Not all abusive relationships are as violent as the ones we hear about in the news, yet they can still be devastating for those involved. Many women may be questioning if their relationship or maybe a close friend’s relationship constitutes domestic abuse. Maybe they just ‘fight passionately’ or he just really ‘loves her so much he cares about her every move’. But how can we tell if a relationship has crossed that line into coercive control or domestic violence. And as parents to boys how can we raise them into men who will not only never do this but also be the person who calls out disrespectful behaviours of their male peers.
About the guest:
Jess Hill is an investigative journalist who has been writing about domestic violence since 2014. Prior to this, she was a producer for ABC Radio, a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail, and an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. She was listed in Foreign Policy’s top 100 Women to follow on Twitter, and her reporting on domestic violence has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.
Jess authored See What You Made Me Do, a book about the phenomenon of domestic abuse and coercive control. Her book won the 2020 Stellar Prize and was adapted into SBS’s documentary series See What You Made Me Do. She has recently released a Quarterly Essay on how #MeToo has changed Australia, titled ‘The Reckoning’ and regularly conducts training and education for groups from magistrates, to high school students, and workplaces. She is an absolute wealth of knowledge on this very complex but important issue.
Listen to Jess’ podcast The Trap
Watch Rowan Baxter’s rough play video
Below is an unedited transcript of the podcast episode:
Today’s episode of Healthy Herd discusses domestic abuse. If this is triggering for you, please skip to another episode. When videos emerge of Hannah Clark’s husband, Rowan Baxter, playing with his kids, it sent shivers down my spine. Here you have this perfectly normal scene of rough play between a dad and his kids.
But watching this video filmed on the family phone, there was just something chilling about it, even if you didn’t know what was gonna happen six weeks later. Just the way he headlock his three year old and the way he kind of face slammed him into the couch. It’s got an intensity to it that just makes your hair stand on end.
You can hear Hannah’s nervous laugh in the background, a woman walking on eggshells. Too afraid to tell him to. Honey, just back off. You’re just being too rough. Back off. But what if we know someone who is in that same position as she was in that video? What if it’s us too afraid or embarrassed to say something, allowing that behavior to potentially escalate.
What if we could prevent this from happening just by. It earlier.
This is healthy her with Amelia Phillips. Not all abusive relationships are as violent as the ones we hear about in the news, yet they can still be devastating for those involved. Many women may be questioning if their relationship or maybe a close friend’s relationship constitutes. Maybe they just fight passionately or maybe he just really loves her so much.
He cares about her every move. But how can we tell if a relationship has crossed that line into coercive control or domestic violence? Jess Hill is an investigative journalist, speaker and author of, See What You Made Me Do a book about the phenomenon of domestic abuse and coercive. Her book won the 2020 Stellar Prize and was adapted into sbss documentary series.
See what you made me do, and gosh, if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you watch this series and read her book. She’s recently released a quarterly essay on how Me Too has changed Australia titled The Reckoning and Regularly Conducts Training and Education for Groups as Diverse as from magistrates to high school students and in workplaces.
She is an absolute wealth of knowledge on this very, very complex but important. Jess, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Amelia. Let’s now rewind back to 2015. Life is just dandy for you. . . Oh yes. Earth made you begin down this path of investigating domestic abuse, and I’d love to know how different the landscape is now.
Seven years on. Mm. . I had a few years earlier come back from being a Middle East correspondent. I’d been working as an investigative journalist for the ABC reporting on everything from asylum seekers to coal and energy, and I got asked by the editor of the monthly Nick Fike if I would write four and a half thousand words on domestic violence and not on a particular case or on a homicide.
Just on the whole phenomenon of it. And that was really rare. And back then, and it’s hard to imagine now because we’ve just been steeped in this reporting for the last seven years, but back then to have a whole four and a half thousand words just devoted to explaining what domestic violence was, was sort of almost unheard of.
And so, Knew and, and the reason why he asked was it was in the wake of the murder of Luke Batty and the advocacy of Rosie Batty. It was just before she became Australian of the Year. And so I knew this was a really important story to do. I had no, or I thought I had. No personal connection with this issue, and I didn’t actually know where to start.
And to be honest, and I say this quite a lot when I’m speaking about this, to just really get across to people. I’m not coming from a moral high ground when I come with this information. I was bored. By the idea, to be honest. I was like, What am I gonna write about? It’s about some guy who goes home on a Friday night, pissed as a fart, and goes and beats up his wife.
Like it was sort of that simplistic understanding of dv and it wasn’t until probably three weeks later that I started to really get a sense of like, Right, I get it now. This is not primarily about violence, This is about power and control, and I still didn’t know the term coercive control at that point.
