Domestic abuse is a national emergency. The ongoing inaction and lack of accountability is evident across our institutions from schools to parliament, and Australian women are calling it out.
Investigative journalist Jess Hill has been writing and researching about domestic abuse since 2014. She holds a spotlight to perpetrators and the systems that enable them, and has published her forensic findings in the award-winning book, See What You Made Me Do.
In this interview, Jess Hill and Verity Firth discuss how we can confront the national crisis of domestic violence and drastically reduce it – not in generations to come, but today.
VERITY FIRTH: Everybody, thank you for joining us today. I'll just wait for about 30 seconds as people enter the virtual room and then we'll kick off today's event.
We've got around 120 people in the room now, so I might begin and more people can join as we go along.
Firstly, hello, everyone. Thank you very much for joining us at today's event. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we're on the traditional land of First Nations people and this was land that was never ceded. I want to pay particular attention to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation because that's where I am and that's where UTS is situated, on the land of the Gadigal, who of course are the traditional custodians of knowledge for the land upon which this university has been built. I want to pay respect to Elders past and present.
My name is Verity Firth. I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS and lead our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion. It's my huge pleasure to be joined today by the indomitable Jess Hill, who I will properly introduce in just a minute, but a couple of housekeeping issues first. First, the event is being live captioned. So if you want to use captions, you need to click on the link that's in the chat, and you'll find that at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel. The captions will then open in a separate window.
There will be an opportunity for Q&A, so you will be able to ask your own questions, and if you do have any questions, you can type them into the Q&A box. Do not type them into the chat. That is not where the questions go. The questions go into the Q&A box, and the good thing about the Q&A box is it also allows you to upvote other people's questions. I tend to ask the questions that have the most upvotes, as you can imagine, so try to make your questions to the point, relatively short and relevant to the topics that we're discussing here today.
I also want to acknowledge before we begin that today's discussion does include topics that are upsetting and they can cause distress and they can be triggering for some people. So if at any time you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed or distressed, just take a break from the webinar. You can just turn it off. You can always rejoin later if you want to, there's no problem with that. You don't need to sit here and feel distressed. Do not force yourself to do that. If you feel overwhelmed or distressed in any way, speak to somebody you trust or contact 1800RESPECT, and we're posting those contact details in the chat box now.
For similar reasons, if you're wanting to tell your own story, of course we really recognise the lived experience of everyone on this call, but if you're wanting to ask a question and tell your own story, try to keep your story not too long. Try to keep it pertinent to the question that you're asking, partly because we don't want to accidentally upset other people who are participating in today's events. Recognise that this is delicate subject matter for some people.
Thank you everyone for joining us for this important discussion today. I'm sure that hopefully many of you that are online were also part of the International Women's Day event that we held specifically on the work being done to prevent and end domestic and family violence. We held it with Dr Anne Summers, Dixie Link‑Gordon and Catherine Gander.
Today's event is an opportunity to meet Jess Hill and Jess Hill is UTS's inaugural Journalist‑in‑Residence and a prominent voice in confronting our national issue of domestic violence. Australian society ‑ I don't need to tell those on this call this, but Australian society is deeply marred by the ongoing horrific epidemic of domestic and family abuse. Each instance of violence is one too many and in Australia there are too many atrocious crimes, too many grieving families and too many headlines. There are too many to count, particularly when state and federal bodies are not taking an active hand in collecting the numbers of victims, nor data on the types of abuse. The human cost is incalculable.
Australian women have risen up this year, demanding accountability and action from our institutions and leaders. Enough is enough. So I'm very honoured to be joined today by Jess Hill.
Now, Jess is an investigative journalist who has been researching and writing about domestic abuse since 2014. She's a leading journalist and spokesperson on the topic of domestic abuse in Australia, with three Our Watch Awards, an Amnesty International Media Award for Women's Leadership and two Walkley Awards. As well as this, Jess was listed in Foreign Policy's top 100 women to follow on Twitter and is one of Cosmopolitan magazine's 30 most influential people under 30.
In 2019, Jess published her Stella Prize‑winning first book See What You Made Me Do, a forensic deep dive into the national issue of domestic and family violence in Australia, and I do recommend people to read this book. I found it profoundly moving and eye opening and I'll talk a little more about that when I talk to Jess.
Now, if you're not the type who wants to read the book, See What You Made Me Do is now being turned into a three‑part TV series that Jess will host and which is premiering next week on Wednesday, 5 May on SBS, NITV and SBS On Demand as part of their content during Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month. That, as I said, is called See What You Made Me Do. We're incredibly lucky at UTS to have Jess as our inaugural Journalist‑in‑Residence in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. So welcome to the webinar, Jess.
JESS HILL: Thank you so much, Verity.
VERITY FIRTH: All right. So, as I've just outlined, you've been researching and writing about domestic abuse and men's violence towards women since 2014. Domestic abuse affects 17% of women over the age of 15. That's one in six. While each woman's story is unique, reflecting the diversity of women, their circumstances and backgrounds, you've found that their abuse almost always follows the same pattern. You've written, and I'll quote you back at yourself, "It's a truly confounding phenomenon: how is it that men from vastly different cultures know how to use the same basic techniques of oppression?" Can you tell us a little bit more about the commonality of domestic abuse? What does it look like?
JESS HILL: Yeah, so much floods into my head when you ask that question and the first thing just to note is that ‑ and this is how statistics update all the time. We had the same thing with child sexual abuse. I think in the 70s it used to be something like one in a million kids had been sexually abused. Then by the 80s it was one in twenty. I think now we're down to more like one in six, one in seven. One in six was the stat for women being abused.
