Jess Hill - A 'love' of Control | The Imperfects

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This episode of The Imperfects is an expert -led discussion around domestic violence and coercive of control.

If this is something you don't feel like you can engage with today, then please skip it for now, but it's a really important conversation and we encourage you to come back when you're ready.

My name is Bella and I'm the assistant producer on The Imperfects.

I'm the descendant of Russian and English migrants who journeyed to Australia during the Second World War.

I grew up on the border of Wadarung and Eastern Mar country, inspired by their care for the natural world as I explored the land near my home.

Here at The Imperfects, we acknowledge We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land where our podcast is recorded.

We extend our respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.

Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

The number one reason women named for not leaving was not the fear of physical violence, it was the threat of poverty.

Sixty per cent of single mothers in Australia are survivors of family violence and 50 per cent of them now live in poverty with their children.

Hello and welcome to the Academy of Imperfection, where experts in their field share their wisdom on the subject of imperfection.

Today, author and journalist Jess Hill sheds some light on the dark issue of coercive control in our relationships.

It's an important one, so gum your boots, cobble your stones and join students Hugh, Ryan and Josh in the Academy of Imperfection.

We have the great privilege today of being joined by someone who's just had a haircut.

Oh, I didn't know that.

She has. It looks great.

It does. Thank you.

Wow, you guys do your research. Well, I just looked at a photo on my screen and you've got long hair.

Yeah, that's true. Oh, you've assumed that just from that photo.

Well, yeah. Yeah, but that photo could have been taken three years ago.

Oh, yeah, true. It was.

I don't have my current triangle of sadness furrowed between my eyes in that photo, so yeah.

Have you recently had a haircut though?

I recently, well, yes, I have actually.

Well, I thought, wow, you really know, because like I had a haircut two weeks ago, but it wasn't a haircut from being long.

It was actually so I, please don't feel uncomfortable, comfortable.

But when I had brain cancer recurrence, I lost half my head of hair.

So I literally had to like, I kept that long hair for ages on one side of my head.

And then the other side, it was like, I was a chimera.

Like it was like bald and then hair on the other side.

And so eventually I'm like, this is not sustainable.

I can't just flip the entire hair over.

And I went to my hairdresser, Wagner, magnificent Brazilian man.

Wagner. Yeah, who like saved my head, and he created this haircut that was I've sort of kept ever since, even though the hair's sort of grown back.

It was only a couple of years ago.

But, yeah, I was just like, oh, man, I feel like Julia Garner.

And that was a vast improvement on half my head is bald and I can't go out in public.

So hats off to Wagner.

All of the Wagners.

There's two really great Wagners I'm thinking of.

So how are you now?

I'm good, yeah. So I finished treatment, gosh, what are we, 25?

So I had treatment sort of all through 2023.

I first was diagnosed back in 2012 when I was a Middle East correspondent and I was living in Beirut.

And I got operated on then and then it was sort of conveyed to me that you should expect that this will probably come back at some stage.

What an awful thing to be told.

Yeah, it was pretty hard, especially at age 29.

So I sort of was like turning 30 as I was coming back to Australia, recovering from brain surgery.

And then, you know, when I turned 40, I had a recurrence.

So that was a fun birthday too.

But, yeah, so it came back and it had advanced in the meantime.

So this time we did surgery and then we did chemo and radiation.

So that kind of takes out that whole year of your life really.

But that finished at the end of 2023.

And honestly, what was surprising about that period was that I thought all of this quite dark work that I've been engaged in for the last decade, while I'm going through this sort of personal, real quite close mortality threat and, you know, and wondering about whether I'm going to live to see my daughter's 18th birthday, day, all those things swirling around and severely degraded on that physical front from the treatment.

I thought all this work's going to drop away and I'm going to think I don't, I can't keep looking into this kind of heart of darkness in Australia.

And it was quite the opposite.

So when I was on, I've given so much data.

Anyway, I was on steroids because I had to, the brain, my brain was swelling and sorry listeners to just tell you what that feels like but I was at I was at the cinema and I felt my brain knock against my skull so that's when you know that your brain's gotten too big and not in a good way and so I had to go and get steroids to reduce the swelling did you know what that was immediately did you know so these are all the fantastic things you discover as you're recovering from brain surgery which I did while I was awake another sort of curveball Oh, my goodness.

And they didn't want to like cut out important parts that I might need.

Yeah, so they would talk to you while they were doing it.

Yeah. I mean, this is not what we're here to talk about today, but I could honestly do a whole episode on this exact surgery.

But anyway, but it actually does key back into what we're going to talk about today.

Okay. And that is that, so, yeah, so I'm on steroids and the impact of that is to not sleep.

So for, I can't remember, it was two or three weeks, but literally I'd sometimes be getting a maximum sum of like two and a half hours sleep a night.

Like it was starting to get into sort of experimental torture territory, which meant that I'd wake up and like around 1 .30, 2 o 'clock in the morning.

And then it'd be like, hmm, a lot of hours here to just have to myself.

And first I'd be really thinking about the cancer and what it meant and what it was likely to mean.

And then I would start really thinking about victim survivors, what they had told me over the years.

You know, like I've spoken at hundreds of events across Australia and I've met thousands upon thousands of victim survivors and people on the frontline and experts who have all told me about this vast system of gendered violence and the way that it operates in Australia and beyond.

And those stories would come back to me and I'd be like trying to problem solve.

I'd be like, how do we fix this?

How do we attend to this?

How do we stop this from happening?

And I was just so obsessed with it and so so impatient to see sort of positive and actual change happen in areas like family court and, you know, what happens to children and young people that I sort of all I wanted to do was to convey as much even uncomfortable truth as I could once I was no longer sleeping two hours a night.

And that's really what I set out to do while I was doing chemo and I set out to sort of really question the way that we do prevention in Australia.

with my colleague and longtime friend and comrade, Professor Michael Salter.

So that's what I found is that actually purpose is such a thing that keeps you going and connected to life and stops you from becoming too self -indulgent and fearful.

And also I think so many victim survivors had trusted me with the worst parts of their experience and the parts parts that feel the most shameful to them.

And they had trusted me to convey those stories.

So when I was going through this, I felt like I should have a similar measure of transparency about this because there are going to be other people with brain cancer who feel like they can't tell anyone.

I was afraid of telling people because I thought they might not hire me.

They might think it's got something to do with competence, all of that.

And so I really wanted to be transparent and live up to the ideal that had been set by the victim -survivors that I had interviewed over the years.

Oh, that's incredible.

I mean, you are quite literally fighting for your life, going through chemo, and you're thinking, and I might also try and solve potentially Australia's biggest social issue right now.

Yeah, that's a good distraction.

My gosh, that's quite incredible.

The surgeon also showed me a photo he took of my brain with my skull open, so that was also interesting.

But I take a spirit of curiosity to all of this because otherwise you'd just feel so overwhelmed by it.

You could say all these silly things like it's so unfair, why me, et cetera, but actually it's like, holy shit, like this is the brain.

And what happens when you have a tumour in a silent area of the brain, which is where I've had it, like, and that makes me very lucky, but where is the mind in the brain?

And when you take out the silent areas of the brain and they don't, And on the map of the brain, they're not saying that governs your eyes or it governs your legs or it governs your speech. But we don't know where the mind sits in the brain.

And so there's all of these things that happen to you personality -wise and stuff that you can't peg down because there's no hard science to this yet.

But this is all part of why I've been obsessed with this issue around gendered violence and domestic abuse is because all of it's about human behaviour and the way our minds work.

You know, all of the, so actually for me having brain cancer is all being kind of more grist for this meal and being on the other side between you're not in total chaos but you're not in control and being in this space between chaos and control actually, yeah, it's like this quite primal insight into the fact that we don't, A, we can't operate in total chaos but we are also not in total chaos.

total control and that total control is a myth.

And total control is the myth that perpetrators try to animate in their lives.

And some of them succeed in the ways that success means to them.

And some of them fail dismally, end up suiciding, end up in jail.

But this whole idea of total control is a societal myth that we need to dispel.

Okay. I'm so keen to get into all this.

I just want to give you the background for people who aren't aware of Jess's work and what she's done.

It's just the most important work, and so I just want to give a quick bio, just so people are aware.

So Jess has always been interested in how power operates, both on an individual and systematic level.

Drawn to the human experience at the centre of complex stories, Jess is determined to understand the epidemic of domestic violence in Australia and work towards a safer future for women and children especially.

