See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse by Jess Hill

Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse (2019) is a wide-ranging examination of love, power, the perpetrators of domestic abuse and the systems that enable them. It won the 2020 Stella Prize, was made into a 3-part SBS documentary and is essential reading. Domestic abuse is a national emergency:

‘In Australia, a country of almost 25 million people, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with. These statistics tell us something that’s almost impossible to grapple with: it’s not the monster lurking in the dark women should fear, but the men they fall in love with.’

Hill’s book is beautifully written, forensically researched, comprehensive and excellent. It puts domestic abuse in its historical context and canvasses a vast, complicated and ever changing terrain, from the statistics and news reports to the shifting views of sociologists and psychologists, to politics, policy, law, economics, feminism and patriarchy – accompanied by moving and harrowing interviews with the men who abuse; with the remarkable people who work tirelessly to intervene on behalf of the victims, who are predominantly women and children; and with the courageous women and children themselves. Here are the words of one survivor:

‘I lived through hell at the hands of this man. I want people to understand how easy it is to feel trapped. I was immobilised through terror, through helplessness, through absolute powerlessness. I want people to stop asking “Why does she stay?” and start asking “Why does he do that?”’

Hill opens with the violent murder of Luke Batty in 2014:

‘For the first time in history we have summoned the courage to confront domestic abuse. This has been a radical shift, and in years to come, 2014 will likely stand as the year the Western world finally started taking men’s violence against women seriously. But nowhere did an entire population wake up to it like Australia did on February 12 that year.

‘On that day, Australians watched a solitary woman, raw with grief, look downwards and skywards and out across a clutch of reporters who’d barely hoped for a statement. An ordinary woman standing in a middle-class Australian street talking about the public murder of her eleven-year-old son at the hands of his father.’

‘As a nation, the scales fell from our eyes the day Luke Batty was murdered. Forty years after the first women’s refuge opened in Australia, we were finally ready to believe in domestic abuse. Survivors – once exiled from respectable society – were invited to tell their stories. We were ready to listen. We needed to understand.’

‘The media, obsessed with Islamic terrorism, had let a gigantic crime wave go virtually unreported. The public was left reeling. How could this be true? What was causing it? How could violence against women be so widespread?’

And then moves to what at first appears an unrelated subject: prisoners of war. Our modern understanding of domestic abuse begins, astonishingly, with a story from the Cold War, in a town on the border of North and South Korea. ‘In the early 1980s, researchers noticed something else extraordinary: not only were the stories of victims uncannily alike, they also resembled the accounts of a seemingly unrelated group of survivors: returned prisoners of war.’

As Hill makes clear, explaining abusive behaviour is not an exact science: ‘It’s a battle of ideas being fought on territory we’ve only just begun to map.’ Only in the last 50 years have scholars begun to take domestic abuse seriously.

This was one of the many things in this book that blew my mind: domestic abuse has only recently been taken seriously, despite attempts to address it dating to at least the 19th century, such as John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor’s work on the domestic torture of women and Frances Power Cobbe’s activism and book Wife Torture (1878). It seems clear that domestic abuse was introduced to this continent from industrial Britain, where women died ‘in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality’, as Mill and Taylor write, ‘without ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of law’.

Unlike First Nations law, ‘which even missionaries praised for its strictness’, British laws regulating domestic abuse, horrifyingly, were designed to protect marriage, not women. And yet now First Nations people suffer the worst family violence in Australia. Having been brutalised by men for over 230 years, Indigenous women and children are now more vulnerable to men’s violence than anyone in Australia.

This, in striking contrast to the ‘unusually rich’ social network of enduring relationships in First Nations communities that awed anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described as ‘“an intellectual and social achievement of a high order”, comparable to the European achievement of parliamentary government. Here lived cultures with almost unique expertise in managing relationships and intimacy, using practices forged over tens of thousands of years – until they were dismantled and almost destroyed by white Europeans.’

Also enraging is the extent to which Australia’s political, legal and other systems of power operate to silence the victims, mostly women and children, and enable and empower the perpetrators, mostly men. As Hill writes, the courts, child support, Centrelink and rental tribunals can all be used as weapons by perpetrators.

In this system ‘the survivor is no longer a victim who needs help to protect her children; she is the one her children need to be protected from. When I first started hearing these stories, it took me a long time – and a lot of research – to accept that they were part of a pattern. But it soon became clear that these weren’t just the experiences of an unlucky few. Reports dating back almost twenty years show that the family law system has repeatedly failed to detect and comprehend domestic abuse and the impact it has on children. … Time and again, the same narrative repeats: despite repeated disclosures of abuse, children are ordered to have contact or even live with their alleged abuser.’

As this book shows, the family court system was in desperate need of reform – but not of abolition. And yet in February 2021, the Senate narrowly passed legislation by 30 votes to 28 to abolish the Family Court of Australia by merging it with the Federal Circuit Court. Yet one more insidious move by a federal government that chooses to ignore gendered violence, as 2021 has so visibly demonstrated.

And yet in pandemic 2021, abused women and children and their defenders are more urgently in need of government support and funding than ever before. In June 2021, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology released the first national survey of domestic and family violence during the pandemic, which showed that domestic violence surged during Covid-19 lockdowns. QUT professor Kerry Carrington reported:

‘We can certainly say that there was a shadow pandemic in Australia in domestic family violence … I don’t think we anticipated or expected that COVID itself would become another weapon in coercive control. I think that actually did shock us.’

See What You Made Me Do shines a light in this darkness. Despite the vast reach and murky complexity of this minefield of a subject, Jess Hill’s prose rings with clarity, urgency, fire and heart. Her passion and determination are contagious.

‘We are a nation famed for courageous responses to public health problems. From thwarting the tobacco industry to criminalising drink driving, Australian governments have shown they are willing to burn political capital to save lives. By doing this, they have achieved results many believed impossible. What would happen if a government were to bring the same zeal to tackling domestic abuse?’ A revolution with beneficent effects for generations to come.

Hill concludes: ‘Revolutions are impossible, until they are inevitable.’

May this fierce, powerful and essential book speed this revolution’s inevitability.

The fallout of domestic abuse is horrendous and lifelong. As Ocean Vuong writes of violence in his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (which I’ll be blogging next):

‘I didn’t know that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that once it enters you it never leaves – but merely echoes, a sound forming the face of your own son. Boom.’