What I realized and what got me fascinated was that I was asking all the questions about the victim’s behavior and asking virtually no questions about the perpetrator. Isn’t that interesting? Because essentially when we look at domestic violence as though it is a collection of abusive incidents or violent acts.
Yeah. The first question that comes to mind when we think of it like, Is, Well, why would anyone stay with that person if I was hit or if I was abused, I would just leave, you know? And then the next question that comes to mind is, well, if that person has stayed with that person, then there must be something wrong with them, but your perspective.
Just gets funneled down this channel, which is all about the victim. The victim, yeah. And not about the perpetrator. And so what I realized, thanks to the intervention of some very kind, but firm people who work in the sector, um, was that these questions that I was asking wasn’t that they’re wrong. They’re just questions people have, It’s just that they don’t have the right focus.
Yeah. And when I started to understand. Spectrum of coercive control and how it works. The question that came first and foremost in my mind and has been there ever since is not, why didn’t she leave, but how did she leave and why doesn’t he let her leave? So that really, I guess it led me on this path that I’ve been on ever since.
To get to the bottom of what is going on in in this country and all over the world. And also why did he do it? Like I’m curious to know, and hopefully we’ll unpack some of this today, there is often so much focus on the victim survivor, but I’m also curious to know how does a man end up in such an evil, horrible situation that he would do something like that?
And I do wanna get. And so how has the landscape changed now? I mean, you know, the people that you approach to interview or even the victim survivors or the perpetrator’s willingness to talk to you. Do you feel like the landscape has shifted more seven years on? Oh, like enormously on that front? Yeah. You know, I think in this area you see gigantic shifts in one area and like nothing happening in others.
Where the most gigantic shift has happened is in culture. We now. Victim survivors who have become known because of their abuse and thinking about people like Grace Tame Britney Higgins. I mean, because of their abuse and also because of their incredible eloquence and charisma and bravery to step forward.
Exactly. So I mean, you know, but, but the first, the thing that they are known for is the fact that they are abused and they are icons. I think it’s not just that this has come a long. 2015, but it is virtually unprecedented in the history of Western civilization. to have victim survivors be. Such powerful cultural operators.
It’s not that we have done away with the shame of being a victim survivor. Not at all. And yes, we are still putting disproportionate attention on particular victim survivors. We’re not worried about them being angry so much anymore, but we do still look for sort of like attractive. Mostly Caucasian people to represent this, right?
And that’s what the media sort of hooks onto. So it’s not like we’ve just come all the way and EV and every victim survivor is equal. But what changed, and Rosie bat was a massive part of this, as was Chanel Miller, who was otherwise known as the Stanford rape victim, whose victim impact statement went viral, that we were suddenly interested in what victim survivors had to say and we wanted to hear them tell their story.
In terms of what was important to them, rather than it bleeds, it leads type of approach. Yeah. The click baie. Yeah. Yeah. Reporters decide what’s important. Reporters say, So did he hit you? Did, Was there a rape? Was there a this, You know, and they position that at the top of the story. What started to happen is a bit of a, is a shift in understanding that actually for victim survivors that may not be the most important or the the most harmful thing that happened to them, that actually for them, The first thing they might go to might not be the abuse at all, but the response from the court or the response from police, or the response from their employer, or the fact that a false allegation from their perpetrator totally ruined their life, that the harm, We can’t just position it on a pyramid with physical and sexual violence at the top anymore.
No, the bruises might be the least painful part and the least devastating part of the whole situ. I wonder if domestic abuse cases have changed. I mean, it must be very hard to tell because on one side you would have hopefully through all of this, a lot more people reporting. But then do you know what the stats are looking like compared?
It must be hard to gauge whether they’re improving or not. This is the issue and we try to measure prevalence. Is domestic abuse getting worse? Is sexual violence getting worse? All we can measure is reporting. Anecdotally, we hear a lot, particularly just over the last year, that a lot of victim survivors are being encouraged to report because they’re inspired by prominent victim survivors who’ve come to the four over the last 12 to 18 months.
Domestic abuse is a bit different because it is so complex, the decision to report if that indeed is your decision, and it’s not always what flows from. Is obviously not just a court case and particularly when there’s children involved, you really are. Weighing up so many factors, not just, will I get a conviction?
Do I even want a conviction? Is this the path I wanna go down? But will I incite this person to more violence? How will they be with the kids? Will they take a family law case? All this sort of stuff that comes up. So, I’m not sure about what you know, the stats on whether there’s been an increase in reporting around domestic abuse.
