Vogue: Australia's most important docuseries on domestic abuse is now out

Australia's most important docuseries on domestic abuse is now out

Op-ed by Jess Hill

Jess Hill has spent the past seven years reporting on domestic abuse, recognised for her book See What You Made Me Do. This month sees the release of a three-part docuseries bearing the same name. She writes here about why it’s crucial for Australia to criminalise coercive control and how we can harness positive change seen overseas.

Right now, we say that domestic violence is a crime. But it’s not. 

We have an antique legal system in this country that sees domestic violence through an old-fashioned prism: one that picks out disparate puzzle pieces and focuses on physical violence. It doesn’t even attempt to see the whole picture. Since the first refuge opened in 1974, women and kids have said over and over that it wasn’t just the physical violence that hurt, but the ways in which they were isolated, degraded, oppressed and trapped. Despite this, our legal system has clung stubbornly to the notion that domestic violence is an incident-based crime. 

This means that when victim-survivors turn to the criminal justice system, the magistrate will only hear about the ‘pointy end’ of their abuse: criminal acts like physical or sexual violence and destruction of property. They will be presented as disconnected incidents, instead of what they are: parts of a much bigger picture. Some of the most seriously controlling abusers will appear before the court charged with a minor offence–destroying household goods, for instance. How can a magistrate possibly assess the risk posed by this offender if the rest of their abuse is invisible to the court? 

This old-fashioned system means that some of the most dangerous perpetrators-who don’t use physical violence and are too clever to commit an offence–are largely invisible to the criminal justice system. Women and children who are subjected to nonphysical coercive control have little other recourse other than to try and get an intervention order. These perpetrators will move from one relationship to the next, ruining the lives of women and children without ever being apprehended, and their behaviours never properly mapped. 

When advocates say they want to criminalise coercive control, what they’re really saying is we want to finally criminalise domestic violence. We want to modernise the law to catch up with what we have known about domestic abuse for decades: that it is, in so many cases, not just a crime of assault, but one of entrapment. Criminalising coercive control would change the legal paradigm away from criminalising incidents, to criminalising the process of entrapment. So what does this process look like? Coercive control is a system of abuse that never switches off, even during the ‘good times’. Coercive controllers oppress and trap their victims by isolating them, micromanaging their behaviour, intimidating and belittling them, stopping them from seeing male friends, threatening to harm themselves, withholding access to money or transport, abusing (or threatening to abuse) kids and/or pets, obsessing over ‘signs’ of their infidelity, humiliating and degrading them, monitoring their movements, gaslighting them and creating an environment of confusion, contradiction and extreme threat. This is not just abuse–it is a system of entrapment. The ultimate goal is to erode the victim’s sense of self and reduce them to a state of compliance and dependency. Abuse is the means to achieve this; entrapment is the end result. When I hear from victims who have managed to escape coercive control, I don’t wonder ‘Why did she stay?’, I marvel at the fact she was able to survive. 

The thing to understand about coercive control is that actual violence isn’t necessary–though it is inflicted by many coercive controllers, and can be sadistic in its extremes. The system is held in place by the believable threat of violence–either to the victims, or as a form of self-harm to the perpetrator themselves. For many, physical violence may be rare, minor, or not used at all. 

So what would it look like to criminalise coercive control? Fortunately, we have a few precedents across the UK, where advocates and victim-survivors have dedicated years to honing the best response: from the careful wording of new laws to how those laws are implemented. 

In April 2019, Scotland introduced new laws against coercive control that are now described as the ‘gold standard’. Police in Scotland welcomed them: one of the country’s top cops described the new offence as “groundbreaking”, because it would “allow police for the first time to investigate and report the full circumstances of an abusive relationship”. 

Within the first year, there had been more than a thousand charges, and 96 per cent of them were being prosecuted. The conviction rate has been high, too–79 to 81 per cent. This is not, as many here fear, a difficult offence to prove. In fact, a far broader range of evidence can be considered by the court: text messages, financial records, photographs, testimony from victims and their friends and family, and so on. Many coercive controllers leave evidence everywhere, and because the evidence is often so strong, the overwhelming majority of convictions for coercive control in the first year were based on guilty pleas. That’s important: if a case does not go to trial, a victim-survivor does not have to endure a traumatic court process. 

“When I hear from victims who have managed to escape coercive control, i don’t wonder ‘Why did she stay?’,I marvel at the fact she was able to survive”

When the new laws were introduced in Scotland, women’s advocates were most nervous about one thing: would these laws be manipulated by perpetrators, and used to prosecute victims? So far, there is no evidence of this happening. In fact, the rate of victims being misidentified as perpetrators has gone down. In Scotland, men account for 96 per cent of convictions; in England and Wales, they account for 99 per cent. Prior to these new laws in Scotland, women were being prosecuted at a rate of around 12 to 15 per cent. I think we’re seeing early evidence that our criminal justice approach to domestic violence–which criminalises incidents, but is not so interested in the context in which those incidents occurred–actually criminalises victims by default. All victims resist, but communities who feel unprotected by police–particularly First Nations women–are most likely to use violent resistance, because they commonly feel it’s up to them to defend and protect themselves. Coercive control laws task the system with identifying and prosecuting the oppressor, not just the person who committed the act of violence.

Perhaps the most important question to answer, however, is this: do women actually want these new laws? Are the laws working for them? Marsha Scott, the head of Scottish Women’s Aid, told me that “for 40 years, women and children have been saying that the emotional and psychological violence is the most traumatic, the most difficult to recover from, the most minimised by the system. Now we’re hearing women and children say: ‘Oh my god, the police asked me questions about what I really care about.’ The law we have in Scotland now actually prosecutes what hurts people. It actually prosecutes domestic abuse, not just an assault. Even if we do nothing else with this bill, what we have already done is say: ‘What you’ve been telling us matters.”’ 

See What You Made Me Do is streaming from 8:30pm Wednesday 5 May on SBS and SBS On Demand

This story originally appeared in the May issue of Vogue