Beginning her career in journalism as a producer for the ABC Radio National, Jess relocated in 2011 2011 to Cairo, Egypt, where she worked as the Middle East correspondent for the Global Mail.

See, if we could do an episode on every paragraph I've got in front of me.

Jess then worked for the ABC background briefing.

For her journalism, Jess has won two Walkley Awards, an Amnesty International Award and three Hour Watch Awards.

In 2014, Jess was asked to write a piece for the Monthly about the prevalence of domestic violence in Australia in response to the murder of Luke Batty.

It was during her research for this piece that Jess was introduced the concept of coercive control, a discovery that would unravel her understanding of the world and dictate the future of her professional career.

Domestic violence in Australia is an epidemic, but sometimes it can be hard to visualize or understand what that actually means.

So just a couple of statistics here.

So in 2022, 4 ,620 women were hospitalized due to family or domestic violence.

So that's 13 women a day ended up in hospital due to domestic violence.

violence. On average, one woman is killed every nine days by a current or former partner.

And every two minutes, police are called out to a case of domestic violence here in Australia.

So your work, to say it's extremely important is an understatement.

Looking at that, I really would love to shape the conversation today around coercive control, because it's something we haven't really talked about yet.

We've had incredible conversations here on this podcast with Tarang Chawla, who told us the tragic story of his sister, but then told me about the work he does now.

We talked to Chanel Contos about consent.

The three of us had a chat.

I think we called it an imperfect conversation around men's violence.

Imperfect chat about men.

Yeah, imperfect chat about men.

And we are three men who are, I guess, desperately trying to learn more, but also try and show people, I mean try to show men how to have the conversation, how to talk about this and we are so lucky to have you here because you are such an expert on this.

We do want to get to coercive control because it's something we haven't really talked about before or don't know a huge amount about but can you start just by talking about the crisis that exists with domestic violence in Australia?

Yeah, sure. So just riffing off the statistics that you just presented, and also shout out Terang and Chanel, who are good friends of mine.

I was actually with Terang last night at the Wheeler Centre.

So police being called out every two minutes, that statistic was from 2016, and I did a recount, which is the first recount I've seen done.

No one seems to have recalculated that since just based on the most recent police report stats and now it's every minute.

So the number of police reports since then have doubled.

So from 5 ,000 a week to 10 ,000 a week.

In fact, in Queensland, I think the most recent stats is 190 ,000 reports of domestic and family violence in one year.

And interestingly, sexual violence crime is at a 31 -year high, but the reporting rate over the last five years has almost halved.

So it was 13 % in 2016 of victims willing to report their most recent sexual assault.

In 2021, that went down to 8%.

And sexual violence crime rates are at an all -time high.

So we've often thought, oh, well, more women are just wanting to report their latest assault.

That's not actually the case now.

So the only conclusion you can come to is there is more sexual violence being perpetrated.

So the domestic violence crisis that people talk about, I think it morphs over time.

Once upon a time, many decades ago, this was seen as something that was primarily defined as violent incidents.

And people pegged domestic violence to physical violence primarily.

primarily over time.

Then we started to introduce other types of abuse in that whole kind of constellation of what constitutes domestic violence, like psychological abuse and emotional abuse and financial abuse and spiritual abuse.

But what we're coming to understand is that some domestic violence does not feature an incident that would be clearly outlined at all, and in fact is just an unrelenting system of entrapment.

Some people will experience sort of highlighted incidents that will activate a service response or will activate a police response and some people won't and the level of torture that people experience is not defined as to whether those incidents occur or not because the underlying system of entrapment for many victim survivors is actually the worst part.

Right. So is it, am I understanding this right in saying that the incidences are so frequent and unrelenting that there may be in the victim's mind too small to report it?

Often, yeah. Too small and too insignificant and not a sense when you're in it of the accumulation until victim survivors get an acute sense of it and then start to see what they're being subjected to.

But so often you hear victim survivors use that trope about the frog in boiling water.

You know, it's just this thing.

It's something that you're coping with, you're coping with, you're readjusting to, you're trying to change your behaviour, you're trying to change him, all of those things.

And so much of your focus is on what you can do to change this situation that you lose sight of what he is doing to you and doing to the kids.

Sorry, what you're talking about, Dan, those things, is that part of coercive control?

Yes. I mean, all of it, and this is the thing, is that I think sometimes when we talk about coercive control, people have positioned coercive control as separate to physical and sexual violence.

It's like it's a separate type of abuse.

Coercive control is the umbrella under which all of this occurs.

And so physical and sexual violence can be extreme in situations of coercive control, or you may get no physical violence at all, and the first physical act of violence may be a homicide.

Or you may get sexual violence that is closer to sexual coercion, or you may get sexual violence that's extreme and degrading.

All of that occurs in this whole universe of coercive control, but it just looks very different for different people.

And I think we've underestimated the harm of that emotional abuse and psychological undermining both for adult victim -survivors and for child victim -survivors?

I'm trying to piece together as we're going today the profiles, I should say plural because I guess there are infinite versions of which a perpetrator can exist, but how often when you talk about them laying out a pattern of behaviour that is of a low enough level that that it wouldn't alert a victim to say this is not right to call the police.

How much of that do you think is a strategy as opposed to just a incidental behaviour that is formed through shame or something like that as opposed to a strategy of like, oh, I know what I'm doing and I'm doing this in a way that is intentional manipulative to make sure it can't get escalated.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, absolutely. So I can't quantify it exactly, because actually, even though we've had a national plan or two national plans now for 15 years, we still have very little deep understanding of perpetrators.

In Australia, there's a study that's going to be done in New South Wales soon, which is one of the first to really assess perpetrators.

So we really have a lot of anecdotal information from services, from people who work with men.

And what we hear from them is often that those really calculating, cold, instrumental perpetrators are in the minority.

They're extraordinarily dangerous and they use the same murder -soporandi in every relationship.

They may not have, you know, psychopathy per se but they are not sort sort of coming from a necessarily like a shame -based response.

It's not like a thing of self -defence.

It's always offence, although they may pretend to be the victim and that's purely strategic.

Yeah. And then the majority, as you said, you know, or alluded to, those men who are, they are using actually the same behaviours as the instrumental men, but it's more responsive.

it's more it's more emergent behavior yeah um and it's coming from this place like I'm afraid I'm going to be abandoned and I know what that feels like I'm afraid she's going to disrespect me and hook up with someone else so I keep like every other person away she makes me feel so vulnerable and so uncomfortable because she basically doesn't just ascend to my worldview every minute of the day and do exactly what I ask and and give me everything I'm entitled to.

And that puts me in touch with that sense of vulnerability.

And I need to dispel that immediately.

When I'm talking from the brain of an abusive man, and this is not a cognitive thing that he's actually, it's not a script he's actually hearing, but they need to dispel that immediately.

Part of dispelling that is to degrade or control or use physical violence or use some way to overcome that feeling of vulnerability with a feeling of power and dominance and will often build like a firewall against that own sense of vulnerability and this, you know, deeply buried sense of shame and this sort of core belief that they're unlovable and have been unloved and that if anyone sees them for who they really are, they'll find out that.

So they build this, you know, firewall of grandiosity a lot of the time and that's why a lot of victim survivors survivors talk about narcissism, right, which is actually like a shame -based profile, you know, the whole, the narcissistic person.

And so they build this firewall and then they get pumped up into grandiosity and that feels great.

And if you live in Sydney, you do that by using cocaine.

You know, that's the portal through to grandiosity.

Well, you use it everywhere but Sydney excels according to the wastewater analysis.

Is that right? Yeah, yeah.

No, it's like pump up into grandiosity, talk a lot of shit about yourself, use cocaine.

Kane. Um, and so, but that, that wasn't an ad by the way, I'll give you my details afterwards.

Um, but yeah, so, so yeah, so that, that sort of that firewall, basically it's the classic thing is of the undiscovered genius.

No one has ever seen what I can do.

No one has ever acknowledged me for who I really am.

And it's like, mate, there's all these people around here trying to love you for actually who you are but all you can be focused on is like I'm not getting the acknowledgement and the fame and the whatever I deserve and I need someone to blame for that and often the person to blame is my partner and or my kids I think two things I find really important in what you just said is that it's when I hear of someone exhibiting a lot of these behaviours it's very easy and tempting to go into the mindset of oh they must be that calculating manipulating manipulative person which then puts them as an other

because I'm not that and I think okay so they're a different fundamentally different person so it absolves I think me of any blame if that makes sense it kind of pushes it to it there are other people out there that are like this when you mention the more reactive stuff it's inherently I think so much more important but also uncomfortable because a lot of the things you bring up there are things that I think every man every person has come up against um and dealt with in different ways but at points in your life are confronted with feelings of not enoughness of of being unlovable all that kind

of stuff and I think it it it is important because it grounds it in that it's a universal it comes from a universal place absolutely um but uh oh yeah but also quite quite uncomfortable.