When ANROWS did work on partners not cohabitating, they found it's one in four. When you include dating violence and not what we would traditionally cast as domestic inside the house, it's one in four, which you wonder as we start to measure non‑physical violence, because that's a stat that looks at physical and sexual violence, we start to measure relationships that are non‑physical but high in coercive control, are we going to get closer to one in three? I think so, probably.
So the similarities, yes, and I had a men's behaviour change facilitator in the business 25 years, Susan Garrity, tell me this. She'd be sitting in the room with men from all around the world and newly migrated, third‑generation Caucasian Australian, and all of them, even though they had their own maybe cultural reasons or excuses, basically were telling the same story and that is that there was a need to have like a certain type of control or a predictable outcome in their relationship and in many of these guys ‑ not in all, but in many of these guys ‑ a deeply seated fear of abandonment, a fear that their partner would leave and a lot of this coming from basically a sense that they are deeply unlovable. Like this is a very buried sense and some of these guys can be highly narcissistic and they come across as the most confident men you've ever met and their sense of like loving themselves seems to be, you know, really over the top, but actual self‑love is the opposite of narcissism and what you find in a lot of these guys, guys who I've interviewed in men's behaviour change groups, time and again they talk about the way that they recovered was in establishing self‑love ‑ like real self‑love, not narcissistic self‑love.
Anyway, so when there's coercive control ‑ what is basically described by men by the women who they subject this to is a process that starts with establishing trust and intimacy, however that may happen, isolation, and then into monopolising the partner's perception. So it's like basically framing what's happening as either their fault or as something that they need to help fix, like "I'm a broken man and only you can fix me", "All my exes were bitches, you're the only one that understands me", but monopolising their perception all to be focused on how do I fix this or how do I fix me to stop him doing this?
Then it starts to go into like humiliation, degradation; alternating punishments with reward, so sometimes super kindness and other times just absolute oppression and what seems like hatred, you know, being directed at them; enforcing arbitrary demands; setting up like rules that may change from day to day, that you've got to know in advance, otherwise you get punished for breaking them, even when no rule has been established. So it's this basically getting you into this code, this code where the relationship is the most important thing in the world, you must figure out the magic code and how to fix it, you must always know in advance how to comply with a demand that's going to be made, and then in amongst that inducing debility and exhaustion.
A question I sometimes ask women, which is what was the first thing you thought when you woke up in the morning, it usually elicits an answer like, "Well, I was tired from the night before because almost every night he'd wake me up around 3 or 4am and want to talk to me about some suspicion about me having an affair or some other grievance or kick me out of bed in the middle of the night because he'd been stewing about something." So it happens in all ways.
It also happens through gaslighting, where you start to doubt your own perceptions because the person you're with has literally denied what's happened in front of both of you or fabricating something entirely. And threats ‑ threats not just to you, but maybe to your pets, to your kids, or even only to the perpetrator themselves, so threats to suicide if you leave.
So this system of coercive control ‑ and this is not all domestic violence. Some domestic violence sits outside of coercive control, it's more reactive, it's not systemic. But where coercive control is present, which we think is in the majority of cases, it's described as like a web of abuse where each strand is pulling tighter and tighter to the point where you are stuck in the centre of it and the idea of how you'd even know that's what's happening because your perception is monopolised inwards, how you know it's happening and how you'd even think about what it would take to get out of it ‑ a lot of women and anyone, you know, non‑binary people, men who are in same‑sex relationships where coercive control is happening, you know, they are just struggling from hour to hour to try to keep a grip on their own reality, but also to resist internally what's being done to them. It's so exhausting that trying to leave even just the pragmatic sense of that can feel like such a bridge too far and also they're very invested often in trying to fix this person and trying to make it better.
So that's why this audio documentary series that I'm working on that's coming out in August, when trying to workshop a name for it I just said we have to call it "The Trap" because I think people need to understand what this is, it's a trap, and when people say, "Why doesn't she just leave", I think if we understand that it is a process of entrapment ‑ not just abuse, but entrapment ‑ those questions will start to become a lot more intelligent.
VERITY FIRTH: What I found ‑ there's a couple of things I found really interesting about this description in your book. The first was how you actually talked about the methodologies or what you've just described being very similar to the sort of torture that prisoners of war undertake in camps such as you described, North Korean camps with American soldiers, and so forth, so actually the methods of coercive control being absolutely similar to the torture methods that they used, but secondly, this idea that you talk about how for some men it's even overt, like there are online websites where they absolutely talk about these key sets of criteria, like establishing intimacy first, then moving to this, then moving to that, completely overtly and upfront but for I don't know whether ‑ I'm now thinking for the majority of men it's almost like an innate coercive control technique. How do you describe that?
JESS HILL: Yes, that's what was ‑ when I started writing the book, it was so confounding to get my head around, how do men who use that same modus operandi in every relationship and could describe it to you what they set out to do when they meet someone ‑ how is it that they end up using pretty much the same techniques as men who are still getting that same outcome, which is like the oppression and control of another person, but are doing it, yeah, from this innate, instinctive place?