I think what we saw though is anytime there is increased attention on this, whether it be Ros Bat, whether it be the Sarah Focus and Documentary Hitting Home, which was around 20 15, 20 16, is that you get an enormous influx of calls to the family. Violence help lines, and certainly you are seeing more women seeking help.
Whether or not they’re actually reporting to police. Yeah, okay. You know, is another story. Well, it’s interesting and I wanna really understand and kind of get down on that granular level with women that are confused, actually wanting to, or thinking of stepping forward in your book, See what you made me do you explain that if you speak to anyone who’s worked with survivors or perpetrators that they’ll tell you the same thing.
Domestic abuse almost always follows the same script, which I found really. Now remember in your book you actually said some of these case workers will say, I was literally finishing their sentences for them. I could tell you what that script is. What is the script? Yeah. Well, so the script is essentially coercive control.
It’s why coercive control is such a powerful concept because what coercive control lays out is like a, a. Of behaviors, techniques, tactics. I use those words to describe the various levels of intent that perpetrators have. Some do it very strategically, others do it kind of instinctively, and yet they seem to still replicate the same system.
And all of these things are happening at the same time. It’s not a step-by-step process. Right? Yeah. Um, except that the first step generally is to establish trust. Right? And in a lot of these relat. You know, as we’re hearing a bit more attention on things like love bombing, can you explain love bombing?
Yeah, sure. Yeah, so I mean, love bombing is essentially, it’s something that you see in relationships. You see it in cults. Sounds great. I’d love to be love bombed . Yeah, Woohoo. Let’s be, you know, bomb with flowers and rizzie dinners, Love bombing. Where does it go wrong? That’s the issue, right? Because when it’s happening it feels amazing.
And I’ve had feel like they are just in a Hollywood film and like they are totally being swept off their feet. The love bombing part of it that, you know, where it moves from being just, you know, a really. Heady, you know, amazing time is honeymoon period. Yeah. Which is normal, right? Like we, and we all wanna be up in each other’s, you know, grills for the first Yeah.
Of course. Few months or, or more. I remember that feeling. Ah, totally. So do I, You know, um, where it starts to get dangerous. Is when it’s so intense and then it is also, you know, the person is moving to get you to commit to things quite early. Like move in with me like, you know, three weeks, four weeks into the relationship, let’s get married like straight away.
I wanna have kids like straight away setting up this fantasy life. That, you know, that that ticks all of your boxes. But then when you try to, when when everything’s sort of, the dust is settling and you’re like, Okay, you know, we can’t be like this forever. I need to get back to some like, level of independence and, and my own life and start to bring these two things together.
There is a real resistance from that person. Crack start to show. Yeah. Well, it’s like, no, I don’t want you going out and seeing that person. Do you have to go out tonight? I thought tonight was our night, but it’s sort of like that’s happening all the time and it can be so subtle. But basically what you start to notice is it’s very hard to have any type of independent life with this person, and you might not notice that.
Until much later when you start to reflect. At the time it might just seem like, you know, everyone makes excuses. Like he’s had a really difficult childhood. He, it takes a lot for him to trust. So I’m just gonna make this compromise. I’m gonna make this next compromise. I’m gonna make this compromise. I’m not gonna go to dance class, I’m not gonna go to music.
I’m gonna quit the choir because it just, it’s too difficult for him and he’s my priority. Kind of start to lose. Self a little bit. Exactly. You kind of, Yeah. Okay. That feeling of losing yourself well, and you sacrifice yourself for the greater good of the relationship, believing that once that trust is established, that then you’ll be able to get back to a more normal sort of level of existence.
But the problem is that part of it is the isolation process, and sometimes it will be really explicit. Like you can’t go and see your sister. I don’t like her. I don’t want a part of our life. Or it could be, You know what? I heard your sister. Talking to your mom the other day and she was talking shit about you and just driving a wed.
Oh, wow. Between that manipulation. Exactly. So this is. You know, always the, the test is what happens when you try to establish boundaries. That’s the test as to whether this is just amazing honeymoon period that’s gonna extend to a gorgeous relationship or love bombing for the intent of getting you into a trap.
Because you’re basically saying that script is, starts with establishing trust. And then what you’re saying now is essentially overpowering. Is that the next step? Yeah, this is probably the end of the chronology , because this will then, or everything will be happening at once, but really what starts to happen, I think also through that love bombing process is isolation.
And the isolation part doesn’t need to be that you are isolat. From everyone. It can just be that they start picking off people who seem like you are really supportive connections or people who might like cotton on to something being wrong. So you’ll notice certain people just, you know, they don’t want you hanging around or that there’s, you are stunned to get these wedges driven in then.
