YouSaid · the spoken record

Jess Hill

lines on the record: 33
first: 2020-09-01
most recent: 2020-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Bed themselves in the neighborhoods, and they are a one stop shop, they have financial counselling, legal counselling, they have carers there for children, they have the police who are mostly, if not exclusively female, and they basically have all this in one spot so that a woman can come and tell her story, have her children cared for while she's interviewed, and not have to tell it multiple times, but also where she can work with police as to what the best course of action is, that might be that she wants to lay charges. It might be that actually she just wants to get them to go and talk to him so that he knows that he's being watched, that he's visible, or it might be that she wants them to go and remove him from the house. And I think what's really evident in these police stations for women is the results that they've had, and in the neighborhoods where they're present, I think this was a study done in Brazil.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Women's police stations or police stations for women that are particularly prevalent across Latin America. And what they are is essentially they are police in name and they have all the investigative powers of police, but they don't report to the Minister of Police, they have no responsibility for protection of the state or of property or all the things that police generally speaking are trained to do. Their total focus is on protection, not on responding and not just on enforcement. So they want to get to women in the early stages of the relationship, at the times when women are starting to go there, there is something wrong here and I can't put my finger on it, but I want to talk to somebody about why I feel unsafe. And so essentially what they do is they establish themselves in brightly colored houses within neighborhoods.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of behaviors are now, as an aggregate, they are a crime, whereas five years ago they weren't. So what do we do to get these police officers to take this seriously? And I kind of have come to a bit of a conclusion in the book, and I say this trepidatiously because I don't want to totally write off police as they are right now, but I think that we've come to a point where you have around twenty percent or so victims who've experienced abuse right now have ever reported to police. So there's a serious distrust. You have the predominant, the majority of serving police officers are male, whereas the majority of victims of domestic abuse are female. So you have a, there's a massive disconnect there. And the best solution I've seen to this that doesn't entirely discard the model of policing, but revolutionizes it, is the model of”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I think that, you know, experts across the UK and lawyers who work on behalf of victims say that the response is still incredibly inconsistent, you know, and what I hear from victim survivors all over the world is that you can get one response from a police officer in a station one day and then the front desk officer changes the next day and you get a completely different response. And there's a type of inconsistency and unreliability that is absolutely endangering the lives of women and children. And when I was looking at the system of policing and what do we do to reform it, what do we do to try to persuade reluctant police to take this seriously and to investigate it as the crime that it is, especially in the UK now that you've criminalized coercive control, that those systems”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hetty Johnston, who says the family law courts, in her opinion, are the most dangerous institution for children in Australia, and I have to say when I look out across the world, the systems in the UK, Australia, the US are remarkably similar, and what's alarming is that across the UK we've started to see more and more cases where children are removed particularly from their mothers when abuse allegations have been disbelieved, and that's just an alarming development.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Routinely diminished and disbelieved within the family law system because they're inconvenient, because they get in the way of contact with both parents, these mothers can have their children taken away from them, so they may have their contact entirely removed, and in Australia and the US that contact may be removed between the children and their primary caregiver for months at a time, and the children handed over to someone that they may have said to the assessors for the court that they are terrified of, and the court has made the decision to do that so as to reestablish a connection with a parent that they deem to be unfairly being unfairly punished because they've minimized or dismissed the allegations of abuse. So I mean this is just such a dangerous system, and I think there's a child advocate here in Australia.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, there just needs to be enormous changes in the ideology of the family law courts for starters. I mean, in terms That there is this belief that has taken hold, this pro contact culture, which has twisted the role of the family law courts into not making sure that children are protected and us safe and are cared for, but it is that the primary concern of those family law courts is to facilitate contact with both parents. Only if the protective parent or the parent who has been abused attempts to go for no contact with the other parent, they can sometimes be punished in the sense that the family law court sees them getting in the way of what the courts have to do. And so I know in Australia and I've seen this happen in the UK as well in the US too that mothers who make abuse allegations which are then”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“is so gigantic that I am astonished when women do leave because what they are doing is they are stepping into an unknown and so many women will just decide it is better the devil I know than the devil I don't, and the devil that they don't know is not just the system but it's also the abusive partner who is no longer in their eyesight, who is no longer you know connected to them in what can feel like an almost psychic way, an almost umbilical way where they can tell by the sound of his footstep, by the shift in a tone of voice how dangerous he is from moment to moment when he's out of sight They can't tell how dangerous he is and they don't know what they need to be doing in order to make themselves and or their children safe. So the barriers to leaving are just gigantic”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To so many women when they do leave, so let's say they try to go through the legal system. Let's say their abuser decides to go for custody and takes them through the family law courts, and suddenly they are in a system which says that even an abusive father is good enough, and you must facilitate contact with that person, a person who may have raped you, who may have threatened your life, who may have threatened the life of your children, suddenly deserves access to those children, those same children who probably child protection services may have told you you need to keep away from that person, otherwise we will remove them from you. You know, so I just think that what women are up against, and I don't just mean women, I mean anyone who is leaving an abusive relationship, but particularly women.