I think when ‑ and this has come through the work of people like Judith Herman, when you start to look at how coercive control is used in various contexts, it becomes quite clear that this is ‑ there is an innate sense in humans of how to overwhelm somebody else's agency, how to basically engage in thought reform, you know, and that was like ‑ it's kind of an old‑fashioned term people used to use with colts or in terms of what would happen in communist countries, they're also using it in terms of what's happening in the Uyghur camps at the moment, a type of reeducation process, some people call it brain washing, but the point is you are basically almost annihilating that person's perspective as a perpetrator and you're replacing almost that perspective with your own.
What I hear from so many victim survivors is they'll say, "Years later I still look in the mirror and I still see myself through his eyes", or a woman who was trained into this type of compliance and compliance is a big part of coercive control, where she had to vacuum the floor in a certain way and 10 years after her partner had died she was still doing it.
VERITY FIRTH: Yes.
JESS HILL: And coming out of that is very much like the sort of almost deprogramming that needs to happen after someone comes out of a colt. Interestingly, because coercive control is also used in colts, when I've spoken to various people who work in either deprogramming in colts or who were in colts, they say that if you ‑ commonly when people leave colts and they don't go through that counselling process to really deprogram, they are really vulnerable to being in a coercively controlling relationship because the almost like neural pathway has been carved out.
I've heard Grace Tame talk numerous times about the stages of grooming in child sexual abuse. It's precisely the same as coercive control. Like this is the method by which people undermine somebody else's agency and create an atmosphere of threat and confusion by which they are able to sort of step into the breach and start, yeah, having a really surprising amount of control over that person's perspective and direction, which is not to say that a person's agency is entirely void and in fact women, children, whoever is a victim survivor of coercive control, resistance is a huge part of it. They are often resisting in ways that aren't even clear to them and certainly aren't necessarily clear to outsiders.
So I'm absolutely not saying ‑ it's not like the perpetrator steps into their brain, takes over the steering wheel and takes control, but there is like this internal fight between their perspective and your perspective and it's very hard to hold on to that sense of yourself. That's why a lot of people will say like, "Oh, my friend" or "my daughter", or whoever, "I feel like she's in this controlling relationship, but when I try to talk to her about it, she pushes me away." That's because a big part of coercive control is establishing that loyalty above everything is paramount. If you're not loyal, there's a threat that may be quite precise against you or others or it might be quite diffuse, but you feel if you are not loyal and show that, then something, something bad is going to happen. So when people start challenging that and say, "This person that you're with is really dangerous", you know, "I hate what they're doing to you", the person can feel like, "Actually, no, you're the problem, you're threatening this whole situation. I've got it under control. You don't understand", you know. So it can be very, very difficult to talk to people who are in that relationship and get them to see what's happening to them.
VERITY FIRTH: And that of course ties in with my next question, which is when there becomes ‑ which happens across ‑ again, in your book you talk about this, that even the most feminist of women end up victim blaming almost, like, "Why aren't you leaving? I don't understand." So can we talk a little bit about victim blaming and what are some examples of those and how are we seeing them in motion in some of the current national discussions about what's going on?
JESS HILL: I think a lot of victim blaming is when there's so much behind it. Obviously there's misogyny behind it, but aside from that, there's also ‑ it's a defence mechanism, like "I would never be that person, this would never happen to me, it's a deficit on their part", because really truly like take on what the reality of those statistics actually means, how high a likelihood it is that when you meet someone they may end up not being a bit abusive or troublesome but like ruining your life ‑ that's a terrifying prospect. So for people whose driving force is not just misogyny, I think that sometimes that victim blaming can be just like that's separation between me and that person.
One of the most amazing victim blaming examples from the book was actually when I was talking to this victim survivor Kay Schubach, who is amazing, her insights are so great. She was sitting in a courtroom. Her ex‑partner, who had coercively controlled her in one of those ways it's full modus operandi, he does the same thing every single time, he's a horror story. She was sitting there ‑ he was on trial, he'd been charged by another woman that he'd subjected to this, and she's listening to the woman's story and she's just going, "God, how could she be so stupid? Why would she stay with him, after all that?" And then she just clocked it for a second and was, "Oh, my God, that's exactly what happened to me, I stayed with him after that, I got pregnant to him and this happened, I sought medication." It was exactly the same story but my first instinct was to blame her for it.
So it's really engrained in us to blame the victim because we have over time totally invisibilised the perpetrator. I mean, it's always been, you know ‑ aside from when we've labelled them as drunks, you know, 18th and 19th century, these lousy men who are drunks, still it was what are the women not doing enough of to control them or help them, or whatever, but at least then there was some focus on men. But I think through the 20th century we actually ‑ those men became more and more invisible and it was much more about what is the woman doing or not doing much as it is with sex crimes.
I think the victim blaming ‑ the way it's evolved, you know, even in the terminology, so you go from women being victims through to being survivors. Now, that was a big evolution to show actually what these women ‑ how they resist, what they do to survive, so taking them out of that sort of like receiving, just being a receiver, a passive receiver of abuse, even calling them a victim was a development on from just labelling them masochistic.
So you can see going from masochistic to victims to survivors, there's this sort of through line where the actual reality of domestic abuse has become more visible, but slowly we're also being able to foreground the perpetrator and say like, you know, if you're going to ask why doesn't she leave, then you have to ask why does he do it and what is he doing to stop her from leaving, you know? I don't like to dismiss anyone's questions as stupid or, you know, as being something that shouldn't be asked, because if you've got the question in mind, we should ask it. I have a problem with it being asked rhetorically, like why doesn't she just leave, because people are expecting a victim blaming answer, that it's a victim blaming question.
