M. Gessen and Rachel Louise Snyder link authoritarianism to domestic violence

M. Gessen and Rachel Louise Snyder are making a pointed comparison: the machinery that keeps people trapped in abusive homes can look strikingly similar to the machinery that sustains authoritarian rule. Gessen said the insight came after hearing a psychologist lecture on domestic violence, where she noticed “how much overlap” there is between the way abusers control victims and the way people are treated under autocratic governments. She called that connection “not a coincidence.”

Snyder, a contributing writer at Times Opinion and the author of No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Abuse Can Kill Us, reached a similar conclusion from a different path. She spent years reporting on gender-based violence abroad, including in London and Cambodia, where she lived for six years, and said she covered the issue in roughly 60 to 65 countries. After moving back to the United States in 2009, Snyder said she began seeing domestic violence less as a private failing than as a hidden structure of power.

Her book won the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation and the Columbia University School of Journalism, and Harvard later quoted Snyder describing domestic violence as a kind of terrorism that is often invisible to the naked eye. That framing fits the broader argument both writers are making: abuse is sustained not only through visible injury, but through intimidation, threats, isolation, and control of information.

The scale of the problem is vast. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says more than 1 in 3 women and more than 1 in 6 men in the United States have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetimes. The agency estimates nearly 43.5 million women and 20.7 million men have suffered intimate partner violence-related harm. National Network to End Domestic Violence’s 19th annual Domestic Violence Counts report added another snapshot: on September 4, 2024, 1,741 programs participated in a 24-hour count, serving 79,088 victims and recording 14,095 unmet requests for help. Hotlines received 26,109 contacts that day, and most unmet requests were for emergency shelter, hotels, motels, transitional housing, or other housing.

The legal history is just as revealing. Snyder told Harvard that Washington, D.C., did not have a law against beating one’s spouse until 1991, a reminder of how recently domestic abuse was treated as tolerable in parts of the country. Gessen’s own writing on Russia, including The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, was described by publishers as portraying the country’s turn into a “mafia state” with elements of totalitarianism. Taken together, the two writers are arguing that fear, isolation, and the normalization of harm are not just household dynamics. They are instruments of power.