The plot line that it basically follows just to, and this is just to list off the, the common techniques is that this isolation process will be sort of ongoing. They micromanage your behavior, which could be everything from just being on your back about every little thing. Or it could be you need to have the blinds drawn by a certain time.
I want the cans turned around the right way and the cupboards, it can be, you know, that extreme right. Intimidating and belittling you, which. Can be quite overt. It can be making jokes about your weight or it can be you’re out at some dinner and they whisper in your ear. They’re only listening to you cuz they wanna meet your dad.
They don’t really like you. You know, they’re pretending to laugh at your jokes or you know, just these like degrading comments to make you feel off base, basically making it difficult for you to access money. Or transport, which again can be very cover in the way that happens. Abusing or threatening to abuse children and or pets.
And the pets one is very common, where there’s an environment of threat established and a and a sense that if you don’t obey certain rules or certain expectations, there’ll be consequences and they’ll be leveled against the things that you love. Humiliation and degradation, monitoring their movements either through actual surveillance technology like mobile phone.
That disappear on your phone. That was what blew me away in the series when you visited one of those safe houses and the guys were out at the car with the metal detectors and they had her phone and there were all these surveillance thing on this woman’s phone. There was a bug in the car. Men go to that level.
Mm-hmm. . Absolutely. And you know the sorts of mobile phone apps that are actually, they’re marketed at parents to stalk their own kids. I remember listening to an interview with one of the promoters of one of these apps on the abc and they were talking like just quite naturally about parents basically installing this app secretly onto their kids’ phone so that they can monitor every single thing in their phone, text message.
Photos, phone numbers, contacts, they can, Yeah, I could see how that would be pretty attractive to parents. Right. I don’t have teenagers yet, but I can imagine , how useful that would be. Yeah. If you’re scared about what they, you know, that they might be getting into trouble or all that sort of thing, but literally these are stalking apps.
Like that’s, and it, Oh my gosh. Whether you’re a parent doing it to your kid or you’re a next. Partner doing it, You know, seriously don’t do it. So yeah, so that’s really very, very common. But it can also be, and I hear this from a lot of women and men who’ve been in these situations with both men, male and female perpetrators or non-binary perpetrators, they’ll get text messages.
And one woman was an Uber driver, for example, and she said she’d get a text message from her partner and she had. Message back within two minutes. Otherwise there’d be consequences. Oh my goodness. There’s that type of surveillance where you feel like you never have private space, you can never switch off.
You’ve always gotta be concerned about what you are or aren’t doing to obey these rules. Gas lighting, which is literally. Messing with someone’s perception of reality so that they start to lose their sense of trust in their own question themselves. Yeah. And feel literally like they’re going crazy and just generally creating this environment, which is confusing.
It’s contradictory. It can make victims, survivors feel angry. But it can also make them feel like there is just an atmosphere of threat. And what I think is really important to put in here is sometimes people say that the way you distinguish between whether it’s just conflict, where you, you know, go at each other, like cats and dogs, which let’s all be honest, we’ve all done in our relationships.
Yeah. But whether it’s between that or whether you’re actually a victim, optimistic violence, apparently for some people, the distinguishing factor. That you feel afraid. And I would say that that’s not the case. And some victim survivors I’ve spoken to, in fact, many could not even admit to themselves that they were afraid because to do so would be like an act of disloyalty to their partner.
And a big part of course of control is training you, like literally reforming your thought processes so that you. Totally compliant and loyal to your partner so that even in your own mind, you should not be thinking disloyal thoughts. And to be afraid is a disloyal thought because you’re positioning them as someone to be afraid of.
So one woman I interviewed, Chloe McCartel, she just set the world record for crossing the English channel for swimming it, and she used to. Furniture up against her bedroom door to stop her partner coming in. But in her mind, the way she positioned that was that she’s a strong woman who is trying to deal with someone who has very hard demons to overcome, and she’s protecting herself in the moment because she doesn’t know what he’ll do.
That’s someone who’s afraid, but who is positioning themselves as the strong person in the relat. Yeah, right. I’m the only one cuz I’m a strong person. I can handle this, I can deal with this. Yeah. Ah, that’s really interesting cuz I did read in your book and I thought, oh, that’s a really nice, clear differentiator, a line to draw.
Is there someone in your life making you afraid? And even that is a pretty profound question, but what you’re saying is, It may not be the case. You may be in a domestic abuse situation, but you have kind of almost like moved past the fear and stepped into that domain. Yeah, And you might, or you might be angry, you might just be really fucked off that he just doesn’t change and he keeps on subjecting you or subjecting the kids to stuff that feels so unfair.
