Twigs snap. Rubber bands snap. A dry branch under your boot.
“Snap” is a word for things that break suddenly, with no warning, because they’ve been bent too far. Nobody blames the twig.
That’s why it’s such a loaded word in a headline about a man who has hurt or killed a woman. “He snapped.” “He just snapped.” “He lost control.”
Each version tells the same story. Something broke, out of nowhere, and nobody could have seen it coming. Quietly, it also moves the cause from the person to the moment: an argument, a text message, a bad week.
The evidence doesn’t support that story. Our Watch publishes Australia’s national guidelines for reporting on violence against women. Their list of common misconceptions includes the idea that men “just snap”, and they note that around 80 per cent of men who murdered their partners had a history of abusing them. Violence against women, in their words, is “both predictable and preventable”.
Predictable is the opposite of snapped.
The guidelines name other words that do the same job:
“Domestic dispute” makes violence sound like an argument between equals.
“Volatile relationship” spreads the responsibility across two people.
A passive headline like “woman punched” leaves out who did the punching.
Describing the man as “an amazing husband” or a “loving dad” invites readers to wonder what went wrong, rather than what he did.
None of these words is a lie, and that’s what makes them work. They’re ordinary words, used quickly, by journalists on deadline and by the rest of us when we retell the story. But each one removes something: the history, the choice or the person.
The guidelines’ fix is plain: name the violence, keep the person who did it in the sentence, and give the story its context. Their example of a better headline is “Man kills wife after years of abusing her”. It’s a harder headline to read. It’s also the accurate one.
Twigs snap. People have histories.
