leader of a programme to help men desist from abuse. In the book, Snyder notices a poster on the wall at one meeting. “How do you persuade a 30-year-old to stop beating his wife? Talk to him when he’s 12.”

“Across the board the violent men I met didn’t want to be violent,” Snyder says. “What they don’t know is alternative behaviours. They don’t understand that where there is greater equality in a relationship, it’s generally stronger and more satisfying.”

She says that among the measures that may make a difference in tackling domestic abuse are better training for the judiciary and the police, constant analysis of risk, education in schools and innovative initiatives such as protected housing so a woman doesn’t have to uproot herself and her children and travel 200 miles to a refuge.

Snyder wants to trigger an international debate about domestic violence and has her own ideas. She proposes an app to provide advice to teenagers distinguishing, for instance, stalking and harassment from “romance” and a helpline for men who want to stop the violence and control. (The UK has a call line, Respect.)

When Snyder had her daughter, she was reconciled with her father and stepmother, Barbara. Close to death, Barbara revealed that she too had been a victim of domestic abuse in a previous marriage. The book is dedicated to her. Prevention, education and early intervention all matter but something far more fundamental and deep-rooted also has to shift because inequality and male power are at the root of this epidemic.

“You have to take the longer view of history,” Snyder says. “Until very recently, for instance, it was legal for a man to rape his wife. I’m an optimist. I have to believe that change is possible.”

• No Visible Bruises by Rachel Louise Snyder is published by Scribe (£9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on orders over £15