See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse
Shortlist year:
2020
Shortlist category:
Non-fiction
Published by:
Black Inc.
About the book
Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. Too often we ask the wrong question: why didn't she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?
Jess Hill puts perpetrators—and the systems that enable them—in the spotlight. Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, 'See What You Made Me Do' radically rethinks how to confront the crisis of fear and abuse in our homes. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence—not in generations to come, but today.
About the author
Jess Hill
Jess Hill is an investigative journalist who has been writing about domestic violence since 2014. Prior to this, she was a producer for ABC Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. She was listed in Foreign Policy's top 100 women to follow on Twitter, and her reporting on domestic violence has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.
Judges’ comments
Recognising that domestic abuse is a pervasive and misunderstood crisis in Australia, this book sets out to understand why it occurs and to propose a sophisticated collection of potential solutions.
Hill interweaves her extensive research with illuminating and sometimes terrifying individual stories, ensuring that this is not just a sociological account, but also a deeply moving human story. This investigation recasts the questions that need to be asked about domestic abuse and invites the reader to reconsider how we think about both perpetrators and their victims.
This is a vitally important book that in setting out the endemic nature of domestic abuse, also provides ways forward while also warning of the cost of doing too little, too late.
