On Thursday, Cerina Fairfax, the former second lady of Virginia, was murdered in her Annandale home. The perpetrator, police say, was her husband, Justin Fairfax, the state’s former lieutenant governor who then took his own life. The couple was undergoing what the Fairfax County Police chief chara cterized as a “messy divorce,” and their two teenaged children were apparently home when the violence occurred. It was their son who called the police. Each year, roughly 2,000 American women are murdered by their current or former partners. Domestic violence accounts for 27 percent of the nation’s violent crime and is a leading cause of death for Black women ages 18 to 45. The lurid details of the Fairfax tragedy conform to a common pattern. Reportedly, Justin Fairfax used money for his kids’ horseback riding lessons to buy a gun (he had access to a firearm), his drinking had spiraled out-of-control (escalating substance abuse), and he’d faced two allegations of sexual assault (an apparent history of violence) that effectively ended his political career (male job loss). Perhaps most important, Cerina Fairfax had initiated divorce proceedings, and a court had reportedly ordered her husband to leave their home by the end of the month. Separation is a particularly dangerous moment for women; up to 75 percent of intimate partner homicides occur when the victim is trying to leave the relationship or shortly after it ends. American University professor Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of the 2019 book No Visible Bruises, a sweeping examination of domestic violence with a particular focus on intimate partner homicide. She actually prefers the term “intimate terrorism” to “domestic violence,” because it evokes the insidious psychological stress of living in an environment where a loved one is a threat to one’s life. We called her to add some context to the horrific events of this week. In the aftermath of an intimate partner homicide, a common question is why the victim didn’t leave the relationship. How would you answer that here? Well first of all, domestic violence is the No. 1 cause of homelessness for women in this country. It sounds like [Cerina Fairfax] was the breadwinner. She was a dentist. She may not have had the money to pay the mortgage on a house and rent something else. They had been separated and living in the same home for two years, and you see that a lot in really expensive areas like the DMV. People stay in these terrible relationships because we don’t have low income housing. We don’t even have middle-income housing in some areas. We have high-end, luxury housing—and this is a middle class family who very likely could only afford the place that they were living. She was probably trying to create stability for her kids. But I often reframe the question “Why didn’t she leave?” as “Why was he violent?” or “Why is the perpetrator not the one who is forced to leave?” Now, in this case, he was being forced to leave by the end of April, but the time of separation is the most dangerous time for victims of domestic violence. So that’s a huge red flag, the fact that he was going to be forced out in two weeks. Reportedly, there were lots of other red flags that Justin Fairfax might be escalating toward lethal violence, including his substance abuse and underemployment. There’s a tool you write about, called the Danger Assessment, which can predict intimate partner homicides. What is that? The Danger Assessment was created in the ’80s—first for emergency rooms, but it’s since been adapted for law enforcement and lots of other social service agencies—to try to determine a person’s level of risk for becoming a victim of domestic violence homicide. It looks at 20 factors to try to get a sense of escalation and rising dangerousness. So, are they threatening to kill the victim? Or threatening to commit suicide? A lot of times, people don’t think of suicide as connected to domestic violence homicide, but it is. In order to get a score on the Danger Assessment, you actually have to have training and be a practitioner, because the questions are weighted. But people can look at the Danger Assessment informally, to try to get a sense of whether or not things are escalating. It can help victims make connections. In this case, it seems like there were a few different moments when a Danger Assessment could have been administered. The obvious one is in January, when police investigated a report that Cerina Fairfax had assaulted her husband. Video footage suggested to police that no such assault had occurred, but the footage existed in the first place because she had apparently installed cameras all over her home, which seems like something you do if you’re terrified. I mean, there’s two reasons that you install cameras inside the home. One is for your own security and protection, and the other is to maintain control. There’s really no other reason. Certainly, if the police did any kind of lethality assessment on scene—which many police are trained in and should do—they could have potentially referred her to a domestic violence advocate. But we expect the police to be problem solvers. Police aren’t social workers, and they’re not psychologists. Most victims will never interact with police, or may interact one time with police. But there’s all kinds