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of British survivors who were surveyed recently They actually have no access to money, and it was about fifty two percent of British women survivors said they actually could not afford to leave their abuser because they had no money of their own. So imagine just in a regular situation thinking about leaving your partner when you have no money and then add a system of coercive control where that person has been degraded, where they have been threatened, where they believe that their partner, for good reasons, knows everything they are doing at all times and is always one step ahead of them. You know, when they feel like they are just trying to survive day to day, minute to minute where they feel like they've lost a sense of who they are. Imagine how difficult it is for someone like that to leave and then pile on what happens.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, and I think that we know that, and sometimes women who are experiencing domestic abuse know that. But interestingly, there was a survey done a few years ago in Australia, and I'm sure that these survey results would transpose across various countries, is that the number one reason women were afraid to leave was their fear of destitution, and that was way above their fear of physical violence. And I think that, you know, often when women are looking at leaving especially someone they're married to or someone they have children with, I mean think about how much thought goes into that for us just you know in regular relationships where there is no massive power and balance and it is such a massive thing to do to leave your partner now imagine if you are like about ninety five percent of women who are abused imagine if you are being financially abused and like about half”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it just snapped in me this sudden reversal, and from that moment I was obsessed with this topic because I think the reason why originally I felt a bit bored by the idea of writing about this, like what was I going to write about this guy that just comes home and, you know, bit drunk or something beats up his wife? You know, I was really naive about it. But suddenly when it flipped like that, and when my attention turned to the perpetrator, and when the question that was suddenly glaringly in front of me was why on earth does he do it? And that was just I felt that was years of research to even get a sense of it, to even get a glimmer of it, and actually I still find it when I hear individual cases I still can feel absolutely just mind boggled by why it is that these men”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Observation, and I said, you know, you must be so frustrated when somebody calls again, and they seem like they're ready to leave, and then they go back to him. And this phone counsellor looked at me with this pointed stare and just said No, I'm frustrated that he promised to stop abusing her, but he chose to abuse her again.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, that was one of the first early learnings I had when I was researching domestic abuse when I started way back in twenty fourteen, and I think that, you know, when I came to this subject I was commissioned actually by an editor here in Australia, and I didn't have any experience with domestic abuse personally, I didn't have any experience writing about anything really related. And I think when I was I had all my all of my attention was really on the women and the women, what choices do the women make? What choices don't they make? Why do they stay? Why don't they leave? Why do they go back? And I was at this phone counselling centre, which is like a family violence helpline. And I was sitting there with the phone counsellors and they get calls every two or three minutes. It's extremely busy. And there was just this brief lull in calls and so I ventured this opportunity.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's not when I say a mistake I don't mean that it is a failing on their part, but it is something that often does not work. She tried to fix him. Without him really putting any effort into him fixing himself.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No sign at all of any personal problems, of any jealousy or paranoia and just in a manner of days turns. And I think Sarah's story is really instructive when people try to sort of pin an abusive situation on the victim as if it's a product of their bad choices or their bad luck. You know, Sarah knew what domestic abuse looked like and so she when her partner Carl started acting like this, she told everyone, she told his family, she told her own family, she told doctors, she had him saying a psychologist, you know, she was totally open about it, but she made the one fundamental mistake which so many women make it's a natural mistake because our systems of attachment are such that we want to do this for our partners”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Announced that she was pregnant, that her partner just turned on a dime and became one of the most intense coercive controllers I've ever heard. It was he went from being totally supportive of gender equality and her independence as a professional woman to policing the minutia of her life, like, you know, saying what time the blinds had to be drawn, trying to forbid her from working, and then when their baby was born and their baby daughter was born with breathing problems, he would refuse to believe that she had breathing problems and so he would turn off her breathing monitor, he cancelled her health insurance, he would even tip express breast milk down the drain so that he could control how much milk his daughter was getting. So, you know, here's a guy who looks really congenial no.