Yeah. Well, the other thing I would say is that even in those guys for whom a lot of that response is emergent and not as cold and calculating, they still will use calculation insight.

So, you know, they still will set out because they become so preoccupied with how their partner has victimized them by basically not assenting to their worldview and not giving them everything they're entitled to and all the rest of it and making them feel bad, which is completely often a total distortion that, you know, they will put their minds to how can I ruin this person?

And they will calculate how to do that.

And they will often bring in, particularly post separation, other professionals, maybe accountants who will help them hide all their money so that they don't actually give this person a scare of what they're owed during separation, or lawyers who will help them war game how to punish them through the family court.

So I don't want it to come across like these guys who use it emergently don't have any calculation at all.

They do but it's almost like, how do I put it?

It's a calculation of a wounded animal.

Okay, yeah. And when I've had guys in my own personal orbit who've gone from being friends who I've known and loved to finding out they've been abusive towards their partners, Of course, they've been perfectly lovely and, you know, affectionate, gorgeous to me.

It means absolutely nothing about what they are with their partners.

I'm not an attachment figure.

I don't bring out their sense of vulnerability.

I'm someone they can project their wonderfulness onto, you know.

But those guys, I have to say, even though they've been friends, I've never been surprised.

and the one thing that's always come across, well, I should say two things, quite an obvious sense of insecurity that's covered up with grandiosity and sort of, you know, strutting about, and then also not great emotional literacy, you know.

And my partner said when we were chatting before, he's a psychotherapist. He has more and more young men coming in to see him as we've had mental health get destigmatised.

And he says sometimes with these guys I need to put like a chart on the wall that typically would be used for people with autism and they show like pictures of faces and it's like name the emotion that's shown on that face.

And some of these guys just cannot name the emotions aside from like angry or sad or happy.

But the in -between, the grey areas are really difficult and that emotional illiteracy for guys who have all these other, the, you know, sort of qualities we've talked about before, or, you know, disadvantages emotionally, they can feel quite outgunned by their partners.

At the very moment they're trying to establish dominance, they can feel like their partner is overpowering them with their emotional literacy, like, and they can't compete on that level.

So the only way to compete is to put their partners down a peg, to neg them or to, you know, to degrade them even subtly so that - To play a game they can win in.

Exactly, to play a game they can win.

The emotional game is often not a game they can win, but the manipulation game is.

It's making me think about this.

There's a person that I know and she was a victim of abuse and sexual violence as well.

And a big part of that, and I think this is a common thing from what I've heard, but it's the negging and the degrading and all that.

that but then there's from the man it was like the instant like regret like the regret that he's done these horrible things and then the showering with well he would say love or like admiration to kind of balance out what he's just done is them is that a common thing because i feel like that would be extremely confusing for particularly for let's say you know a woman who is the receiver of this and the victim of this, because everyone wants to be loved.

And so it's like to have on one hand this person like showing all this love and you're believing them, but on the other hand, moments later abusing them in some way to then switch back.

It's like, well, what's the real thing here?

Do you love me or do you not respect me?

100%. And it's not just that.

It's that when you've been idealised, and this is a classic part part of love bombing, you know, which has become like a real part of the vernacular.

And it's described as the sort of thing that really draws victim -survivors into a relationship, sometimes strategically, sometimes it's just the man idealizes this new partner and it's like, you're nothing like my crazy ex. That's red flag.

Anyway, but that cycle can go from that full idealization and pedestal.

You're the best thing that's ever happened to me.

You're the perfect faked woman you know all of these things I absolutely admire and I see about you the things that other people don't see and then it flips to devaluation where you're not what I thought you were you know because they see you and the the need to degrade you is so coming from such a like strong place of like desperation and need from the perpetrator they just have this way of getting right to the heart of the most hurtful things you know the sorts of things that that other people don't know about you and the secrets that you've probably told them, and they will use those and turn

them against you. But because this is the person who has seen you more than anyone else has and often has you in this glow, to then have that suddenly, like the trap door open and you drop into the basement, the feeling is the only person who can pull you back up out of that basement is him.

That's horrific. And that's why so many women will say all they wanted was just for him to realise or to have an apology, to have something.

And so much of it is a feeling of trappedness in his perspective of her that they feel might only be absolved by him saying he was wrong.

And, of course, for so many women that never comes.

And it's such a long unpicking of that experience.

experience. And a lot of services will say, you know, like obviously physical violence is horrific and should not be underestimated.

And it's also intertwined with all of the other violence that's going on in the control.

But the services will say that, you know, 95 % of our time is unpicking all of that emotional abuse, emotional programming.

You know, that's what we have to get the the perpetrator, out of her head.

Is there many cases or is there any data on the amount of men, like perpetrators, who will call the police and report themselves?

That sounds to me like a unicorn.

That certainly may happen.

Unfortunately, in the saddest cases, we hear that happening after a homicide has occurred.

You literally have triple zero calls saying, like, I've just killed her.

yeah well that's I mean that's literally what you play at the start of the your SBS series exactly and in that moment you can have anything from she deserved it to oh my god what have I done um so but you do have men calling like men's referral service and other lines saying they're concerned about their behavior and they're trying to seek help I think it would be look I could be be wrong, but I think it would be a rare guy who would call police and invite an authority greater than himself into his house.

No, police is probably, actually probably didn't even really mean police.

It was more like someone reporting to someone.

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's been increasing over time as we've had this conversation about coercive control and men have maybe started to recognise those behaviours in themselves.

And like when I'm talking about men who have the capacity for that type of self -insight and who can see like, I'm kind of of like standing over my partner like a slave owner why am i monitoring everything that she does or trying to micro regulate her life i don't want to be this or i don't want to be this type of father you know there's all sorts of things that can motivate someone to say something so is there i mean for the unicorns listening um um thank you for listening it's very courageous of any man who has is doing this to be listening but where would they call yeah so there is um men's

line and the men's referral service.

So they will take incoming calls and then they can have sort of like some phone counselling and be perhaps referred somewhere else where they could speak to someone, whether it be a men's behaviour change program or whether it be in a one -on -one therapy situation.

The other thing though, for men who are listening or men who are thinking about friends and thinking, wow, I've seen that controlling behaviour in a friend of mine and I'm concerned.

There's a 30 -day free guided program that you can pretty much download on your phone called In A Boy from a group called She Is Not Your Rehab.

Matt and Sarah Brown.

Yes. The title alone is...

What a title. Yeah.

And that already designates where their loyalty is, right?

Their loyalty is to victim survivors, but they express that loyalty to victim survivors by getting to the nub of why and how men do this and saying to men their classic line for men who have developed these behaviors out of a childhood of experiencing violence or neglect or abuse or shame is to say that your childhood trauma was not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility.

Love that. That's amazing.

Yeah. And so that 30 day app guided by Matt Brown, who came out of a, you know, a childhood of horrific family violence and sexual violence himself, it's really seeking to get men to interrupt those not to a hundred responses.

Like, you know, she didn't wash the dishes.

I'm going to like, have a go.

I'm going to take her down a notch. I'm going to do this.

Or my child didn't do this.

I'm going to go in and smack him.

You know, all these sorts of things and gets them to come back feedback to you know the things that happened to them as kids the way that they were loved or not loved the way that their emotional needs were not attended to and really try to leverage that say is that the kind of father or partner you want to be um and they've had amazing results and in New Zealand it's now launched in Australia in New Zealand when it was launched 36 ,000 men signed up in the first hour holy shit gosh a lot of unicorns that's a lot of unicorns and they're And really their ambassadors, they did this campaign.

They ran a campaign called Not All Men.

And when Sarah, who's a good mate of mine, said, we're running this campaign, Not All Men, and I was like, ooh, are you sure?

For the title. Yeah, because I'm like, wow.

For those uninitiated into the Not All Men hashtag, it's usually used to shut down conversations about gender violence and deflect, you know, like don't talk about men.

It's not all men. and they just in this genius way of flipping it on its head, they would have these very simple like sort of slogans like not all men heal, will you?

Not all men break cycles, will you?

