Award-winning investigative journalist Jess Hill continues to push for reform in Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children? Photo: Supplied.
“Each time a woman or child was murdered, I felt a gnawing sense of urgency. If it’s everybody’s responsibility to prevent violence, where does the buck stop?”
Award-winning investigative journalist and author Jess Hill investigates Australia’s National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children to find out what’s working and what’s not – and what we can do to turn things around. What will it take to stop gendered violence?
This progressive, considerate essay Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children? exposes a national crisis.
The important question is: What went wrong? Australian governments promised to end violence against women and children in a single generation. Instead, it is escalating: men have been murdering women at an increased rate, coercive control and sexual violence are becoming more complex and severe, and we see a marked rise in youth-on-youth sexual assault.
Hill, who redefined how we hold perpetrators to account in See What You Made Me Do, continues to push for reform in her latest Quarterly Essay.
While QE97 is a disturbing read, primarily it should motivate Australians to look and solve a severe problem that has devastating consequences, impacting individuals, families and communities. The challenges are demanding, and significant effort has been put in by Hill to produce an exceptional work.
Hill begins her essay by stating how the annual 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence was a high-energy time usually pumped with urgency and determination in November 2024.
“The killings have seemed relentless,” she recalls. “By November, sixty-nine men have killed women they apparently once loved. Nine Aboriginal women have been killed in just five months in the Northern Territory … The need for help is escalating year on year, and the nature of sexual, domestic and family violence seems to be getting worse – according to many frontline workers, it’s more complex and more severe.”
Since her 2019 book See What You Made Me Do came out, she has decoded coercive control for audiences at almost 400 events across Australia.
“I’m an insider-outsider, and my professional and personal life is entwined with and enriched by thousands of others who work to end gendered violence,” Hill writes. “At events like these, disclosures are common from people who have suffered abuse.”
As a nation, we all know so much more than we used to. Since 2014, when Rosie Batty first commanded Australia’s attention after her son Luke was murdered by his father, the public voices of victim-survivors have increased in number and influence.
“Between the stories and the statistics, Australia has had a sharp and protracted awakening in the grim modern scale of men’s violence against women and kids. Now, whenever the nation is convulsed by yet another homicide – especially when the victim is young, white and middle-class – newspaper front pages cry ‘Enough!’ and demand that governments do something to make it stop.
“The problem is: governments are doing something. They’ve committed record levels of funding to a national plan, they’ve changed laws, run summits and inquiries and taskforces – and yet the horror continues. In the statistics and in the bottomless supply of testimonies.”
One of Australia’s most recognised and respected thinkers on gendered violence, Hill cites many cases of violent behaviour, but mentions the name of a schoolteacher, Theresa, a mother-of-three, who is one of a diverse group of victim-survivors helping the State Government implement its new coercive control laws.
Why did Theresa’s ex-husband grow into a man who terrorised his wife and kids, ruining his own life in the process? What is it about his trajectory that is similar to – and different from – that of many men, from different cultures and backgrounds, who end up inflicting physical, sexual and psychological abuse on women and children? And how can we interrupt these violence trajectories so that this same old story doesn’t play out over and over again, one generation after another?
No doubt, Australian governments would sincerely like to see the end of gender-based violence. While they have spent billions attending to this problem over the past decade, they are still only tinkering at the edges. Things are not getting better. The problem goes deeper than funding.
On the other hand, the former Commissioner for Social Policy at the Australian Productivity Commission, Natalie Siegel-Brown, could well be pointing out the obvious: “By failing to address why people perpetrate, we are creating insatiable demand.”
Losing It: Can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children?, by Jess Hill, Quarterly Essay/Black Books Inc., $29.99
