What Autocrats Have in Common With Abusers

M. Gessen and Rachel Louise Snyder on the parallels between authoritarianism and domestic violence.

By M. Gessen and Rachel Louise Snyder

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player below or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What Autocrats Have in Common With Abusers

M. Gessen: I’m M. Gessen, an Opinion columnist at The New York Times. I often write about autocracy and what it’s like to live under a totalitarian government.

I spent my childhood in Russia and later went back as an adult and reported from the country through the rise of Vladimir Putin. Now, in the United States, I often write about what’s happening during the Trump presidency.

I’ve been writing about autocrats and aspiring autocrats for most of my professional life. I often find myself thinking about a lecture I happened to listen to several years ago. It was a talk by a psychologist about a completely different subject: Domestic violence. As she talked about the way abusers control their victims, I kept noticing how much overlap there is between that experience and what happens to people under autocratic governments.

As I looked into the subject more, I realized that this was not a coincidence. For one thing, the study of trauma suffered by totalitarian subjects has informed the study of trauma in victims of domestic violence. I wanted to talk about it with a friend and a colleague of mine, Rachel Louise Snyder.

Rachel is a contributing writer at Times Opinion who often covers domestic violence, and she’s helped me think through this connection between violence against women and autocracy.

Thanks for being here, Rachel.

Rachel Louise Snyder: Thanks for having me.

Gessen: Before we get to the meat of the conversation, can you talk to me about how you got into your area of expertise?

Snyder: I can. It’s sort of a funny answer.

I had been a baby journalist of sorts and I lived overseas: I lived in London for a couple of years, I lived in Cambodia for a long time — six years — and I traveled to around 60 or 65 countries. I did stories on gender-based violence in all of those countries — stories of child marriage, trafficking, all this darkness, and domestic violence was in all of those stories. But I was so young and naïve that I would think: That’s not my story, so I’m not going to ask this young, 12-year-old married Roma girl about the violence in her house.

It wasn’t until I moved back to America in 2009 — I was standing in the driveway of a friend of mine, my dear friend the writer Andre Dubus III, whose sister Suzanne works for a domestic violence agency. She drove up, he introduced us, and I did that very American thing, asking “What do you do?” And she said, “Oh, I work for a domestic violence agency.”

I thought, oh, like you have a shelter? And she said, well, we do. But that’s not primarily what we do. What we actually do is: We have looked at the research to determine the highest risk indicators of domestic violence homicide in order to prevent it. So we basically predict domestic violence homicide.

I said, “You do what now?”

This is a crime that happens behind closed doors. This is a crime that I, as a journalist, with all of the privileges that came with it — I’m a white journalist, I’m traveling the world, I have an education — I was blind to it. In some ways, my career ever since that day has been an attempt to pull off my own blinders and say, “Wow, this is something we need to talk about, and that we need to study.” That’s what I’ve done ever since that day.

Gessen: Let’s try to unpack some things: I want to start by talking about control and mechanisms of control. I’m going to go through a list of things that stood out to me when I first started thinking about the overlap, and I want to get your reaction.

Growing up in the Soviet Union, I was used to seemingly every aspect of our lives being controlled. The state decided who could live in which city, which building, which apartment, where you would work after university, whether you could travel, even inside the country. How does that relate to what happens in domestic abuse?

Snyder: That’s one of the primary questions, really. Abusers will start slowly: They’ll talk about clothing, they’ll talk about makeup, they’ll say things like, “Hmm, I see the way men look at you when you wear that short skirt, and so I don’t think you should wear that.” It’s couched in protectionism, and they’ll chip away at attachments to meaningful things or people, and eventually you’ll see somebody control money and work and how much a victim interacts with friends or family.

You’ll see the threat of violence as sometimes more effective and certainly more ubiquitous than actual physical violence.

M. GessenOpinion columnistI have been thinking about the parallels between autocratic control and control exerted by domestic abusers for a long time. In this episode of The Opinions, I asked Rachel Louise Snyder, an Opinion contributing writer and an expert on domestic violence, to talk to me about this. In her writing, Rachel has introduced the term "intimate terror," which I think is particularly useful. I am interested in the psychological parallels, the ways in which the experiences of people living with intimate terror parallel the experience of people living with political terror.Show full commentMMLHere@M. Gessen, I can’t thank you enough for this conversation. I grew up with domestic violence. For years and years, Trump has reminded me of my father. I couldn’t even watch the debates between him and Clinton because my body would grow so uncomfortable. I’d shake uncontrollably. I didn’t understand it until now. All I knew was that I had a visceral response. This conversation performed what you name at the very end. Consciousness raising. Calling things by their names. This discourse and the parallels you make were profoundly helpful to me. Thank you.Show full comment

I have been thinking about the parallels between autocratic control and control exerted by domestic abusers for a long time. In this episode of The Opinions, I asked Rachel Louise Snyder, an Opinion contributing writer and an expert on domestic violence, to talk to me about this. In her writing, Rachel has introduced the term "intimate terror," which I think is particularly useful. I am interested in the psychological parallels, the ways in which the experiences of people living with intimate terror parallel the experience of people living with political terror.

MMLHere@M. Gessen, I can’t thank you enough for this conversation. I grew up with domestic violence. For years and years, Trump has reminded me of my father. I couldn’t even watch the debates between him and Clinton because my body would grow so uncomfortable. I’d shake uncontrollably. I didn’t understand it until now. All I knew was that I had a visceral response. This conversation performed what you name at the very end. Consciousness raising. Calling things by their names. This discourse and the parallels you make were profoundly helpful to me. Thank you.Show full comment

@M. Gessen, I can’t thank you enough for this conversation. I grew up with domestic violence. For years and years, Trump has reminded me of my father. I couldn’t even watch the debates between him and Clinton because my body would grow so uncomfortable. I’d shake uncontrollably. I didn’t understand it until now. All I knew was that I had a visceral response. This conversation performed what you name at the very end. Consciousness raising. Calling things by their names. This discourse and the parallels you make were profoundly helpful to me. Thank you.

Gessen: The threat of violence, as we get more into talking about the Trump administration, that just the amount of violence that we are witnessing now — given that this is a very violent society and has been for a long time — but the spectacle of violence, ICE and political violence. Taken together, I think it has transported us into a different space, where the threat of violence feels much more sort of palpable to many more people.

Snyder: It is in the language that people in this administration are using. It is in Trump saying, well, Iran, you know, they better get smart........

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