Jess Hill

Every single person working in media, law enforcement, primary healthcare, education, the justice system, community services and above all politicians should read this book. Every. Single. One of you.

In Australia, about once a week, women are being killed by their current or former intimate partners. Uncounted numbers more are enduring assault, degradation and humiliation, having their freedom to go about their lives taken away, and their children are suffering horrifically. Even if a woman manages to leave the home where the abuse occurs, she usually faces even more suffering and loss because our system is broken. Jess Hill has created something extraordinary: a forensic analysis of domestic abuse in Australia; what it looks like; the conditions that allow it to flourish, the horrific toll it takes on victims and the wider community, and how to fix it.

We can do this. We can make it better.… (altro)

An utterly harrowing book about domestic violence that really should be read by everyone, everywhere, I'm afraid. The depth of this problem lingers at the very heart of so many of society's ills, and we are so very, very far from making it any better, unless we all arm ourselves with the knowledge in books such as these and really set out with determination to tackle this problem. And by we, I mean all of us. It's going to take that many. How we might start doing that is tackled in later chapters, but first off, there's some very important fundamentals. Why don't the women leave? Because coercive control have been proven to be as effective as methods of brainwashing employed by the North Koreans against American soldiers that caused those soldiers to renounce their American citizenship and move there. "Intimate terrorism" is another name for it. Don't ask why many don't leave. Marvel at the strength and resilience of those that DO. Also consider the many thousands of pounds/dollars involved in moving your family out of the house of a committed coercive controller, and the sheer ingenuity it takes to stay safe - surveillance experts talk of searching the cars of women in refuges and in 99% of cases finding a tracking device on their car. Also consider the heart breaking fact that it is legally very hard to stop a man seeing his children, even if he is a known domestic abuser (the chapter on this is one of the most dispiriting things you will ever read), so many women stay just to make sure there is another adult in the room at all times when these men are with their children. And in case you are wondering, coercive controllers are almost 99% men. There are women who are domestic abusers - some studies suggest there may be a roughly an equal amount of them as there are violent men, and the harm they do should definitely not be dismissed. But coercive control is only in very small part to do with violence. It's a much more sinister web of rendering another human being utterly defenceless, and it is terrifying and very hard to escape. Like I said, just read the book already. Join the fight. It's time.… (altro)