Recording: Jess Hill in conversation

Descriptive transcript

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 I 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. 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. 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, 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 can cause distress or be triggering for some people. If at any time you feel yourself becoming overwhelmed or distressed, just take a break from the webinar. You can turn it off and 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 and 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 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. Jess Hill is UTS's inaugural Journalist-in-Residence and a prominent voice in confronting our national issue of domestic violence. 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. 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 as 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. I do recommend people read this book; I found it profoundly moving and eye-opening. I'll talk a little more about that when I talk to Jess.

If you're not the type who wants to read the book, See What You Made Me Do is now also being turned into a three-part TV series that Jess will host, 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. The first thing just to note is that, and this is how statistics update over 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 just what we would traditionally cast as domestic inside the house, it's one in four, which makes you wonder as we start to measure non-physical violence—because that's a stat that looks at physical and sexual violence—if 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. I had a men's behaviour change facilitator, Susan Geraghty, who'd been in the business for 25 years, tell me that she'd be sitting in a room with men from all around the world—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. That is, there was a need to have a certain type of control or predictable outcome in their relationship. In many of these guys—not all, but many—a deeply seated fear of abandonment, a fear that their partner would leave, and a lot of this coming from a sense that they are deeply unlovable. This is a very buried sense. Some of these guys can be highly narcissistic and come across as the most confident men you've ever met, and their sense of loving themselves seems to be really over the top, but actual self-love is the opposite of narcissism. 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—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. It's 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 humiliation, degradation, alternating punishments with rewards—sometimes super kindness and other times just absolute oppression and what seems like hatred being directed at them. Enforcing arbitrary demands, setting up 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 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 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 this inducing debility and exhaustion can happen in all sorts of ways, but also happens through gaslighting, where you're starting to doubt your own perceptions because the person you're with is literally denying what's just happened in front of both of you or fabricating something entirely. And 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'd know what's happening, and then how you'd even think about what it would take to get out of it. A lot of women and anyone—non-binary people, men who are in same-sex relationships where coercive control is happening—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 we were 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: There are a couple of things I found really interesting about this description in your book. The first was how you actually talked about the methodologies being very similar to the sort of torture that prisoners of war undertake in camps, such as North Korean camps with American soldiers, so the methods of coercive control being absolutely similar to the torture methods that they use. 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, 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: Yeah, that's what was so confounding to get my head around when I started writing the book—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 the oppression and control of another person, but are doing it 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 there is an innate sense in humans of how to overwhelm somebody else's agency, how to basically engage in thought reform. That's kind of an old-fashioned term people used to use with cults or in terms of what would happen in communist countries, and also using it in terms of what's happening in the Uyghur camps at the moment—a type of re-education process. Some people call it brainwashing. 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. Coming out of that is very much like the sort of almost deprogramming that needs to happen after someone comes out of a cult. Interestingly, because coercive control is also used in cults, when I've spoken to various people who work in either deprogramming in cults or who were in cults, they say that commonly when people leave cults 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 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. 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 step into the breach and start 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. 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 this internal fight between their perspective and your perspective, and it's very hard to hold onto that sense of yourself. That's why a lot of people will say, "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 like if you are not loyal and show that, then something bad is going to happen. So when people start challenging that and say, "This person that you're with is really dangerous. 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." 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, and again, in your book you talk about this—that even the most feminist 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—there's so much behind it. Obviously there's misogyny behind it, but aside from that, it's also a defence mechanism, like, "I would never be that person. This would never happen to me. It's a deficit on their part," because if we were really to truly 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 just being a bit abusive or troublesome, but 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 a 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 this to, 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 like, "Oh my God, that's exactly what happened to me. I stayed with him after all 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 ingrained 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 just sort of 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 to control them or to help them or whatever—but at least then there was some focus on men. But I think through the 20th century, 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. The victim blaming, the way it's evolved—even in the terminology, so you go from women being victims through to being survivors. That was a big evolution just 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 passive receiver of abuse, and even calling them a victim was a development on from just labelling them masochistic. So you can see that 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 were 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?" I don't like to dismiss anyone's questions as stupid or 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 just 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, "So what's he doing to woo you back?" and maybe she says, "Well, his friends keep calling me and saying 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's 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 a 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 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 to 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 in a 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 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 a question that came up a couple of times was, "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, but they disbelieve child sexual abuse allegations or where there's part of it that 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 have children who are being prevented from attending doctors for issues like autism or other disorders. 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, 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 news last week, the Federal Government's sexual consent videos 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." So what is it that drives strategic decisions like the one that we saw last week?

Jess Hill: I'd have to fully investigate to verify this entirely, but I think that, based on historical evidence, a conservative religious agenda. I'm not 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, a couple of mentions of rape, but it's so, to extend the metaphor, vanilla. I'm not a consent expert, but just to say from my experience as a teenager, 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 in a video—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 just 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, so much stuff has to be done on that—getting boys not to fear rejection, not to 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. There's so much confusion and the conversations I've had even just in schools, 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. 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 for our First Nations people. 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, and I think a sign of how far we've come, and especially with the sector as well, 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 are not always subjected to coercive control by Aboriginal men. In fact, there's a big pattern in 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. 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 accountabi