"Why doesn't she leave" is a great question because actually I'll explain to you why doesn't she leave, you know? But as long as why doesn't she leave is a question that's asked to look further into his behaviour, because I can tell you a woman who goes back to her partner five or six times where there's serious violence, it's confounding on the face of it if you look at her actions and go far out, why can't she see what kind of threat she's under? But if you start asking what's he doing to woo you back and maybe she says, "Well, his friends keep calling me and say he's going to kill himself if I don't go back", suddenly you're like that's a horrible bind to be in, your actions are making a lot more sense now.
But unfortunately it's always just been this focus on her behaviour and the courts have that focus, Family Court has that focus, child protection has that focus. Literally the child protection model looks at the victim parent and measures their ability to protect and when you get your child removed, it's based on this idea that you've failed to protect your children. But not even the system is able to protect her. The system is not able to protect the kids. How is she supposed to protect herself and her kids from someone who is determined to destroy them? It's absolutely insane. So victim blaming is not just something that we do, it's something that is actually the paradigm of so many of the response systems, Family Court and child protection being the paramount version of that.
VERITY FIRTH: I think one of the most powerful examples in your book to that was the woman who felt she had to stay with a man because she'd be more likely to be able to protect her child if she stayed with him than if he got every second weekend and was then alone with the child on visitation. She thought that would be more dangerous. I just thought that was just ‑ and again, such an indictment on the way family law courts and the way that those sorts of experiences of violence, including direct violence by the child, are not necessarily taken into account when it comes into unsupervised visitation.
JESS HILL: Absolutely. I've sat with women who will say they go into the family law courts and some of them regret leaving because they're like, "Now if my kids are five or six, I'm in a potentially system for the next decade where he may do his utmost to bankrupt me, he will impugn my character and absolutely malign me in court, where my children will be subject to ongoing sort of examinations and interviews and where the most likely outcome will be shared parenting" and that's not necessarily shared custody half and half time, but shared parenting which means responsibility for all the major decisions, including whether that child sees a counsellor.
I remember sitting in a room with counsellors and Legal Aid people in Tasmania and the question that came up a couple of times was like how do we as counsellors get access to children when the family law orders have said they're not allowed to seek counselling? The reason why these family law orders say that is because the Family Courts have disbelieved the mother's allegations or the children's own allegations and see them going to counselling as this way of furthering their anxiety about the situation, even when there's been a proven history of domestic abuse, you know, but they disbelieve child sexual abuse allegations or where there's part of ‑ the court has decided on balance not to have happened.
So when you have someone who's perpetrated domestic violence, especially coercive control, who's equally responsible for making those decisions, you have children who aren't getting their health needs responded to, you know, you have children who are being prevented from attending doctors for issues like autism or other disorders ‑ I mean, it's actually aside from just spending weekends. Imagine having to co‑parent with a coercive controller? Imagine being court ordered to do that and then imagine being in a situation where your kids are court ordered to see a parent that terrifies them and that in private they are begging you not to hand them over, screaming, you know, punching the walls, hiding under beds and you knowing that if you resist, you will be contravened in court and that if they were to totally resist and if you were to actually just disappear, like a number of mothers and kids I know have, that the Federal Police can be sent after you and you may be incarcerated and really not see your children for years until they're old enough to make their own decisions. It's just terrifying.
VERITY FIRTH: I know, it really is. In the last week the Federal Government's ‑ it was about the Federal Government's sexual consent videos of course that were meant to be educational resources for teachers and students, including the infamous milkshake video that was removed within 72 hours. At the time you said, "I think we need to stop presuming the competence and start seeing these missteps on sex education and domestic abuse as being agenda driven. Outrage is useful to a point, but let's get to the bottom of what actually drives these strategic decisions." What is it that drives strategic decisions like the one that we saw last week?
JESS HILL: I'd have to like fully investigate to verify this entirely, but I think that like based on historical evidence, a conservative religious agenda. I'm not just saying religious agenda from the Federal Government itself, although in the last week that's become perhaps more clear on behalf of the Prime Minister and other ministers, but the Australian Christian Lobby is a powerful voice in Canberra. It was a powerful voice during the same sex marriage debate.
I know that they've had various things to say about Our Watch, that there have been things that I can't talk about publicly but are going to be reported in the Age by a good friend of mine who literally just called the minute that you asked that question. So there's some things that I can't talk about just yet, but I think that anybody who's been paying attention to Australian politics can see how influential the Australian Christian Lobby is. They don't even represent most Christians. It's just a self‑appointed lobby for Christians. It's kind of absurd.
But the Government can't talk about sex, they just can't talk about it. It's absolutely clear in those videos and in that material. I went and had a quick look at the entire suite of material and there's a couple of mentions of sex, there's a couple of mentions of rape, but it's so, to extend the metaphor, vanilla and I'm thinking back to ‑ I'm not a consent expert, but just to say from my experience as a teenager, you know, I was thinking back to times when I'd be at a blue light disco and some guy grabs my arse. I'm like how do I say no without looking like a prude? I would love to have seen that modelled, you know, in a video like someone grabs your arse, you don't want to look like a prude, you have all these things going through your head, what do you say, or that guy grabbing your arse, go through all the things, maybe another way you could get this girl's attention and show you're interested in her, show it.