And they have these ambassadors who aren't sort of pictures of perfection in the spirit of this podcast and it's not sort of like these good male role models that if only you could be more like them you'd be like a proper man.

It's more like, hey, I experienced this too, brothers, and this was really hard to get past, I've, you know, tried to do the work to break that intergenerational cycle and here's how you can do that.

So instead of just saying you should respect women more, you should, you know, be a better man, here are the steps that you may have to take to unpick the schemas that are deeply embedded in the way that you respond to your intimate people, whether that be your partner or whether it be your kids or your family, you are going to have to do extremely difficult, challenging work that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid.

Yeah. I get you to, you use a great analogy to help people to understand coercive control around the American soldiers.

Could you talk us through that analogy?

So the whole idea of coercive control, Troll we actually started to develop in the 1950s and the understanding of it started to emerge after the Korean War and after the return of American prisoners of war who'd been held in North Korea.

And what people were astonished by was just the level of cooperation that these soldiers had exhibited.

So they had informed on fellow prisoners, they had confessed to false atrocities.

They had extolled the virtues of communism.

Some had even defected to communist China at the point of release, literally at the crossing where their families were waiting.

They were dressed in blue sort of Chinese communist outfits, had like Pablo Picasso's dove of peace attached to them.

And they were like, see you later families, we're off to China.

And so you can imagine we're at the beginning of the Cold War.

Americans are freaking out about this because these soldiers, some of them have gone through World War II, but we've seen World War I, World War II.

We've seen prisoner of war camps.

We've seen brutalization and torture.

Never have soldiers reacted like this ever.

So there's very big question marks about this.

And in the American way, the first response is they've been brainwashed.

The Soviets have, you know, got a weapon.

It's a brainwashing machine.

They've emptied out these men's minds and they've installed new thoughts and memories on it.

We need to go into the lab and we need to develop our own mind control.

This idea that it was a fancy brainwashing machine was not accepted by the US Air Force and not by this sociologist working with them, Albert Biederman.

And he actually went and did something unusual for the time, which was to go and talk to the prisoners of war and ask them what happened.

Wild theory. Crazy wild -eyed scientists.

And what he found was that when they described what they'd been subjected to is he was able to sort of isolate this into eight distinct techniques of behavioural management that they were subjected to.

And there was no fancy brainwashing machine used, but there were what he shorthanded as DDD, which is the Communist Wood Induce Dependency, Debility and Dread.

And interestingly, I think for the analogy and the way that we figure out out about coercive control later is that when the American soldiers were captured, the captors gave them cigarettes.

They clapped them on the back and they said like, we're friends of the workers of America.

You will not be harmed.

So in this direct analogy to what happens in coercive control and intimate relationships, it's love bombing, it's trust. Don't worry about us.

So it's establishing that and then having this process of coercive control begin.

And so Biederman, established this eight techniques, which is isolation and that was to deprive the victim of the social supports they would need to resist. And the social supports in the POW camps was the other prisoners.

Monopolizing the perception, so drive the victim's perception inwards.

What am I doing to deserve this treatment?

How can I change? You know, but fostering introspection rather than having their focus fixed on what's being done to them.

Induce stability and exhaustion to weaken the ability to resist, threats which were supposed to cultivate anxiety and despair, and sometimes that would be threats like what we could do to your family back in the United States if you don't cooperate, what we might do to this fellow prisoner or all those sorts of things.

But by this stage, like if they're threatening them like that, the prisoners already trust them.

Yes. Well, because then we get to occasional indulgences, which is like as you described before, this whole thing of like, I'm going to, you know, devalue you, but now I'm going to idealize you again.

And so these occasional indulgences were like, hey, you know, thanks so much for helping us.

What you're doing is great.

And here, we're going to give you an extra blanket.

We're going to do these things to make you feel like there's this positive motive for you to comply, right?

And then demonstrating omnipotence to suggest the futility of resistance.

So in some of these POW camps, there weren't even fences.

And the point was we can see everything.

thing. We can see every move that you make.

So we don't need fences.

And then degradation, which was supposed to reduce the prisoner to animal level concerns, and then enforcing trivial demands to develop the habit of compliance.

So what would degradation look like here?

Degradation could be everything from having them stand naked, or just getting at them, undermining them personally, insulting them, all of these sorts of techniques.

And it would would just make the cost of resistance to your own self -esteem higher than capitulation.

So the point is to basically make it easier for you to comply, because actually for human beings generally, self -esteem and dignity is almost valued above physical safety.

So facing a threat of having your dignity undermined for some is more scary than the threat of being hit.

And then the enforcing of tribunal demands was really to develop this habit of compliance.

So there'd be just like rules set that would change at a moment's notice, but they had to be like right on top of it every single time because otherwise they'd be punished if they didn't comply.

And then as time went on, these became the known techniques of cult leaders, of sex traffickers, hostage takers, you know, people like there's so many amazing examples.

Scientology was jumping into my head.

Oh, 100%. Yeah. I mean, this whole idea of like suppressives and the people who would like to try to alert you to what's actually going on, you need to be isolated from them.

I mean, this is coercive control in intimate partnerships has the closest relationship with coercive control in cults, only it's not happening in a group environment most of the time.

And then it wasn't until, you know, we didn't have refuges until 1975, right?

And then the testimonies of women and kids started to come in thick and fast. And so by the late 70s, early 80s, you have, you know, a burgeoning academia on domestic violence that in the 60s just didn't exist. You could literally read all of the literature in two or three hours.

And a lot of it was interviewing abusers about what they thought about their wives.

So, you know, not super reliable.

And so you get to the 80s.

We had some really great analysis, of course, of control intimate relationships in the late 1970s.

But Diana Russell in this book, Rape in Marriage, one of the first to really talk about that phenomenon, she listed the techniques that Albert Biederman had and listed them against common techniques used by abusers and found they were identical.

A lot of those techniques that you're talking about, also sort of similar it seems to the kind of classic, which we kind of know more from movies I guess, is like the good cop, bad cop kind of approach and the way that to try and interrogate alleged criminals or to, you know, it seems like that good cop, bad cop thing is very much a, well, one cop treats you well and the other cop treats you bad.

Yeah. And you seek alliance with the person who's seemingly giving you protection and unfortunately in coercive control every person who is abusing you is also offering you protection sometimes.

That's not always the case.

I've got to say in some situations of coercive control the occasional indulgences do not exist I mean in the really in the in the coercive control situations where the threat against leaving is so violent and the person is so sadistic that that part of it doesn't actually need to be used but in most relationships that I hear about that's a very big part of it and it's It's what draws the woman back and it also reconvinces her and possibly the kids as well that everything they're doing to like be perfect, to tiptoe around, to do everything that he wants and asks and to maybe like try to get him

help as well, that that's all working and we can go back to what it was like at the beginning.

So it's that the good times in coercive control are unfortunately unfortunately, just as much a part of the control as the bad times.

Yeah. So occasionally, and I say this very occasionally, when a conversation will happen with a group of people around a friend of theirs who's in a relationship like this, someone will say quite flippantly, they just need to leave. That would feel like, for that person, for the victim, that would feel like an impossible task, I'm guessing.

Yeah. I mean, I'd say just for listeners who haven't had this experience or don't feel like they know anyone who has, I think we'll find often once you understand this, you find all these people in your life who have. I think if you just think about what it is to leave a regular relationship, especially one in which you have kids and maybe you rent a place together other or you own a place together, the extrication from that is often so intimidating that people stay in relationships that are just unhappy for longer than they should, right?

That's just a common thing, right?

It takes ages to adjust to the idea that you're going to turn your life upside down and leave this person.

So take that as sort of like, I think, first of all, we could just take everyday experiences of leaving relationships and see how hard that is.

The calculation in leaving a violent relationship, A, it's important to recognise that, yes, you can leave their physical proximity, but it's not the victim's choice to leave the abuse because the abuse can take on a completely different flavour after the separation occurs and it's not their choice to stop that.

That's the perpetrator's choice.

What can that look like in terms of once they leave?

How can that look different?

Stalking, reputational ruin, false allegations to child protection, filing to family court if there are kids involved, financial abuse, just endless, endless tactics that can be used.

And these guys, this is what's so, it's the fixation on why doesn't she leave is, I understand it.

I had that too when I first started looking into this.

But my fixation then turned to like why doesn't he let her leave?