of other systems that interact with domestic violence victims—victims will go to clergy members, friends, or family members long before they’ll go to the police, and so it’s really important that others are informed about the Danger Assessment. There are some big red flags in the Danger Assessment that haven’t been reported in the Fairfax case. What are those? Strangulation is number one. [Incidents of non-fatal strangulation are among the single best predictors of intimate partner homicide.] The children used as leverage is another. Kids are often used as bargaining chips in emotional abuse, like, “If you leave me, I’ll take the kids.” And I would ask if he was trying to isolate her or control her movements. In my book, there’s a woman who calls victims of domestic violence “passive hostages.” She means that you can go out and work your job and do your grocery shopping and run your errands and everything, and still be unable to extricate yourself from that relationship, because the abuser has taken up residence inside your own head by saying things like, “I will take the children if you ever leave me” or “I will kill you if you ever leave me.” One neighbor described Justin Fairfax as “affable and extroverted.” But you write about how when you started spending time with perpetrators of domestic violence, you were really shocked by how normal they seemed. They didn’t strike you as particularly enraged or violent. Why is that important to understand? We have this vision of monsters when, in fact, abusers are just normal people. They know perfectly well how to act around their bosses or co-workers or neighbors. This is one of the great misunderstandings of domestic violence—like, I see judges all the time order people to anger management. But they don’t have anger management issues. I mean, some of them might—there may be co-morbidities there—but abusers don’t generally abuse everyone else in their life. They hold down normal jobs. They’re white collar, they’re blue collar, they’re funny, they’re smart—they’re a wide constellation of humanity. And it’s the same with victims. Something like one in three women are victims of domestic violence. That means that every day, all of us are walking past victims and perpetrators all the time. You like to ask the question “Why was he violent?” How would you begin to answer that in this case?  I don’t know enough about his history. Obviously, he had faced these allegations of sexual assault before, so there’s apparently a history of violence. And I know that there was financial abuse, because he used the kids’ money to buy a gun. In what way is that financial abuse? Let me take a step back and say that we really prioritize physical abuse in this country, across all systems. We look for bruises, we look for physical injuries—but there’s all kinds of other ways to abuse somebody. There’s emotional abuse, there’s financial abuse, there’s coercive control, and they all have overlap. So financial abuse might be just what it sounds like; you steal money from either a shared account or a partner’s account. Or you control finances to maintain control over somebody. Another common tactic—probably the most common form of financial abuse, actually—is running up credit card debt in shared accounts, and then that ruins the credit of both people. There’s reporting that he’d incurred some debts. Yeah, that would be another way to lock a victim in place. If their credit is ruined, they can’t go and rent another apartment. They certainly can’t get another mortgage. If someone is concerned about violence in their own home, or they’re concerned about a loved one, what should they do? The first thing they should do is make space for the victim to talk about their experience without shame. So don’t make judgments. Don’t say, “You’ve got to leave.” The victim has to get to a point where they’re ready to take action. I would also call a local domestic violence agency or the National Domestic Violence Hotline. I would probably try the local agency first, because they would know the local resources. And I would make a safety plan and have them do the Danger Assessment, even just informally, to try to get a sense of whether or not things are escalating. And then I would also say that domestic violence agencies—which operate in basically every county in America—should make sure that when they’re doing trainings, they are inviting local community leaders from churches and schools, or human resource officers at local businesses. You want to make sure that people in the community are aware of these signs, because law enforcement: a) can’t do it alone; and b) is not always going to be the system that victims interact with first. Do you have other thoughts about what happened this week? We need to make space to have these conversations publicly. And the media needs to do a much better job of keeping gender-based violence in its coverage, because the threat isn’t going away. In fact, it’s arguably getting worse. As women take up more space in the public sphere, the pushback against them is growing more significant and more deadly, and so we have to do better. We have to keep fighting for our right to be in the public sphere.The post Cerina Fairfax’s Murder Fits a Terrifying Pattern first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less