Metaphors are useful to an extent and I'm sure there are some things that can be communicated. Some people have talked very highly about a particular tea video on YouTube about consent, you don't want to drink tea if you're unconscious, and that's kind of good for a laugh and it shows things from a different perspective, but consent is really ‑ it's clear, but it's also tricky because we're not just talking about whether someone says yes or no, we're also talking about power imbalances that are built into relationships or built into especially boy‑girl, you know, heterosexual couplings, for want of a better word. It sounds so old, but that idea that girls may feel like they have no other choice but to say yes or boys may feel like if they don't sort of just like take the girl, then they're being a pussy.
These are the conversations you need to be having and if the Government is going to spend $3.5 million, like so much stuff has to be done on that ‑ getting boys not to fear rejection, not to fear feel shamed and then feel angry about rejection. It's showing girls how to just absolutely be in their independence, be in what feels good, even know what feels good instead of just putting that aside to be like "I'm going to do whatever they want because I want them to like me."
There's a lot of conversations to have around this and kids are so hungry for it. Like there's so much confusion and the conversations I've had even just in schools, like they're really intelligent. They just need a little bit of guidance, an opening up of safe space and some parameters and they just go for it.
So it's such ‑ yeah, it's shameful that the Government continues to do this, but there's a certain point at which you stop expecting a group of people to act differently and I've reached that point.
VERITY FIRTH: Everything you're saying absolutely concurs with our experience at university in terms of our consent training that we do with our students and staff and how exactly that, young people are yearning for just some honest talk with each other about the whole subject. You're absolutely correct in that in terms of what young people want and need.
Getting back ‑ it was interesting, when you were talking about that, you talked about the sense of shame the boy can feel if rejected and a big part of your book talks about humiliated fury coming out of shame and the link between that and coercive control. So just pulling us back to coercive control, as you know, legislation to criminalise coercive control is currently being drawn up and is expected to be reported back to the Government by October and they've been having various parliamentary inquiries around coercive control as well with people providing evidence.
One of the issues that has emerged, particularly with bodies representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, is around how do we ensure that criminalising coercive control doesn't again disproportionately target and incarcerate First Nations peoples, particularly the connection between high rates of incarceration, and so forth, for our First Nations people. So what do you have to say about some of those points that have been made?
JESS HILL: So the fact that that concern is being foregrounded right at the beginning of talking about legislation and whatever associated reforms would need to go along with that to make it effective is essential, you know, and I think a sign of like how far we've come and especially with the sector as well, you know, really foregrounding First Nations concerns, because while they're a small part of the population, they are massively disproportionately represented, both in prisons obviously but as victim survivors and as perpetrators, obviously also Aboriginal women not always subjected to coercive control by Aboriginal men. In fact, there's a big pattern and Safe Steps in Melbourne, the family violence helpline, their counsellors really explained this to me that a lot of the phone calls they get are about white men often with criminal backgrounds targeting Aboriginal women. So it's more complex than just an intra‑community situation.
So what I think in terms of criminalising coercive control is it's not so much about adding another offence. It's about correcting an offence that does not work properly and that does not actually recognise domestic abuse for what it is. So what we're doing at the moment is we are picking out little puzzle pieces that are present in some but not all of the most dangerous relationships and we're prosecuting those or we're bringing those to court or that's what's getting police intervention.
Now, of course if you're being coercively controlled you may be able to seek an intervention order. Some people still can't get police backing to do that, even when they describe what sound like terrifying circumstances of coercive control, but theoretically that's where the intervention order system comes in to protect people who are subjected to that. But when it comes to pressing charges, which in domestic violence mostly women are pressing charges out of a need for safety, out of a need to create both whatever accountability may be possible if that even is possible, and it's not very good in the criminal justice system or if that person does end up in jail, sometimes it's not popular or palatable to say this, but for that woman it's the only time she feels safe. She has a minute to re‑establish her life, maybe move somewhere different, maybe just sort out something in her community without the perpetrator being right there.
But what we're talking about really, as I said, is just amending a law that was not really ever designed that well. If we're just looking at physical incidents or maybe sexual incidents, we're only seeing parts of the picture. When you have, as I've seen, so many court rooms, you'll have something like this man is being charged with the destruction of three pot plants. His wife is sitting several rows back, not sitting next to him, so I'm sitting there going well, is that all that's happened? Did anyone ask what's happened for the last year or two years or 10 years, because what made her call the police to report the destruction of three pot plants?
So here's a magistrate, that's all the information they have, how do they assess the risk that that man poses? How do they decide whether that man should receive a particular type of intervention, be it a behaviour change program, which I think is woefully inadequate as they stand right now, or whether there needs to be something more severe than a community order because that low‑level offence is going to get a very low‑level response.
In the UK, where coercive control is criminalised, there was a stark story the other day about the head of a Welsh football team who had two "incidents", charges against him, which was I think there was an assault, something else, and I felt myself having that reaction like I wonder what the background is to this. Maybe he did just overreact one night. Like this is me, someone who's been in this for seven years, I have that moment. Then it says as well three years of coercive control and you're like well, there's no question about that guy's intent, is there? It just makes it so clear. So what we're really trying to do is have an offence that recognises a pattern of behaviour which is what domestic abuse actually is instead of an offence that only recognises the incidents.
When it comes to the issue with especially First Nations women they are often, or more often than non‑Indigenous women, engaging in a type of violent resistance because that's all they've got, is to defend themselves. Often they feel like they can't engage even services, let alone police, for many, many reasons.
When police arrive and the woman is engaged in violent resistance, at the moment they're there to charge that assault, they're there to charge that incident. What we're trying to say is like let's put that in context, you know. Let's see why did she do that, investigate the full arc of the relationship.