Why does he like 10 years later still fixate on her and like turn up at places that she's at to like intimidate her or still use systems to try to get to her like what's his fixation why can't he fucking leave um you know that's sorry but that's you know that's a big part of it yeah yeah that's right i am a cusser um and um but i'm australian so it's all right but the um that thing about leaving the other thing i would say is that a lot of women stay because they absolutely believe that they can and it's their job to fix him.

And they see in some of these men who have sometimes come from these horrific childhoods or had really difficult experiences, they see this scared little boy in him sometimes and they keep on wanting to go to that little boy and prove to that boy he can be loved and I'm going to be the one that shows you how you can be loved.

But so often they're doing so much of the work and he's not doing hardly any of the work at all.

And even if sometimes he looks like he's doing the work, Often, unfortunately, he may be using that work to be more manipulative.

Anyway, that's not always the case.

There are some men in these relationships who really do genuinely do the work, but, again, it's not as common. But the other thing is if they have strong beliefs, faith beliefs, it might be that I have to stay with this person until I die.

That was the commitment that I made.

And if I don't, and particularly if you're talking about, you know, women from South Asian backgrounds, it's like am I going to be excluded from my community if I leave?

And am I going to be stigmatised?

Which is more isolation.

So much isolation. So sometimes you talk to women, not just from, you know, different cultural backgrounds, but also Caucasian backgrounds who were like, I had to make the choice between my friends or my life, or they felt like their kids who had lived in this sort of hot pot for for so long were also turned against them and for them to leave would sometimes mean leaving their kids as well.

Their kids would not come with them.

With this person. With this person.

And the last thing that I'd say, and there's so many things, I mean there's visa issues, there's, I mean there's just endless, but it's that really the number one reason women named for not leaving was not the fear of physical violence, it was the threat of poverty.

And 60 % of single mothers in Australia, this is from research from the personal safety survey that Dr Anne Summers surfaced, 60 % of single mothers are survivors of family violence and 50 % of them now live in poverty with their children.

Oh, my God. And they did not live in poverty before the violence occurred by and large.

It was something that was caused by the violence.

So and you talk about things with family court.

If you end up in family court and you've got kids and you go to a full hearing because he is not going to mediate because ultimately he wants to punish you and use the court to control you, you can spend upwards of $200 ,000, $300 ,000, $400 ,000, $500 ,000, you know, and talk about women and that's even if you're like, that's if you've got a lawyer, you might try to self -represent, it's still expensive.

It's just such a massive spectre hanging over you when you leave and it's like you might end up being ordered by a family court court.

To send your child to either live or spend time with that person who you have all fled from, that child will not have a choice.

It'll be a court order.

If the child screams and kicks and begs not to go, that mother will have to drag them into the car and take them to the person that child fears.

And there is no recourse.

If that child runs away, if the abusive parent has, has custody over that child, they can literally file a recovery order to the court and have the Australian federal police track that child down and return them to the abusive parent.

It is such a trap for children and young people.

So you think about, when I was doing that judicial education, there was a magistrate there who was, when she was in a domestic violence situation, she was a barrister.

She knew how the courts worked and she stayed in her marriage for 10 years as a supervisor because she was like, I can't risk the courts ordering me to hand over my child to this man without me to supervise his safety.

My wife and I know someone in this situation right now and it's the most heartbreaking story I've heard and the most, I almost feel like helpless.

Like there's no, I kept thinking there's got to be someone, but the system is not set up to support her at all with this.

And it's just so heartbreaking.

Yeah, and that's the thing is like, you know, we talk about these domestic violence services being overburdened.

And, yeah, sure, I mean, as we've seen, like the reports are going through the roof, but so often caseworkers are spending their days unpicking the violence that is done to women through systems, through child protection, through family court, through, you know, financial abuse, through tech surveillance.

And it's like, if we were able to stop perpetrators weaponising systems, the burden on the service response system and the domestic violence response system would be drastically reduced.

You know, so the interpersonal violence is one part of it, but the systems violence that then wraps around, particularly in that post -separation era, and particularly if there are our kids is another thing altogether.

And that's why I just think it's also crazy that we don't intervene much earlier with teenagers who are at the highest risk age group for intimate partner violence, intervene when they're 16, 17, because often those, you know, so many women will meet their partner who may be their age or a bit older when they're 16 or 17, continue into their 20s, have kids, and then the trap is set.

And I don't want to say to people in the audience that you can't leave because it's not the case that everybody gets taken to family court.

It's not the case that everybody gets false allegations of child protection.

Some people really do leave and they go on to leave much happier and independent lives.

But what I want to say is that it's a risk and you don't get to control the risk and you don't know what the risk is when when you take it you you said before with the perfect level of swearing you asked a great question and I'd love to hear your answer about why doesn't he stop he becomes hyper fixated as this person is the source of all of my problems you know and And the grievance and resentment towards that person is like fuel.

I don't think we actually know quite enough about why he doesn't stop because actually it's been much more rarely asked.

And I think the issue is also men who use this type of violence and who use coercive control, they're not considered reliable narrators, you know, and that's fair because they minimise, they deny, they shift blame, all the rest of it.

So it's been much easier to do research with victim survivors and ask them why they think their partners act in certain ways.

But the risk of that is that we're kind of in this territory a little bit like the 1960s when we were asking men about what they thought about their wives.

Although I think women have a much better insight into their partners.

In fact, they dedicate their entire mental acuity to understanding why he's doing this.

So I think It's different in that way.

But we do need to find a way to actually speak to these guys once they've got a level of self -insight to understand what was it that kept you fixated for 10 years on this person after they'd left?

Why did you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to ruin her through the courts?

You know, what's in it for you?

And sometimes what's in it is I will win.

That's what I was thinking the whole time.

It's like it's winning.

it's just winning. Hyperfixation on winning with a person.

Yeah. It's devastating for victim survivors.

And, and a woman stood up last night at the Wheeler Centre where I was, where I was with Terang.

And she said, you know, I've been in the family court system for 14 years with my daughter since we, since we left. And my daughter was just taken away from me.

I've had no contact with her for two years.

And that's because the courts decided that she, the daughter, was too enmeshed with her mother and that she needed to have no contact at all so she could rebuild a relationship with the father, even though the daughter is terrified of the father.

I say this because I, when I first started learning about family court, and may I say it wasn't just from victim survivors, it was from barristers and and family court judges sometimes who are telling me about this and also reports, is that these decisions about parenting are so anti what we know about child development, anti what we know about attachment, that we would remove a child from their primary attachment figure, place them with a parent who has sometimes had very little to do with them, where the separation has been for many years, and then like re -engineer a relationship because we

believe or the court believes or the judge believes that that child must have a relationship with that father.

And yet a woman who's left, first of all, she's been dealt with by domestic abuse services saying, you've done the right thing, we're going to focus on getting you safe, we're going to get an intervention order against this man, he's dangerous, we're going to contain and control this, then child protection might step in and be like, well, you need to protect your children so you need to leave. If you can't protect them and if he keeps on coming into your house or he keeps on threatening you, that's your failure to protect and we may have to remove the children.

Then you go to family court and they're like, you need to be able to provide contact between your children and the father and if you don't, then we may see you as an alienating mother and we may need to remove the children altogether from you because you're a hostile parent but you're prohibiting this based on your own personal grievance about the way that he was towards you in the relationship.

relationship that's the completely messed up underground that victim survivors live in where these what's called like the three planets which is professor marion hester's work completely unaligned and they are they are hopping from one planet to the next and and having to behave in completely different ways that are totally contradictory i mean that is just an awful picture that you paint i for anyone listening right now to this who is in that situation, I, yeah, we really, I don't know, I don't even know what to say, but just this must be a difficult thing to listen to.

In the conversations you've had with victims, what happens to their mental health?

They get into a sense where the objective sense of reality starts to ebb away and the reality is continually constructed and reinforced by the perpetrator.

and that reality is that what's happening to you is your fault.

If you could do better, then this wouldn't be happening or if you can just like, you know, find ways to fix me, then I wouldn't be doing this to you.

Constant thing that you hear from victim survivors is I was walking on eggshells, right, always walking on eggshells.

And so they get into this sense that I need to be hypervigilant to what the next threat is or to what the next rule that's going to be set.

this is for adults and children.

I had one young boy who I called Finley in the book, who was eight years old.

And I remember he was a really keen gamer.

And he said that he used to read his father's face like an algorithm.

So he would like see the minute changes in the face and then judge what was going to happen as a result of that.

And then he would change his behavior accordingly.

