Opinion | What Autocrats Have in Common With Abusers

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?