And in Scotland the head of the police there said just that when they introduced coercive control law, "Finally we now have a mandate to investigate the full circumstances of the relationship and present that to the court." It also means that when you go to court, you aren't just trying to prove whether that one incident occurred. You are able to bring in so many types of evidence that were previously inadmissible ‑ text messages, proof of surveillance, like if there are cameras inside the house, testimony from friends and family about whether one has been isolated, if there are friends and family still left, a huge range of evidence such that the specialist domestic violence prosecutor in Scotland says that the vast majority of defendants are pleading guilty because the evidence is so conclusive, the victim survivors aren't even having to go to court aside from maybe giving a victim impact statement.
For me it's like I'm not ‑ it's a shame that we're talking about it as though we're just trying to introduce a new offence because actually we're just trying to fix an old offence.
VERITY FIRTH: Yes, that's a very good way of describing it. So I'm going to move now to some of our questions from our audience because I do want to ask some of these questions before we have to close. And the one that's had the top number of votes, which I think is a really important one, is one from Jason, who asks, "What can I do if I think a friend is facing domestic violence?"
JESS HILL: Yes, it's really tricky ‑ thanks, Jason. The first thing you can do ‑ and this is actually harder than it sounds ‑ is to stay in contact with that person, and when I say it's harder than it sounds, it's because it can be so hard to see someone being subjected to abuse or being controlled and them not being able to see it and sometimes you have to figure out ways to bring conversations to them that aren't going to make them push you away.
The other thing that perpetrators do, if they see you as a close connection that kind of threatens their world view, they can start sort of talking shit about you basically to their partner and you may find that friend of yours suddenly pushing you away. That's a red flag. If your friend is pushing you away and nothing has happened and you're also seeing that kind of controlling behaviour from their partner, think about why that partner may not want you around and try to resist it. Even if it just means ‑ even if there's nothing you can do and that person is not going to stay in touch with you, just let them know that any time they're ready to come back and talk, there's no hard feelings and you'll be there, you know, because just recognising that in some of these situations the spell that is cast is so strong that literally they can be turning people against their most close and loved friends and family. So it's not easy.
The other thing is when you have a chance to sort of talk to people about this not to say necessarily, "The person you're with is a shithead", even though it might be really tempting to do that, but more like, "I am worried about the changes I'm seeing in you", like "You've started losing a lot of weight" or "You don't seem to eat a lot" ‑ point out how they're changing. Sometimes when that isolation happens, they don't even notice how they're changing until one day they look in the mirror and just go, "Who am I? I don't recognise this person." So if you can sort of try to be that mirror for them.
And because it's so much in the news, sometimes I think about well, maybe just say, "Have you heard of this thing coercive control? It's so freaky, like how it is. I thought I understood domestic abuse as being physical and blah, but actually it's this." Talk to them about it as though it's not targeted at them but explain what coercive control is.
I had a woman come up to me at a talk recently, it was actually at a class being led by Hannah Clarke's mother, Sue Clarke, on educating mothers and daughters about coercive control. She also does it for fathers and sons as well. This woman came up to me and said she'd read my book and that had been the impetus for her leaving. Her daughter was sitting next to her and said, "I'd been trying to tell her for two years and she wouldn't listen. It wasn't until she saw what it was and recognised herself in it that she finally understood what I'd been trying to tell her", you know? So people are going to come to it in their own time.
When there's kids involved and you feel there's danger there, that's really hard and sometimes you have to think about is this situation so bad that the kids are now in danger in a way she can't see or won't see and then I think it's good to call someone like 1800RESPECT and just get some advice on what to do next. It's not always so easy as just waiting for that penny to drop when there are kids involved.
VERITY FIRTH: That's a really good answer. As you were answering like that, I think this is such brilliantly practical and sensible advice, Jess, thank you. That's what we need to do in consent training too.
JESS HILL: Yes.
VERITY FIRTH: We need to roll you out everywhere. Elizabeth Robinson asks the next question: "Each time we hear devastating reports of a woman dying at the hands of her current or former partner, there is outrage, calls to do more to address family violence and promises by politicians and police to do better. Then nothing happens and the cycle repeats itself. What will it take to change our culture and finally address this seriously?"
JESS HILL: Mmm, well, it can feel like nothing happens, but you know in Victoria something very big happened and it was due to the advocacy of so many people, like Phil Cleary, so many countless survivors, their families, all the rest of it, but when Luke Batty was murdered, it was like the straw that broke the camel's back and for the first time I wonder if ever in the world family violence became an election issue. And I'm being intruded upon by my cat. Sorry.
And you know you've got a royal commission into family violence and a government that accepted all of the recommendations and has committed to implementing it and has spent vast sums of money, not even vast enough necessarily, for how big an issue it is in society, but they have changed, you know, incredibly.
I'd say in other states and federally Anne Summers at your last event made the point about if you look back at who's in charge of the national plan to reduce violence against women and kids, it's not people you associate with progress in gender equality, you know, people like Christian Porter, Scott Morrison. So there's an issue about stewardship, but there's also an issue about paradigm and what the paradigm shift that happened in Victoria was recognising that this is, as the Premier said ‑ this is like the number one law and order issue and that's with only 20% of victims right now ever reporting to police.