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and wants to know where you are all the time and doesn't seem to be able to live without you until that becomes a trap and a cage. So those there are signs sometimes in relationships early on and you hear women say sometimes I had a feeling I had this instinct that something was not quite right but I didn't listen to it because I really wanted to believe in this relationship and you know women like that who have had those relationships and been subjected to this kind of abuse will become much more adept at picking that kind of personality early on. But so often as you say, you know there were so many stories in the book and so many women I spoke to whose men would absolutely turn on a dial and one woman Sarah she was a nurse at a trauma hospital and basically it wasn't until she”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think, you know, it's kind of like on this spectrum. So, in some relationships, you have signs that, you know, I think Laura Richards puts this really well. She is the founder of Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service. She puts this really well in the sense that she says that a lot of the first signs of coercive control look like caretaking behavior. So they might be something as simple as, you know, you don't need to drive tonight, I'll drive, because you're tired, and then it might be every night you don't drive, and then it might be you never drive, and then it might be that you don't renew your license, you know, and then you don't you aren't able to drive a car, and the only way you can get around is with your partner. So it's these subtle, gradual things that at first may seem like chivalry. It might seem chivalrous that and really gorgeous that your partner wants to spend every moment with you.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, in the most savvy, you know, in the hands of the most savvy captors, the physical violence was minor or barely present because actually it's what would alert the They had their perception was monopolized, and so I'll explain just in a minute what that means for domestic abuse victims. They were induced into debility and exhaustion, their captors enforced trivial demands, they demonstrated omnipotence, they alternated punishments with rewards, they made threats against them but also against their families back in the United States, and they degraded them. And that is the basic chart of coercion that became as Amnesty International said in the seventies these are the internationally recognized form of torture and essentially it's used by anyone who trades in a form of captivity, whether that be traffickers, pimps, religious cult leaders, political prisoner takers, and as we found out once the women and children started fleeing to refuges”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course did not have excellent results. But Albert Biederman, when all of that hysteria was going around, he just thought this sounds a lot like propaganda. And has anybody even thought to speak to these men and ask them what they went through? And so he did. He went and interviewed these returned POWs, and they described again and again the same techniques had been used against them, often in isolation, so they hadn't got together and talked about it, and what he boiled it down to was three effects, the three major effects of this pattern that they were subjected to was dependency, debility, and dread, and he isolated eight techniques by which that was achieved, and interestingly, physical violence was not on the list of techniques, and the reason was not because there was a total absence of physical violence, in fact some of the violence these POWs were subjected to was extremely.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were making false confessions. They were informing on fellow prisoners. They were giving away information that they had been explicitly trained to keep confidential. And when they were released, there were actually a few of them that defected to communist China. So back in America when the war was over, there was just this hysteria about what the soldiers had done, and everyone to the highest levels of the CIA had concluded that the Soviets had some magic brainwashing machine and that there was actually some sort of scientific trick that they'd come upon in which they could basically remove a man's memories and thoughts and install all new ones. And so, you know, the Americans, as they do, went into the lab and started trying to do their own magic brainwashing machine.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's really interesting and also I think quite important, especially for people who've been victimized by a coercive controller, to understand where our modern understanding of this comes from. And actually, though the term was coined in the seventies by feminist psychologists, our understanding of how coercive control is constructed comes from the nineteen fifties, and it came from a US Air Force sociologist Albert Biderman, and the reason why he chartered how coercive control works is that during the Korean War US Air Force and US soldiers were taken prisoner by the Communist Chinese, they were taken up to North Korea, put into camps, and over time it became clear that these soldiers were acting in ways that no one had ever seen before in prisoners of war.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the architecture of coercive control, so the behaviours or techniques that a perpetrator will use are the same, they are repeated over and over again. It's what actually, you know, Rob Senassy referred to as the perpetrator's handbook, that for all the guys that he's spoken to, after he'd perpetrated it himself, it just started to feel like to him like they'd all studied the same book. And so even though the behaviors within coercive control, the ways in which it's expressed are different for each relationship, the basic architecture is the same and it repeats whether the perpetrator is strategic and intends to control and dominate or is doing it almost unconsciously.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say that within the domestic abuse sector it's widely recognised because you know since the seventies the building you know mountain of testimonies from women and children have described the same behaviours over and over again and it was back in the 70s that a group of feminist psychologists actually coined the term coercive control so it's been around for a really long time and but I think that outside of the sector and unfortunately you know prior to the laws coming in across the UK and Scotland I'd say a lot of police and magistrates probably would not have either heard the term or been aware of it I'd say across the world I certainly find in Australia that when I started talking about this when the book was released last year there was a lot of kind of blank faces when I brought up the term coercive control and what really shocked people I think was finding out”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and you know, we don't call it child violence, we call it child violence. But I just felt this change was absolutely necessary, and so my publishers went ahead and did it, and I've not regretted it for a second.