So in order to protect yourself from punishment and to see what's coming next, the process, this quite incredible strategic process ends up with the perpetrator occupying more and more of your brain space.

Because for you to be where you are trying to defend your own dignity, stand up for what you believe in, what you think is right, all of that is not keeping keeping you safe, you know, in this sort of situation.

And we see that when we have, like, a moment of resistance or violent resistance or self -defence, you know, where they have this snap and it's like, I'm not going to put up with this anymore.

Now, sometimes that can actually be a huge wake -up call for the abuser and it's quite shocking.

Other times it ends up inflicting more violence.

So the self -protection strategy is get the perpetrator in your head, get to understand exactly all the signs that danger is close or it's already here.

And what happens over time is neatly described using this term prospecticide, which is literally the killing off of your own instinct and your own perspective and the replacement of that with the perpetrator.

Anyone who's been bullied probably has a sense of what it is to have the perpetrator live inside your head.

So when you're getting dressed in the morning, whether it's at school or whether it's at work, first thing you might be thinking is, what are they going to say about what I'm wearing?

What are they going to think about what I do?

You hear their response even to your thoughts.

And that's what happens in these relationships.

And I think that in that perspective side process, a lot of women and particularly kids come to see themselves quite wholeheartedly, definitely to blame for what's going on.

The kids particularly will do this as a way of maintaining some sort of agency in a powerless situation because it's like if I'm to blame, then actually I can actually fix this.

If I'm not to blame and he's to blame or she's to blame or he and she is to blame, that's so scary as an idea because I rely on these people for survival and, you know, both sort of like physical survival but also just survival of my heart.

But if I'm to blame and if I'm the bad person, then I just need to do everything I can to fix that.

And unpicking that self -blame, especially for kids and young people, can take a lifetime.

But that's why when you get that early intervention, it's like you need to get to kids and say like understand why you went there, why you believed it was your fault, acknowledging the kind of instinctive brilliance of maintaining that agency, but saying this is a maladaptive coping strategy.

You wouldn't use that word with a kid.

But, you know, this over time, if you consider yourself to blame for every bad thing that happens to you and you consider yourself then to become this bad, unlovable person, you see this shame process start, I am the cause of all the bad things in my life, that's not something that's going to produce a healthy life.

And you see this in the child maltreatment study as well, all is that the two types of abuse that have the worst long -term outcomes in terms of self -harm, in terms of physical illness, in terms of, you know, mental struggles is child sexual abuse, which you would probably expect, but also emotional abuse.

They are the two worst. And for children, they will say, including, you know, this young guy, Jack, in my recent quarterly essay, he said, you know, his dad wanted to be called Ivan because he most admired the serial killer Ivan Milat.

That's all I probably need to say about him.

He used all sorts of horrific physical violence, but Jack says in a letter to him, the emotional abuse was the worst. The name calling, the threats, the degradation, that was the worst that we had to deal with.

And that's, we don't think about, we think about child abuse, we don't go to emotional abuse, as we wouldn't necessarily classify that.

We go to physical, we go to sexual abuse, we go to neglect.

But emotional abuse is sort of seen as this sort of wafty thing that doesn't, you know, but in the maltreatment study, seeing a third of children now 16 to 24 had experienced emotional abuse, and things like their parents saying, we should never have had you, you were a mistake, or never showing love or affection to them.

Like just a type of emotional despair bear that at that moment when they are forming their identity, that is incredibly difficult to recover from.

It's a bit of a jump, but it's been on my mind for a while, so I wanted to bring it up.

Quite rightly, spend a bit of time talking about the, we're talking about physical violence and the cases of the family courts and all that kind of stuff.

But one of the things that I find interesting is that if like one of us was to have an issue, say like eating too much, like a health issue, like eating too much donuts for want of a better example.

And I can envisage a situation where a group of blokes are at the pub or whatever and would say like, oh, I just can't stop eating donuts.

Like I can't stop doing this.

and there would be a bit of discussion about like, oh no, what you got to do is I'll try fasting or whatever.

There'd be a discussion that comes out of it.

I cannot envisage a situation where a guy would say to his mates at the pub something like I feel like I keep blaming my wife for stuffing something up and I hate the way I do it.

It doesn't feel good but I can't stop doing it.

I just can't imagine that happening.

Well, you know, when you think about, like, what it would be to have that discussion about eating donuts, that's like safe territory, right, because it's like, oh, this is something we can fix.

This is something we can fix really easily.

And for a lot of guys having that emotional honesty with friends can feel dangerous or just inaccessible, right?

And it's just like if I were to trust them with this, maybe they would use that against me later.

I mean I'm not saying with like really good friends, but if you're talking about like friends and acquaintances at a pub, a lot of guys, especially people who are perpetrators, they're often quite socially isolated.

Some of these guys just don't have friends.

And the partner is like their best friend, their mother, what they consider to be their sex worker, their domestic labourer, et cetera.

Or if they do have friends, they're kind of fair weather friends, they're friends that they might have through work or whatever, but often not a friendship that they could go into these sorts of really deep emotional conversations with.

So, yeah, I agree. Like, I think that we are maybe edging into that territory now and maybe edging into that territory with some younger guys who are kind of, who are not the guys that everyone's talking about at the the moment who are sliding into, you know, misogyny and, and hectic online influencer worlds.

Um, but who are the guys who actually, you know, a reasonable proportion of them who are becoming much more emotionally intelligent than their fathers.

You know, there's also probably a fear of like judgment.

Oh, definitely. So it's like, no, one's going to judge you that much for like eating too many donuts.

Cause it's like, you know, everyone can kind of relate to it yeah yeah whereas like to to say the taboo thing that um could potentially lead to intense judgment and not only that but then there's a chance that these guys will go home and tell their partners maybe that is also a reason why people wouldn't feel safe talking about it I think so I mean that that fear of exile is like you know that goes back millennia like you know the fear that you'll be exiled from the group is like one of the deepest sort of earliest um like literally survival fears that we have. That's an interesting point because I

guess that fear would be more often than not hyper -present in someone who's perpetrating it already.

So the fear of being rejected or isolated or unloved would be very present in someone who is enacting these acts of coercive control.

So therefore, to take the risk in another situation that might pull me away away from that is like that's a lot of risk yeah and then but and yet we also know from some surveys that friends and family are the most likely person that a perpetrator will disclose to um at what point of that journey who knows like whether it's early um or whether it's later where it's like i actually have no choice now because there's an order or you know it's become visible who knows you know we don't have that um detail when that happens and the second most likely is is a GP or a psychologist. So it's not that they

don't disclose, it's just, as you say, there's not like a culture, and this is what She's Not Your Rehab, I think, is so powerful at doing, is trying to engender that culture of men speaking more openly about their imperfections and about and not try to say, like, there's a pin -up male role model over here that we should all aspire to be, but say, like, actually – and, you know, I've had men in men's behaviour change programs that I've observed and interacted with them on say what they really want is to be modelled like this is how I got through this.

I'm not a perfect person.

And that's why facilitators who are, you know, genuinely reformed and not using violence or control anymore can be so effective because there's that sense of relationship like you're not someone who's better than me and who looks down on me.

We understand each other.

Um, so yeah, I mean, but I, I do think that we, we are very worried about young men now in all sorts of ways, but on the, on the flip side of that, a lot of this stigma is starting to move and we're starting to see a real evolution in how young men approach friendships and things like that.

So it's sort of like terrible news story over here, quite positive news story over there.

but it's more the polarisation of those two.

Do you think that with everything that you know and all the people that you've spoken to and cases you've read and research you've done and this is maybe not including like psychopaths, like people who are genuinely psychopaths, do you think these men can change and how?

Yes, they can if they are genuinely committed to it.

And you do see some results for men's behaviour change programs, which I think the men's behaviour change sector would agree.

For the most part, they are mostly too short.

So you're looking at just a few months, you know, often once, maybe twice a week.

And you think about our schemas and the things that we have to overcome in our regular lives, like you can have years of therapy and still feel like you're scratching away at the edges.

I know that's been my experience with certain things.

Um, so, so there's, there's part of that is that like actually these sorts of patterns take a long time to shift, even when you genuinely want to, and you want to put in the work.

So yes, they can change.

Our ability, as Professor Salter, um, says, you know, our ability to re -regulate men, especially once they've experienced a childhood violence and where they're, they go to abusiveness in order to manage their sense of security.

Our ability to re -regulate them later is quite constrained.

It's very difficult and it takes a long time.