It's still the number one law and order issue, 40 to 60% of the time Victoria police spend time on family violence, but it's also the number one threat to public safety. It's the number one so many things and it backgrounds so many other issues ‑ suicide. You know, one in five women who suicide have a background of family violence. There's a high suicide rate in perpetrators as the New South Wales domestic homicide review team found. There's homelessness, the growing numbers especially 55 plus women who are becoming homeless. We've had lives of disadvantaged that really were backgrounded with domestic violence either as children or as adults.
I said in the book we look around and we go how did it get so bad, but we rarely follow the bread crumbs back to where it started. Often domestic abuse and family violence is where it started. For me it's like no amount of funding, like announcements or bits and pieces here and there, is actually going to see the change that we need. It's a paradigm shift that is required that says this is one of the most corrosive effects on our society. It affects millions upon millions of Australians both as victims and as perpetrators. We need to start addressing it like that instead of seeing it as a niche issue that happens to some people.
I think for me the framework of coercive control rather than this incident‑based model that we've had starts to at least draw back and see it for what it is, you know, in a large number of cases and see then how when the relationship stops their control does not necessarily end and how systems are brought into that level of control, how they are abused, how they enable the abuse and perpetuate it. This is the paradigm shift that I think is actually happening with a number of politicians who care about it. I think they're starting to understand perhaps for the first time what this actually is and what kind of level of attention needs to be placed on it.
So anything ‑ criminalising coercive control. I've made a big deal about that because it's one part of a system that I think needs repairing, but by no means do I think that that is going to even necessarily see a reduction in homicides or see a reduction in violence. We can't keep on responding to domestic violence in a way that's false. I'm like fix that part so we can make visible the entire system.
But when you look at like how do we actually get in behind where we get to that point where someone is needing to intervene or police or whoever ‑ how do we get behind that and start changing it earlier, that's where a lot of my attention is going.
VERITY FIRTH: Mmm. Petra Jenkins asks ‑ and you do write about this in your book as well ‑ she'd like to "hear Jess's thoughts please on free counselling and mental health programs for men in prison as a strategy to combat driving factors of DFV being shame, disempowerment, childhood trauma etc leading to toxic masculinity and violence".
JESS HILL: Mmm, the whole issue with prisons (a) is that ‑ if you get fewer than ‑ I think it's fewer than 12 months or two years in jail, you don't even qualify for rehabilitation. It's absurd. Someone who is being sentenced like that probably has done something reasonably serious, but you might be catching them earlier than what might happen later. So that service isn't even offered.
As abolitionists, prisons are a site of violence. It's not just about getting counselling and all the rest of it for men in prisons. Prisons themselves need to be reassessed for what are they actually trying to achieve. Are they trying to rehabilitate, are they there just for punishment and deterrence? How do they contribute to the life ‑ the evolution of that person through the rest of their life, because we can't just put all these guys in prison.
There's been no human society in the history of human societies that has not had consequences for actions, including First Nations societies. There's always been consequences and you cannot have a society that runs without it. You know, the prison system is a screwed up system no question. Some men do need to be just taken off the streets. They are so dangerous and most men who end up being arrested or charged do not end up being put in prison. It may be an intervention point that leads to a men's behaviour change program, a community order, or just the fact that they are now visible. Often it just ends up in fines actually.
The point is that I don't ‑ I think we're very much still at the beginning of figuring out what to do with men because actually there's been a lot of resistance to talk about how do we deal with men, you know, because it's been like well, if you put money into that, then you're taking money away from victim survivors, adults and kids, who even their crisis needs are not being funded properly let alone their long‑term needs for counselling and for rehabilitating. That's a lifelong process that needs support.
So I think we're just now starting to see that it's one thing to say okay, we're going to try to ensure victim safety, but what happens when that guy just moves on to the next partner? We can't go okay, let's focus on ensuring victim safety, whatever that looks like, but no level of accountability or what goes on for this guy. There has to be a plan for this guy. He has shown himself to be a risk to the community. Once he's out of that relationship, he may go on to replicate the same behaviours in the next relationship and if we don't really think very clearly and deeply about how to address this man's deeply habituated patterns, we're going to keep on going on this never‑ending sort of carousel.
I think that the behaviour change programs we have currently, which can run anywhere between 12 and 20 weeks ‑ in Victoria the standard was increased to 20 weeks ‑ you're really just scratching the surface by that stage if you're a guy with a deeply habituated need for control or a deep sense of unacknowledged shame and entitlement that's driving that humiliated fury. It takes ‑ it can take years, it can take ongoing mentoring to make sure that you don't just slip back into that very comfortable habituated way of relating.
It seems expensive when you sort of explain just how long that's going to take, but what's more expensive is putting these guys into 20‑week programs, incarcerating them, doing all the stuff that ends up just repeating back with that same person again and again. And you know what's really expensive, to be absolutely crass, but on a bottom line? Homicide. Homicide is expensive, you know what I mean? It pains me to even talk about dollars in terms of domestic abuse, but unfortunately the Government ‑ governments often need to see this bottom line, like how much does domestic abuse cost us, how can we save here, how can we save there? You know what you can save on? Cut down on homicides. It's extremely expensive to investigate a homicide, it's extremely expensive for those children to be raised who have been traumatised and orphaned.
VERITY FIRTH: I know, it's terrible that it all comes down to that. We're getting close to end time, but I wanted to end with two questions that have come from people with lived experience and I think they're related in some ways. The first is Jacy, who says, "I wasn't able to leave for fear of being killed or my children being removed. There was very little support in the 1980s. There doesn't seem to have been much change. What do you think is working now? And where do you see improvements can be made re: safety in reporting to police, so that children aren't removed?" So hold that question.
