Read an extract from See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill

Jess Hill was revealed last night as the winner of the 2020 Stella Prize for her book, See What You Made Me Do – a work of investigative non-fiction into domestic violence within Australia.

Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?

Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators — and the systems that enable them — in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience — abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence — not in generations to come, but today.

Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes.

Scroll down to read an extract.

THE PERPETRATOR’S HANDBOOK

‘Asking clients, “Is there someone in your life making you afraid?” or “Controlling what you do or say?” promises an even more profound awakening than asking women about violence.’

Evan Stark, Coercive Control

It’s a sparkling Saturday afternoon in Bella Vista, in Sydney’s Bible Belt. The people who live here have faith and money: the streets are immaculate and the houses are huge. Outside one house, a pile of household items is all that blights the row of manicured lawns. As is typical in suburbs like this, there are signs of life, but nobody on the street.

Nobody except for a slight man in an oversized white singlet, leaning into a car. As I approach, he waves. ‘My son’s selling his car, so I’m taking off the most valuable part of it,’ laughs Rob Sanasi, triumphantly waving an eTag above his head.

We walk into the house at the bottom of the drive to find a tall, elegant blonde woman and two twenty-somethings milling around the kitchen, joking and making plans for the weekend. This is the house Rob shares with his wife, Deb, and their two adult children.

Deb puts on the kettle and Rob brings out the biscuits, one of which has already been partially enjoyed. ‘Oh, nice,’ he says apologetically. ‘Someone graciously put that one back there.’

Deb guffaws from behind the kitchen counter. ‘You don’t want to feel the guilt of taking a whole one!’

Rob shrugs, smiling. ‘Yeah, it’s the quirk in this family.’

As the kids wave their goodbyes, new biscuits are found and tea is poured. Then we sit down together at the kitchen table to talk about Rob and Deb’s history of domestic abuse.2

Rob begins his story in 2006. It was a bad time: his business was failing, his family life was falling apart. ‘Deb and I were . . . well, when I say Deb and I were fighting, I was fighting more, but it looked like we were fighting. I remember driving along on the M2 and I was in a bad way. Actually, that day, I thought: this is probably going to be my last day.’

Rob, a devout Christian, thought about driving his car into a tree. Then he put on a recording of a church minister addressing a large auditorium. ‘And he just said something . . . It was, “Do you love your children?” And I answered in the car, “Yeah, of course I do.” And then he said, “Would you die for them?” and I said, “Yeah, I would.” And he said, “Well, this is Australia, and you’ll probably never have to die for your children, but if you’re willing to die for them, why won’t you change for them?” And when I heard that, I just thought, wow.’ At that moment, Rob says, he realised he had to seek counselling.

Deb shakes her head. ‘Can I interject? The reason that Rob went into counselling was I went into the workforce. The control had been very strong in our relationship, but actually neither of us really realised to what degree Rob was controlling me, until I did something that he couldn’t control. Within three weeks of me starting that job, Rob had a nervous breakdown. He lost 15 kilos, he was having anxiety and panic attacks, he became addicted to Xanax, he was suicidal. That’s what drove him into counselling. He was a mess.’ Rob nods quietly.

During their first session, Rob says his counsellor asked him a series of questions. ‘Do you raise your voice, do you yell, do you throw things, do you call your wife names, do you swear, do you bash things – not her, but things – and it was kind of tick, tick, tick,’ Rob remembers. ‘And then he went to a filing cabinet in his office, and pulled out an A4 piece of paper with a pre- printed “Cycle of Violence” on it, and he whacked that on the table and he said, “That’s what you do. This is what we call domestic violence.”’

‘So that was the first session. And he said, “Take that with you and discuss it with your wife.” So I was like, I don’t think that’s a very good idea, right?’

Rob wasn’t physically violent, but he behaved like a typical perpetrator: he constantly criticised and bullied his wife, tried to stop her from working, made it hard for her to see family and friends, and kept total control over their bank accounts. The bullying and criticism wasn’t always overt; sometimes Rob would use humour to demean Deb. But it was always sending the same message: he was more important than her, and she was there to serve him. The only thing that wasn’t typical about Rob was that he had sought counselling without being forced.

At first, Rob kept the piece of paper to himself. ‘And then eventually I thought, oh, I’ll just bring it out casually, you know. But when I brought it out, things got a lot worse. Because then Deb realised what was going on. It’s kind of like the scales fell off our eyes – both of us.’

I ask Deb what it was like for her to see that piece of paper. ‘I remember actually what Rob said to me. He said, “What’s going on in our relationship is domestic violence, and the type of violence that I’m using on you is called emotional abuse, which means I don’t bash you with my fists, I bash you with my emotions, to keep you under control.”’

That shocked Deb. As she understood it, domestic violence was ‘the guy that goes down the pub on a Friday night and comes home and beats up his wife . . . it doesn’t happen in suburbs like where I’m from.’ (As Deb has since discovered, she wasn’t the only anomaly in her suburb – or even her street. Later she told me that the items I’d seen on the lawn next door belonged to her neighbour, who had dumped them there before fleeing her violent husband.)

Now, after almost ten years and much intense counselling, Rob and Deb are happily married, and both counsel domestic abuse victims and perpetrators: Deb in private practice, and Rob more informally, with abusive men who seek him out for advice.

Deb says one thing stands out about abusers: it’s as if they’ve studied some kind of domestic abuse handbook. ‘They all have the same tactics. So, for example, they may not come out and say, “I don’t want you seeing your friends, or having hobbies, or being around your parents,” but they’ll just make it hard. Like, “What do you want to see them for? I don’t think they’re good for you.” And eventually women go it’s just all too hard, because they don’t want the fight. So that’s how it starts over time . . . And then your world gets smaller. And then if the perpetrator becomes your main frame of reference, which is what happens, it’s very much like a cult. Because you’re essentially getting your main input from him.’

‘It’s like you go to abuse school,’ says Rob. ‘They all do it.’

Speak to anyone who’s worked with survivors or perpetrators and they’ll tell you the same thing: domestic abuse almost always follows the same script. It’s a truly confounding phenomenon: how is it that men from vastly different cultures know to use the same basic techniques of oppression?

That’s something we’ve only recently begun to investigate. Domestic abuse may be as old as 8 intimacy, but we only really started to understand it after the first women’s refuges opened in the 1970s. When women in their thousands fled to these makeshift shelters, they weren’t just complaining about black eyes and raging tempers. They told stories of unfathomable cruelty and violence, and what sounded like orchestrated campaigns of control. It became clear that, although each woman’s story was individual, the overarching narratives were uncannily alike. As one shelter worker said at the time, ‘It got so I could finish a woman’s story halfway through it. There was this absolutely eerie feeling that these guys were sitting together and deciding what to say and do.’

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.

–Extracted from See What You Made Me Do by Jess Hill (Black Inc Books), out now.

Find out more about Jess Hill here.

See What You Made Me Do

by Jess Hill

Women are abused or killed by their partners at astonishing rates- in Australia, almost 17 per cent of women over the age of fifteen - one in six - have been abused by an intimate partner.

In this confronting and deeply researched account, journalist Jess Hill uncovers the ways in which abusers exert control in the darkest - and most intimate - ways imaginable. She asks- What do we know about perpetrators? Why is it so hard to leave? What does successful intervention look like?...

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