And that's why a lot of what myself and Professor Salter and lots of people who work in the children and young people sector are saying that we need to be working with young men and boys before these these schemas get really rigidly in place and we need to be stopping or interrupting particularly the intergenerational transmission of violence.

So you've got more than four in ten kids, now 16 and 24, who grew up with family violence in Australia, more than four in ten.

Holy shit. That's like a lot.

If we are to work with these young kids earlier, particularly those kids who start showing harm, might show harmful sexual behaviours or start using harm in their first intimate relationships, you have a much better chance of re -regulating them and setting them on a better path and showing them another option of how to be than you do with a guy who's like 30 plus for whom this has become a way of living.

But we also have, and this is, I cite this in the quarterly, this amazing woman, Cheryl Batchelor, who runs this program, program Yiliya Pinya.

And it's for the kids who it's like the island of last resort.

You know, it's like the kids who just no one knows what to do with them anymore.

And she's so amazing.

She's an Aboriginal woman who is a deputy principal of a school.

She came across Norman Doidge's book, The Brain That Changes Itself on neuroplasticity.

And it was like this light bulb going off for her.

But she thought, what I want to do is work with kids and young people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids who are, you know, in the out -of -home care or, you know, crossing over to youth detention or at risk of.

And I want to not just talk about their trauma but about their brain health.

How do we actually rewire their brains but do so in connection to culture?

And she has just done, like, incredible things.

And talking to her, it's all this matter of, no, no, your brain can't deal with this yet.

And it's this, and my little girl, God bless her, Stevie, she's so great.

I don't know why I keep saying God, I'm actually agnostic.

But anyway, God bless her, she's very into Greek mythology.

You know, she said to me the other day, she said, Mum, you know, it's just about the power of yet.

I can't do this yet.

And I'm just like, Jesus, Stevie, you are the child of a therapist anyway.

But, you know. Give yourself some credit as well.

Yeah, yeah. A little bit of credit there as well.

But that's what Cheryl brings to that work and what so many people who work with children and young people bring, which is, yes, you are resorting to these sorts of self -defensive tactics, which could be using harm against another kid.

Now, you need to stop doing that and that kid needs to be protected or other children may need to be protected from you.

but you are not doomed to this trajectory.

Your brain just needs to find new ways to respond to the stimuli that it might have been trained into responding to in a certain way.

But that's the beauty of things like neuroplasticity is to say that none of this is set in stone but the older we get, the harder it is.

for anyone listening or watching this who sees in their most honest self -reflection and quietest moment themselves in this conversation as a perpetrator and thinks i don't want to be here i don't want to be this but i don't know what else to better know how else to be what do they do now start doing some reading i think um start what do they read um you could read my book no well well i mean literally you could read my book um because my partner david and i um we worked together quite closely not on all of it but on particularly on the chapters on shame and patriarchy and we wrote those chapters

together to speak to men um you know primarily and to speak to the women who loved men who were harming them or who had sons who were harming others.

And I've had so much amazing, incredible feedback from men who've said that's the first time that I really felt seen and the sort of deep, secretive motivations for why I was doing this.

And it allowed me to, you know, it was hard to read but it really made sense and it allowed me to check in and sort of like be honest with myself, as you've just said, Hugh.

So there's that. And the book is called See What You Made Me Do.

It is. So I don't mean to just self -promote, but the reason I say that is because there's not a lot on this that caters to guys, to be honest, because guys don't read this material.

Most of it, if you want to sell books, you're going to write them for women, right, and that's just a commercial imperative.

The other thing, and again, I'm not wanting to self -promote, but it really is quite effective for guys.

There's one episode in a podcast that I did called The Trap.

And it was basically like, why does he do this?

But it really goes into it.

We interview men in a men's behavior change program.

We talk to really incredible people who work with men.

And again, I've had great feedback from some guys who've said they recognize themselves in that and it really helped them set on a path.

But the other book that I would say, harking back to She Is Not Your Rehab is to read that book, The She Is Not Your Rehab book by Matt and Sarah Brown.

It really just steps you through this in a way that's like compassionate accountability.

Look up Matt Brown's TED Talk.

He does an amazing TED Talk on his experiences of violence growing up and how he managed to break that cycle.

Okay, so you can go to the show notes right now and they will all be there for anyone listening who does think, I think, yeah, I don't want to be this person anymore.

Yeah, that's a good place to start and we commend that.

I mean it's also obviously very, very helpful stuff for even for the men listening who think like I'm not that guy.

Because, I mean, the statistics you said earlier are so shocking.

Like how many men would I, statistically speaking, how many men would I know that would be counted as a perpetrator?

That's something we haven't quantified yet.

So what we can say is that one in four women from the age of 15 have experienced intimate partner violence, but perpetrators, typically career perpetrators will abuse more than one woman.

So we can't sort of flip that and say that one in four men.

however I would suggest that you know at least one that we can be sure of that.

I came to the work thinking I don't know anyone who's been through this and then I discovered actually it's all through my own family and several of my friends and actually and now at my daughter's school lovely guy one of the dads there who was asking like what do you do and I explained and And he said, oh, you know, it's something along the lines of it's so great that we just don't really have that problem here.

And I was like, it's interesting you say that.

And I explained to him what coercive control was and then he was like, oh, I think I know people like that.

I'm like, yes, you do.

Yes, you do. So I think people think that we still have a large proportion of Australians who think, yes, domestic and family violence, It's a terrible issue in Australia, but it doesn't happen in the community that I live in.

And I think partly that's because they imagine domestic and family violence to be sirens blazing, black eyes, you know, this dysfunctional living.

They don't imagine these high control environments.

I think one of the most incredible statistics that came through recently after Professor Michael Salter and I were talking very much about the role of alcohol in domestic violence, we got these stats that looked at alcohol -fuelled domestic violence call -outs for police across Sydney and the highest rates of alcohol -fuelled domestic violence were in the wealthiest areas.

is. In something Ryan said earlier, it was sort of implied, I think, or at least brought up as an idea, guilt, like buying presents because you feel guilty.

And then we've also been talking about shame.

And I have read that chapter from your book and I was pretty blown away by it on a whole, but the definitions and differences between shame and guilt and how they play out, I thought it were fascinating and probably worth going into, and also the role of humiliation in the psyche.

I guess the shorthand version of the difference between shame and guilt is that guilt is something that you can apologise for, you can apologise for what you feel guilty about, and you can be forgiven by someone who you feel guilty for doing that to, to a certain extent, but nobody can can absolve you of shame, right?

No one, no amount of forgiveness or positive messaging necessarily can displace that feeling that you are inherently intrinsically unlovable and unloved and that you are defective.

And guilt, I think, can almost be a deterrent for bad behaviour sometimes.

times it can you know it can drive us to express remorse shame sometimes can actually do the opposite which is convince us that actually we are the real victims and this is something that you see in men who use violence all the time and the the counsellors who work the lines at the men's referral service and at men's line they'll say they they do call outs to guys who've been named on charge sheets, so like they've had police interaction and the vast majority of the calls start with a guy absolutely convinced that he is the primary victim in the situation and by the end of the call that's sort

of gotten down to 10 % and maybe in 10 % cases maybe he was the victim, you know, or has been victimised in some way.

So this victimhood complex is deeply connected to shame and what I'd also say about that is that, But and Donald Nathanson wrote a great book about this and talks about the way that then people interpret shame, right?

Because it's not like, oh, well, if you experience, you know, deep, unacknowledged shame, you are therefore going to be abusive.

That is not the case at all.

People have all different ways of doing it.

Sometimes it's completely self -inflicted and they just, you know, they harm themselves either physically, emotionally, over -reading, all those sorts of ways.

sometimes they want to go into complete social isolation um just avoidance I can't be in contact with people I you know people hate me I don't I can't have friends all those sorts of things and then you know if you're mixing that kind of really toxic unacknowledged shame with a sense of entitlement and and a sense that this is an unbearable feeling and I cannot stand to have it and the way that I'm going to get rid of it is by exerting myself on other people Does a violent childhood or abuse or trauma in an early age have a correlation to someone's likelihood to place the shame on other people

as opposed to going inward?

It can do, but not necessarily.

So lots of guys who've grown up in a violent childhood would rather die than make someone else feel that harm again.

And you do have, you know, men and women who suicide because they cannot tell others about the things that haunt them about themselves.

But there's a certainly higher proportion of perpetrators who have those childhoods themselves, which is why that emphasis on early intervention is so important.

And it is so underdeveloped in Australia and around the world.

