Winner of the 2020 Stella Prize
See What You Made Me Do – Jess Hill
Nonfiction · 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. 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.
“It is a sensitive read, which—whilst confronting—is compelling and hopeful.”
– 2020 Stella Prize Judges
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.
Further Reading
Reviews
“It is Hill’s capacity to keep broad political structures and the minutiae of personal experience and emotion in her sights at all times that makes this such a unique and powerful contribution to a field of literature which, to our shame, is still only just emerging.” Alecia Simmonds, Sydney Review of Books.
Links
Read the 2020 Stella Prize Announcement Broadcast report in The Guardian.
Listen to Evelyn Araluen read from Dropbear via The Leaf Bookshop
Judges’ report
Jess Hill’s four-year investigation of the parlous numbers of domestic abuse in Australia is ground-breaking. She has ignited a nationwide debate on the causes and solutions to a devastating problem, garnering significant media attention.
See What You Made Me Do looks at the issue from multiple perspectives, including those of the largely male perpetrators and asks the government to rethink and reframe the measures which have so far failed Australian women. It is a sensitive read, which –whilst confronting – compelling and hopeful.
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