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the most dangerous relationships is the level of control creeps up. It's why we use the term coercive control because often it's not outright domination, it's coercion, it's putting the woman in a position where she feels like she has to change her behavior, modulate her behavior, walk on eggshells, etc until the woman can't forgets what it is that she wants or what it is that is actually happening to her because she's so focused inwards on what can I do to change my behaviour so that I can stop him from acting this way or what can I do to help fix him because he seems like such a broken man and a lot of women like Deb Senassi really believe that it's them who are the strong ones in the relationship and that they're actually doing all they can to try to fix their partner and so it becomes the whole system of abuse can become invisible.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rob, why I wanted to put that in the first chapter is that their relationship was absolutely flat out domestic abuse, and Rob was told that by a psychologist he went to sea when he went to get treatment for depression and for feelings of suicidality. But there was no physical violence, and really the sorts of things that were happening were reasonably subtle. Deb was being coerced into compliance with Rob's needs. She was being isolated from friends and supportive connections and family. She was being very subtly degraded, so just jokes, demeaning comments, things that Rob would sort of just try to pass off as insignificant and then would make her feel even more humiliated for reacting to them. And I think this is what you see so often in domestic abuse and in really”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ten years out of the abusive pattern that Rob had been perpetuating in the relationship. But even as Rob was telling his side of what had sort of woken him up, Deb had to chime in a number of times and say, well, that's not quite how it happened. Actually, what was happening was this. And it was just, it was a real reminder that whenever you're talking to men who've perpetrated abuse or violence, that even if they're years free of it, that there's a narrative that gets into a primary position in their head, which is usually to position themselves, if not as the hero, but as someone who was basically like on their way to discovering it of their own accord, independent of anybody else. And actually, it's not until you speak to a partner or ex-partner that you really get a full sense of what's gone on. And I think that with them.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that, you know, a small percentage, unfortunately, at the moment with the sorts of mechanisms that we have, like men's behaviour change programs, we see a small percentage who are capable of real total reform. I'm not just talking about men who stop using violence, but men who are able to really address their overblown sense of entitlement, their need for control and domination, and their need to humiliate their partners. But Rob and Deb were a really amazing couple because I went there to their house with my partner, partly to sort of disarm them because I think sometimes going in as a journalist, people can feel a bit like a specimen under a microscope. So I went there with my partner who's also a psychotherapist, kind of with the intention of us all sitting around the table and just having a chat about marriage and relationships. And it was really interesting because they'd been about.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That when I started writing this book, I was told by a lot of different people working within the sector that there was no real way that we could reduce domestic abuse and that really the only way to come at it was to stop it before it starts by increasing gender equality and working on respectful relationships, but I think that there are a number of strategies worldwide that show that we don't have to wait for attitudes to change over generations, that we can stop this, you know, we can really or stop this or at least reduce it dramatically within years”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're looking, and so the victim is held in safe regard the whole time, but the whole point is to make the perpetrator visible and to make them not only accountable and responsible for their actions, but actually to sort of put in place a system that may support whatever it is they need to possibly change their behavior, but if they can't change their behavior over time, then the full force of the law comes against them. And I think the focus deterrence model is really interesting and has had very promising results in the few years that it's been running. But there are lots of different models around the world that are actually reducing the statistics of domestic abuse, which is the only thing that we can use to measure what is actually going on inside households. Statistics often miss a lot of what is happening, but it's the only way we can get any kind of idea.”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that given the way that we were late, you know, and the way that we are intimate with each other and all of the vulnerabilities and, you know, sort of extreme emotions that can come with that, that it's going to be very difficult to just extinguish domestic abuse altogether. But I don't think that it's inevitable that we should have it at anywhere near the levels that we have it now, and nor is it inevitable that it should continue to go as unchecked as it is now. And, you know, that's why we talk about sort of in the book around things like focus deterrence, models where you're actually seeing the perpetrator become the focus of not only law enforcement, but community service agencies and the domestic violence sector. And when I say the focus, what I mean is, obviously the victim's safety is the number one is the lens through which”
2020-09-01 · Intelligence Squared · Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, with Jess Hill and Ros Urwin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source