It's like talking about perpetrators and the harms they may have experienced in childhood has been almost taboo because it's like giving them an excuse.

That's the idea is that for ages it was like, well, it must be because it's like monkey see, monkey do, which is just so absurd. I mean, yes, there's a certain amount that you do learn to respond to things in certain ways.

But it's also that complex trauma is not just about repeating the behaviours that you witnessed.

It's about seeking safety and security in rigidity and perhaps prejudice or the need for control.

It's so much more complicated than that.

It's not that, it's just not that alone.

It's not that alone, exactly.

And I think that it really undermines the complexity of young people's experience to say that they just saw it and they repeated it.

okay um so i guess that we need to acknowledge that this is not like a trajectory that is certain a lot of young guys will say to me and young guys who are like the most beautiful people you've ever met will say that they are absolutely terrified that their father's dna is is in them that that that violent trajectory is unavoidable no matter what they do some young guys won't even go into to relationships for fear that that side of them is going to emerge.

And it's just so terrible that those young guys find it so hard to access any help for that.

But is that fear, like in those young guys who are so aware, like so self -aware of the potential of what might happen, are they likely to then become a perpetrator if they're aware?

Sometimes. Right, wow.

That's the terrible thing is that I've spoken to, I remember one guy in the men's behaviour change program that I observed and he said my two siblings they all grew up in a violent household he was the only one who ended up using violence in his relationship and he'd been afraid of that happening and then it happened but then there's you know for the really super self -aware guys I mean you're talking about like you know guys who have spent time working on this it's unlikely it's just going to come out like a rabbit out of a hat suddenly because they're in a different attachment relationship now

with an intimate partner.

But, yeah, I mean, I won't name names, but some of the leading people in the country who have spent years working on this have said that they are afraid of what they don't know about themselves in those situations.

I imagine that with shame and is linked into power and pride, and control and that the process of feeling humiliated, whether that actually happened or not, is a huge like, you know, oxygen to a fire in this situation.

Yeah, and it's that, it's the, as you say, it's the perception that one has been humiliated and the concept of humiliated fury was developed by this feminist psychoanalyst who like in the 70s was another unicorn, corn, Helen Block Lewis, who was also one of the first clinicians to study the difference between shame and guilt.

And she developed this notion of humiliated fury where you feel this sense of humiliation and the feeling that rushes in behind it is a sense of, you know, really accelerated grievance and the need to then stand over that person who has just caused you that, you know, literally that microsecond of feeling humiliated and dissed, it gets overwhelmed by this sense of power and dominance and it's a way to expel those unbearable feelings.

Because remembering that, like, shame is a feeling that is so difficult to bear, we often want to be just swallowed up by the ground when we feel it, you know, or made to be invisible.

But abusive people, when shame comes into play and when humiliated fury comes into play, instead of being swallowed up by the ground, it's just like, I'm going to attack someone else I'm going to fire up into dominance and grandiosity and that's the way I dispel that feeling.

Which I can only imagine makes for a victim to bring it up, to sort of confront their abuser and to inflict any form of shame could make it even worse.

100%. And so it's often like the expectation of men who have these sorts of shame -based personalities is that you will never make this visible It will always be our secret.

You won't even make it visible to me, right, but never make it visible to the outside world and we must keep this secret.

And the loyalty code is fundamental to coercive control in keeping that secret.

So, you know, we see headlines like man kills wife over burnt toast, which is obviously farcical, but really what the men's counsellors hear on those phone lines is exactly that.

She didn't put the garbage bins out to the curb square.

She dissed me. I've told her to do that.

It's like, she didn't respect me.

And these things are seen as instrumental forms of disrespect.

And then there's just this absolute rage that comes in, this humiliated fury.

How dare you do this to me?

How dare you make me feel like this?

And meanwhile, the woman's just sitting there they're like going, did what?

And the other thing I'd just say to that, the way that you can see this expressed, I remember sitting with a group of women and they were like, one of them said, my partner used to kick me out of bed in the middle of the night.

And she'd never said that to anyone.

And then two of the other women in the group were like, yeah, that happened to me as well.

And at first I was just like, why?

Why are they doing that?

Is it so they want to interrupt their asleep?

What is it? And then it clicked.

He's been sitting there and stewing over these perceived disrespects that have happened through the day.

She, you know, she didn't just go to the shops.

I know she went and, you know, went to see a friend.

I know she did the things I told her not to, or she didn't do the housework well enough.

And that's all a personal sign of disrespect to me.

And it just builds and builds and builds until there's an attack.

And then there's, you know, wake up, we're going to talk about this.

And suddenly it's like, like, we're going to talk about this for the next two or three hours.

I don't care if you are tired tomorrow.

And then it's like, oh, now you can't go to work.

Well, that fits my ends as well, because I actually prefer, you know, often not to be engaging in public.

Anyway, so I just think that this type of humiliated fury, it shows up so often and distorts the frame.

And then when those men are in contact with service professionals, whether they be therapists or police, police whatever their humiliated fury and their sense of victimhood is is very persuasive because they really believe it and one um there's one memorable thing i always talk about when i'm doing education to try to just like shorthand this approach and that is from this american cop who now investigates other cops who use domestic violence which is a whole nother subject um and he says you know i've never been convinced by a bank robber to arrest the clerk and yet that That happens all the time

in domestic violence.

Victims are misidentified as the perpetrator because the perpetrator stands there at the door and says, she's like hysterically crying, she could be bleeding, and she's like, it was her.

Oh, my God, yeah. She did this to me.

And sometimes it's strategic and instrumental, as I've said, from those sorts of cold and calculating guys, and then other times they really believe it.

Wowee. that's a really hard um conversation to kind of tie a bow in at the end because it feels like it just feels like well now what i would say is i feel having listened to you i feel very happy that you're well two things about your brain first of all that's healthy but also that your brain is working on this because um yeah i just it is a it just feels like the biggest social problem in Australia and it has obviously been for quite some time and I truly hope that people who find themselves in a situation as a victim or perpetrator find something in this that helps but also for all of us who as you

said before Ryan and people who are not directly affected by this that they find something in this that will I think the education is the the best place to start.

So thank you for educating us today, Jess.

It feels like a real privilege to sit down with yet another future Australian of the year.

So thank you. No, thank you.

And the last thing I'd say about that is that it's not even like when I wrote the book originally, it was really important that people didn't feel like they just had to eat their vegetables, right?

I did actually start a little bit like eat your fucking broccoli.

I I have to like look at all this horror.

You should look at it too.

But actually I changed from that perspective to say like, hey, this is fascinating.

Like this is not just about domestic violence.

This is about how we negotiate love.

It's how we negotiate power.

This is the working title of the book was The Story of Us.

And it wasn't because we're all being abused.

It's because all of us exist on a spectrum where we navigate these issues and we navigate power in our relationships And we know that even in regular relationships that are not classified as abusive, we're negotiating this every day.

So getting better at understanding where all of this comes from is just, I think, the work of knowing ourselves.

And I think the more we know, like anything, the easier it is to sort of talk about it without feeling like you're going to step on a landmine.

And that's probably the taboo nature of why, particularly men, because obviously women, it sounds like I'm sure women talk talk about it all the time but men don't talk about it because it's like it's like scary and you don't know enough and like you don't want to expose yourself or humiliate yourself or whatever and i think the more we know like anything like i said it's just like it just makes it easier to talk about it or hear someone talk about it know what to say back when if someone ever says anything to you 100 thanks jess thank you enjoyed this week's episode but want to a little more

then you might want to know that we have a brand new show called a little more imperfects over on patreon for a little bit of money you'll get access to bonus episodes with the three of us every fortnight early access to live events plus other things that we haven't thought of yet but when we do think of them you'll get them visit patreon .com forward slash the imperfects the imperfects is hosted and produced by hugh van kylenberg ryan shelton and josh van and kyle andberg our executive producer is bridget northeast producer bella northeast this episode is edited by george martin the imperfects

is not a licensed mental health service and is not a substitute for professional mental health advice treatment or assessment the advice given in this episode is generally nature but if you're struggling please see a healthcare professional or call lifeline on 13 11 14

[Unveiling Coercive Control: A Deep Dive into Domestic Violence and Human Behavior]-[Jess Hill - A 'love' of Control]

📋 Summary

The Unseen Epidemic: Understanding Coercive Control

The Myth of Total Control

The Analogy of POW Camps

The Systemic Trap

Breaking the Cycle: Accountability and Healing

Conclusion: Navigating Power and Love

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript