See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  enquiries@blackincbooks.com

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Jess Hill 2019

  Jess Hill asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781760641405 (paperback)

  9781743820865 (ebook)

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, www.sandycull.com

  Text design and typesetting by Marilyn de Castro and Akiko Chan

  Cover image: Decaying Flower © Billy Kidd

  Author photo: Connie Agius

  CONTENTS

  Notes on My Methods

  Introduction

  1.The Perpetrator’s Handbook

  2.The Underground

  3.The Abusive Mind

  4.Shame

  5.Patriarchy

  6.Children

  7.When Women Use Violence

  8.State of Emergency

  9.Through the Looking Glass

  10.Dadirri

  11.Fixing It

  Who Can I Call?

  Acknowledgements

  Endnotes

  Index

  NOTES ON MY METHODS

  In this book, wherever possible, I have replaced the term ‘domestic violence’ with ‘domestic abuse’. I did this because in some of the worst abusive relationships, physical violence is rare, minor or barely present. As Yasmin Khan from Eidfest Community Services writes in an article for Women’s Agenda, ‘Many women that we support assure me there has been no domestic violence – “he’s never laid a hand on me” – but on deeper questioning and reflection, realise they have been abused for many years, in ways that have been more subtle but [are] just as damaging and potent.’ Khan has made it her mission to replace ‘domestic violence’ with ‘domestic abuse’, as police have done in the UK. ‘Let’s change the language,’ she writes, ‘and stop sending a message … that it’s only a serious issue when there has been physical violence.’ When I read Khan’s article, it stopped me in my tracks. I knew immediately: we need to make this change. The entire book was re-edited to reflect it, where appropriate, and the subtitle was changed on the cover. As my wonderful editor Kirstie Innes-Will assured me, the gain is worth the effort.

  There is a distinct power imbalance built into the journalist–source relationship: the journalist usually has ultimate power over what gets published. For the survivors featured in this book, I wanted to flip that and give the power back to them. If this process was not a positive experience for them, there was no point in doing it. Every survivor I interviewed was reassured that this was their story, not mine. This meant giving them the chance, wherever possible, to review their story, suggest revisions or ask for things to be deleted – especially if there were safety concerns. The process was sometimes laborious, but always worthwhile. It has been an honour to work with every one of them.

  Where necessary, I have also omitted the cultural backgrounds of several people in this book. I did so either for the victim’s protection, or because I have identified them as parties to a family law case (and it’s illegal under Section 121 of the Family Law Act to publish anything that might identify a party to the proceedings).

  The stories in the chapter on family law are those of adult and child survivors/victims. It was considered unsafe to contact the alleged abusers in each case. I did, however, look carefully at their affidavits, and strove to be as fair as possible.

  Some of the ideas in this book are heavily contested, as I have made clear throughout. Although I’ve been fortunate enough to have some of the best minds review many of the following chapters, the responsibility for errors and inaccuracies is entirely mine. If you notice something of concern, please contact Black Inc., and we will do our best to correct future editions.

  INTRODUCTION

  At the office of Safe Steps, Victoria’s 24/7 family violence helpline, the phones have gone quiet. ‘I get nervous when they stop ringing,’ says one worker. It’s a rare occurrence. At its busiest, Safe Steps receives a call every three minutes. Many women are repeat callers: on average, they will return to an abusive partner seven times before leaving for good.

  ‘You must get so frustrated when you think a woman’s ready to leave and then she decides to go back,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ replies one phone counsellor pointedly. ‘I’m frustrated that even though he promised to stop, he chose to abuse her again.’

  *

  A year into my reporting on domestic abuse, I had a terrible realisation. It was 2015, and I was hanging clothes out to dry on a stunning summer night alive with the screeching of fruit bats. The air was cool on my skin. I felt content, peaceful; safe. As I walked towards our back steps, washing basket in hand, a cascade of thoughts swept through me with such force it made my eyes sting. To feel safe in the dark – even in my own backyard – was a privilege. How many women would never feel safe in their backyard? How many would be approaching their back steps with a sense of dread? How many would be steeling themselves for what might happen to them in bed that night? How many would feel their breath quicken at every rustle of leaves, terrified that somewhere in the dark, the man they once loved was waiting for them?

  We talk a lot about the danger of dark alleys, but the truth is that in every country around the world the home is the most dangerous place for a woman. Of the 87,000 women killed globally in 2017, more than a third (30,000) were killed by an intimate partner, and another 20,000 by a family member.1 In Australia, a country of almost 25 million, one woman a week is killed by a man she’s been intimate with.2 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.

  *

  This is a book about love, abuse and power. It’s about a phenomenon that flourishes in private and in public, perpetrated mostly by men who evade scrutiny. It’s about all the questions we don’t ask, like: ‘Why does he do it?’ It’s about turning our stubborn beliefs and assumptions inside out and confronting one of the most complex – and urgent – issues of our time.

  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. An ordinary woman who for eleven years had struggled to keep her son safe and protect the love he had for his father. After all, wasn’t that what she was supposed to do? Bury her own fear and manage the risk, so her child could have a dad? ‘No-one loved Luke more than Greg, his father. No-one loved him more than me,’ Rosie Batty insisted, defending the love of a father who had just beaten and stabbed her son to death. After surviving and leaving Greg’s violence, she had warned for years that he was dangerous, unpredictable, and a risk to her son. In courts and police stations her warnings had been minimised, dismissed, believed, acted on and then lost in the system, just like those of countless victims before her.
Now her predictions had come true. Not behind closed doors, where such horrors are usually carried out, but in front of children and parents on a public cricket ground. ‘If anything comes out of this, I want it to be a lesson to everybody,’ said Rosie Batty on the street that day. ‘Family violence happens to everybody, no matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It happens to everyone and anyone.’

  In the eyes of mainstream Australia, Batty was everyone – not from the stigmatised poor or the privileged rich, but from the demilitarised zone of the white middle class. When she refused to go away and mourn quietly, her urgent pleas for action – backed by the force of her colossal loss – breached the barrier of indifference and compelled people to take notice. Her grief was pure and blameless, and everybody was invited to share it. 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.

  It’s hard to pinpoint why, after so many tragedies and decades of advocacy, one murder became such a decisive tipping point. But Luke’s murder occurred at a critical time. All over the world, survivors were casting off their shame and demanding to be heard. By April 2014, the White House had been persuaded to intervene on American campuses, where sexual assaults were common, and the perpetrators largely unpunished.3 ‘We all know that many of our schools just aren’t safe,’ said Vice-President Joe Biden, ‘[and] colleges and universities can no longer turn a blind eye.’ A month later, in May, the misogynistic ravings of Elliot Rodger turned to murderous rage near the University of California, where he killed six and injured fourteen. Rodger murdered more men than he did women, and he was probably mentally ill, but the animating force of his misogyny was undeniable. In a chilling 137-page manifesto, he railed against the ‘sluts’ who denied him the sex he saw as his birthright, and the men who were taking his rightful due. ‘The girls don’t flock to the gentlemen. They flock to the alpha male,’ Rodger wrote. ‘Who’s the alpha male now, bitches?’

  Rodger’s worldview wasn’t that of a lone madman; it was echoed and encouraged in the online forums he frequented and the men’s rights groups he joined. It was forced on women online by trolls who threatened them with rape and violence. For women all over the world, seeing this familiar brand of hate turn to murder was the final straw. A hashtag, #YesAllWomen, became a rallying point, eliciting more than a million vignettes of fear, harassment, threats and violence. Later that year, the public assault on Janay Palmer by her NFL-star fiancé, Ray Rice, triggered another tidal wave of online truth-telling, this time about domestic abuse, with the hashtag #WhyIStayed. ‘I have been waiting all my life for what 2014 has brought,’ wrote the American writer Rebecca Solnit. ‘It was a watershed year for women, and for feminism, as we refused to accept the pandemic of violence against women – the rape, the murder, the beatings, the harassment on the streets and the threats online.’4

  In Australia, Luke’s brutal public murder jolted us out of our stupor. Shocking statistics came to light. In Victoria, the state where Luke had lived and died, police responded to more than 65,000 domestic abuse incidents in 2013–14 alone (an increase of 83 per cent in just five years).5 Australian police were being called to an incident every two minutes.*6

  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?

  *

  Domestic abuse cuts a deep wound into our society. It has been experienced by one in four Australian women.# It accounts for nearly 60 per cent of the women hospitalised for assault.7 It drives up to one in five female suicide attempts.8 Of the escalating numbers of Indigenous women in prison, 70 to 90 per cent have been a victim of family violence.9 From this yawning chasm comes a never-ending exodus of women and children, fleeing their homes: in 2015–16, 105,619 people – 94 per cent of them women and children – said domestic abuse was the reason they’d come to a homelessness service for help.10 We see the impact of domestic abuse everywhere, but rarely do we trace the breadcrumbs back to where the destruction begins. We see only the ruinous aftermath – rising homelessness, more and more women in prison – and wonder how things got so bad.11

  We may be able to grasp intellectually that domestic abuse can happen to anyone, but many of us still can’t imagine it affecting anyone we know – even when the evidence is right in front of us. This is what the national chair of WESNET, Julie Oberin, hears routinely from the aspiring social workers she teaches in Victoria. ‘[In the beginning] they say things like, “I don’t know anybody who’s been a victim of domestic violence,”’ she says. ‘By week three, we get disclosures. They say, “I realise my childhood was a family violence childhood, but no-one’s ever named it.” One woman said, “I rang my sister, and I said, you’re in a domestic violence relationship – he’s controlling everything you do and everywhere you go, you need to get some help.” There’s a big barrier [to seeing domestic violence], because there is all that focus on some people, rather than an understanding of it being entrenched throughout the society.’

  That focus on some people leads us to believe domestic abuse only happens to certain types of women: the poor, the vulnerable, the mentally ill or those with ‘victim mentalities’. Some women are overrepresented: those who are Indigenous, disabled or on insecure visas, those who grew up with domestic abuse, the young, and women who live in the outback. In regional and remote areas of Australia, reported incidents of physical violence are higher than in the cities – and women there are even more trapped than their urban counterparts.12 But when police and victim advocates say that domestic abuse can affect anyone, they’re not making it up. In all reputable studies of domestic abuse victims – and there have been thousands – not one researcher has been able to find a victim ‘type’. As one review concludes, ‘there is no evidence that the status a woman occupies, the role she performs, the behaviour she engages in, her demographic profile or her personality characteristics consistently influence her chance of intimate victimisation.’13 In the hands of a sophisticated abuser, even the most secure and strong-minded woman can be reduced to someone utterly unrecognisable, even to herself.

  Well-meaning people often say we should stop using terms like ‘domestic abuse’ or ‘domestic violence’ – that such language hides a brutal reality and we should instead call it what it is: assault, or terrorism, or just ‘violence’. But this misses the point. Domestic abuse is not just violence. It’s worse. It is a unique phenomenon, in which the perpetrator takes advantage of their partner’s love and trust and uses that person’s most intimate details – their deepest desires, shames and secrets – as a blueprint for their abuse.

  We also say domestic abuse is a crime, but that’s not quite right either. Crimes are incidents – if you get bashed, you can call the police and report an assault. There are criminal offences committed within domestic abuse, but the worst of it cannot be captured on a charge sheet. A victim’s most frightening experiences may never be recorded by police or understood by a judge. That’s because domestic abuse is a terrifying language that develops slowly and is spoken only by the people involved. 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. These are the signals that tell them danger is close, or that it has already surrounded them.

  For many victims, the physical violence is actually what hurts the least. Almost uniformly, victims who haven’t been physically assaulted say they wish their abuser would just hit them; anything to make the abuse ‘real’.

  After all, it’s not a crime to demand that your girlfriend no longer see her family. It’s not a crime to tell her what
to wear, how to clean the house and what she’s allowed to buy at the supermarket. It’s not a crime to convince your wife she’s worthless, or to make her feel that she shouldn’t leave the children alone with you. It’s not a crime to say something happened when it didn’t – to say it so many times that you break her sense of what’s real. You can’t be charged for turning someone’s entire family against them. And yet, these are the kinds of controlling behaviours that show up as red flags for domestic homicide. By the time that crime occurs, it’s too late.

  For decades now, experts have recognised that the repetitive infliction of traumas like these can produce a form of mental captivity, in which victims struggle to define their own reality. In this abusive environment, minor assaults and humiliations can occur so regularly that they become as unremarkable as breathing. Even if we could find a reliable way to criminalise this behaviour, how might a survivor prove that in so many ways they were trapped – even though it looked to the world like they could have just left?

  For friends and family – especially those who’ve never experienced domestic abuse – none of this makes sense. It doesn’t make sense that women who are smart and independent will stay with a man who treats them like dirt. It doesn’t make sense that even after fleeing, a woman will often return to her abuser – even plead for him to take her back. It doesn’t make sense that someone known as a good bloke could be going home to hold a knife to his wife’s throat. If we were to think about his actions as much as we think about hers, it would make even less sense that a man who inflicts abuse on his partner would want to stay – and even kill her after she leaves. Why does he stay?

  None of it makes sense. What’s even more confusing is that perpetrators commonly believe with all their heart that they are the victim, and will plead their case to police even as their partner stands bloody and bruised behind them. Their victimhood is what makes them feel their abuse is justified. They’re not like those other men, because they’re just defending themselves.