See What You Made Me Do - Book Review

Award-winning investigative journalist, Jess Hill, won the 2020 Stella Prize with See What You Made Me Do. Through the stories of survivors and perpetrators, Hill exposes the festering ulcer of domestic abuse in our society.

Confronting, meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book demands to be read. I knew I was hooked when barely a hundred pages in I had made more than thirty notations. Hill was speaking to me, writing articulately about things I had never fully understood, giving me perspective on behaviour that is profoundly counterintuitive.

‘Why doesn’t she leave?’ was the question that drove Hill’s initial investigation. Millions of women experience emotional, physical and sexual abuse from their intimate partner. It seemed incomprehensible to Hill that there was such a poor understanding of the impact this abuse on them and their children.

Hill credits 2014 as the year the Western world started taking men’s violence against women seriously. The catalyst for Australia happened on February 12 of that year when eleven-year-old Luke Batty was brutally murdered by his father on a public sports ground in front of horrified children and parents. Twenty-four hours later, television screens around the country were showing a grief stricken Rosie Batty, an ordinary mum in a middle-class street, saying that no one loved Luke more than his father.

Australian statistics are shocking: one in four women has experienced domestic abuse; every week a woman is murdered by her current or former partner; every three hours a woman is hospitalised as a result of abuse; every two minutes police are called to a domestic abuse incident; on average, women return to an abusive partner seven times before they leave for good.

Victims’ stories revealed that successful abusive relationships develop over time and rely on a foundation of love, trust and intimacy. By the time the abuse starts—isolation, gaslighting, shaming, degradation, bullying— the victim is heavily invested in the relationship and will go to enormous lengths to preserve it. It’s called coercive control.

Many victims don’t realise their situation is abusive because there has been no actual physical violence. Traumatised, exhausted and hyper-vigilant, their reality is distorted. They have spent years living in what Hill calls the underground—a dark private place where they juggle personal and family life on emotional quicksand.

‘Victims may feel breathless from a sideways look, a sarcastic tone or a stony silence, because these are the signals to which they have become hyper-attuned, the same way animals can sense an oncoming storm.’

Once Hill had a handle on why victims made the choices they did, she started looking at perpetrators. These are the outwardly normal men with families and friends, who are respected in their workplace, yet behave in distorted ways in intimate situations? Why does he stay? drove the next stage of her investigation. Hill found this research much tougher. Her six-month project blew out to four years.

Hill’s findings, give us some insight into what motivates the essentially dysfunctional behaviour of abusers. How useful this is in terms of facilitating immediate change is unclear. Until we can recognise and protect women living in the underground, until the number of domestic assaults and homicide go down, and until the Family Court prioritises children’s safety over having contact with both parents, domestic abuse will continue. Abusers won’t stop until there is a public revolt against their actions.

Hill has started the conversation. See What You Made Me Do uncovers the truth about the appalling atrocities being committed every day against women and children in the houses we live in.