Then the other one comes from Teena, who said, "I am nodding along to everything that's been said. Is there an online forum where abused women can talk anonymously (if wanted) and freely, just to be able to say 'me too'? I needed it at the time, to dispel shame and self‑blame."
JESS HILL: Thanks so much both of you. So it's Jacy and Teena. First to Jacy ‑ oh, God, just having gone through that in the 1980s, yes, my heart just goes out to you that I can't imagine how difficult and isolating and just terrifying that must have been. The issue of child removal is prevalent and still incredibly threatening.
I just spent some time with Waminda, an Aboriginal‑led community service in Nowra. They have a great footprint. You walk around Nowra and there's a Waminda office every 15 metres it looks like, there's so many. They're so present in the community. They work with predominantly Aboriginal families, but not always Aboriginal men, sometimes they're non‑Koori men who are in the family.
This is underselling what they do in their entirety, but just in terms of child removal, they work with families who are come being ‑ who alerts are being sent to DCJ, the Department of Communities and Justice, and they are like the go‑between. When those families are engaged with Waminda, it's a note to communities and Department of Communities and Justice that this is being taken care of, but also Waminda are not only advocating to child protection for keeping that family together where that's possible, and they are able to sort of correct the sorts of wrong‑headed assumptions that workers are making, but they're also through their constant engagement educating Child Protection Services.
So instead of taking that failure to protect approach, it's like what are the strengths of this family and particularly the victim parent, and often it's the mother, what are her strengths, how has she resisted? And your reports foreground that, like build on that. That's our platform from which to build. This failure to protect model is a reason to remove kids and once kids are removed, especially if you're in a disadvantaged situation, but really anybody, getting them back is incredibly difficult and it's a very complicated legal scenario.
So Waminda I feel is such a model for how to work in community and they're amazing. Their case workers go out to the family and they are just with them and they figure out what does this family need. It might be there's a whole bunch of junk around the house. Case workers will go out and help them clean it up, just seeing these stress points, but also taking the kids to their appointments or showing up at school when the kid is in trouble, or whatever, because the parents are overwhelmed and can't deal. It's at those points the kids see this person is trustworthy, this person is there for me when I need it, then when on the car trip going to an appointment, kids are opening up to them. The kids can look out the window, they can say casually instead of being in a counselling room where they have to perform on request.
But Waminda I've visited several times and I think they're miraculous in that way. So we need go‑betweens because child protection still has not reformed to the point where this is a safe place for women who experience violence or abuse. The second question ‑‑
VERITY FIRTH: It was around ‑ just saying abused women can talk anonymously, an online forum or somewhere we can say "me too". This woman felt she needed it at the time to dispel shame and self‑blame.
JESS HILL: I'm sure there is. I'm afraid I can't recount off the top of my head. I wish I had time to assemble one myself. But the Red Hearts campaign, I think they have a private group, but I'm not sure exactly.
VERITY FIRTH: But there's clearly something in the sort of community of women that can also help you build up your own sense of self again.
JESS HILL: Exactly. We'll see what we can find too, Teena, and send you through details if we can find.
VERITY FIRTH: We will close it there because we've gone a little over time. I want to thank everybody for joining us today. That was an extremely interesting conversation. Thank you, Jess, for all your time and for your incredible work you do in this subject.
I said to Jess offline before we started that reading the book was really profound for me because so much of it was true, it was true with my sense of how it all worked, yet I've never quite been able to articulate it the way that Jess did. So she really gave me an understanding of something that I innately felt I knew anyway, but suddenly had it made crystal clear to me with evidence to back it up. So thank you so much, Jess, for the work that you do in this incredibly important area. And thank you for spending time with us today. And can everybody else please do some claps at home, or whatever, and thank you for joining us and we'll see you at the next one.
JESS HILL: Thank you so much. Bye.
Jointly presented by the UTS Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion and UTS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
If you are interested in hearing about future events, please contact events.socialjustice@uts.edu.au.
No amount of funding is actually going to see the change that we need. It's a paradigm shift that is required that says ‘this is one of the most corrosive effects on our society’.
It affects millions upon millions of Australians both as victims and as perpetrators. We need to start addressing it like that instead of seeing it as a niche issue that happens to some people. – Jess Hill
Reflections on the event from two UTS Brennan Justice and Leadership Award students:
I found this discussion really insightful. For me, I was able to draw significant correlations between things Jess discussed with the book 'My Dark Vanessa' which is one of the Brennan Justice Program 2021 fiction books. Particularly the aspect of coercive control in grooming contexts and how, when I read the book, it brought to light the complex nature of these situations and how victims’ perspectives are completely impaired, despite the evident (potentially subconscious) attempts to resist these coercive control methods.
Jess mentioned that victims of domestic violence suffer long-term consequences, and the effects of coercive relationships are more than just transient. I definitely knew this before, but what I found interesting is that Jess said that often the victims, even decades after their trauma, still look at themselves in the mirror ‘in the eyes of their perpetrator’. I found this to be really interesting, and quite frankly, upsetting.
It was one of my favourite talks. I found it really insightful and topical.
Speaker
Jess Hill is an investigative journalist who has been writing about domestic violence since 2014. Prior to this, she was a producer for ABC Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. Her reporting on domestic violence has won two Walkley Awards, an Amnesty International Award and three Our Watch Awards. Her Stella Prize-winning book, See What You Made Me Do, was released in 2019.