The idea that you’d be a victim is so alien because it’s like, what me, a victim? No, like he’s, he’s got the problems, like he’s the weak one, not me, because we so associate victimhood with weakness when in fact if you look at by workplace the categories of work in which like they, people are the most prone to being victims of intimate partner violence and family violence.
Our healthcare. And a lot of the reason for that. So 45% of healthcare workers, female healthcare workers in Victoria have experienced family violence, which is way disproportionate compared to the community. Mm. Okay. And I think a lot of that from, you know, extensive interviews I’ve done with people, including doctors, is that they identify with being able to help people.
Yeah, I was gonna say fixer. You know, that kind of fixer mentality. I can help this person. And isn’t that part of. Coercive control as well is that the perpetrator made them play the poor me. Oh, I just love you so much, and Oh, I had a rough upbringing. When shit hits fan, they’ll then pull that card out and play that as well.
If a woman listening today recognizes some of the things you’ve mentioned, either in their relationship or in a close person’s relationship, what should they do? How do they. Unpack, Oh my goodness. You know, I’m feeling afraid or, or maybe I’m not, but there’s just this behavior that really is ticking a lot of those boxes you’ve mentioned.
Yeah. What can they do about it? So, I know this is a big step for a lot of people and, and feels really difficult, especially if it’s happening to them to take it out of that private space and the space that they may not even acknowledge in their own heads to actually talking about it with someone. But honestly, you.
If you are feeling like this is ticking a lot of boxes for you, firstly do what you can safely to maybe get across what coercive control is. Get some bearings to your partner, you mean? No, no, not. Well. Maybe if you feel like that’s accessible, but no more just to yourself to get a really good understanding of it.
Right. Okay. Really understand what it means. Okay. There’s quite a few resources out there now, but I think it’s probably safest. To do things through audio cuz you can do it sort of in the car or when you are like out on a walk or something. So I developed a podcast series with the Victorian Women’s Trust called The Trap, which I only plug here because it’s actually really helpful for people who are in coercive control relationships and where people have told, like, I’ve got messages from people saying, I’m literally like at the police station.
I’m reporting now. I only just realized having listened to your podcast, what I’m living through, you know, so I’m, I’m only saying that because there are some resources, but it’s still rather limited in terms of what, like the Australian context. So have a listen to something like the Trap or have a look at some, you know, coercive control resources.
If you feel like this is something that you can do, call one of the statewide help lines, the domestic violence help lines, because they will take you. Probably a checklist depending on which state you’re in. But they’ll listen to you and they’ll be able to feedback to you what is happening, and they’ll be able to also explain to you what are some of the next steps.
They’re not gonna report what’s happening. There’s no, you know, mandatory function that they then have to report it to police. But what you can do, and again, this can seem very confronting if you’re still in it and you haven’t even like contemplated this, it’s very important, even if you don’t plan to leave, To just develop a bit of a safety plan, which is okay if things escalate, what are you gonna do?
Like, what is your plan? Do you have all your documents in a place that you can grab quickly if that was needed? Having a safety plan does not mean, Oh, you now have to leave, or like, things may get better. You never know. That does happen, but just having all of your documents in one. Maybe having a friend or someone just aware of the situation so that you have someone you’ve already confided in who maybe has a spare bed or something like that if you need to get away.
Just having a sense of what you would do if you had to. Leave in a hurry is really important. And just have a look around like how your finances set up. What access do you have to money, uh, what would happen if there was a sudden separation? You know, whose name are the, you know, various policies in whose name’s the house in, all of that sort of thing.
You know, just start to have a look around at that.
Even asking some of those questions to your partner, I can imagine if someone’s listening and like, what would my partner’s reaction be if I said, Oh, you know that master account we have where all our savings are. How can I have access to that? You can imagine for some partners, if they are in that coercive control environment, that would be a difficult conversation to have with their partner.
Oh, a lot of people have just stopped talking about finances because they know that will trigger an outburst from their partner, so they just stopped talking about it and then they stop paying attention to it cuz it’s just like a dangerous area and that’s when it can go really bad. Frog in boiling water mentality, isn’t it?
It’s like that one little thing on its own just is not that significant. But then over time, and as those things escalate, you suddenly realize you are in a pot of boiling water and and how the hell did you get there? Yep. Now, what I loved about your book is that you focus on men as well, and. Trying to unpack why did they do it.
Now, , we’re not gonna cover that in the short time we have left, but can you just give me some top lines of what you did uncover when looking at the men? Sure. So I think it’s really important to understand that even though we try to look for patents, And like for one of a better word, types in men who perpetrate.
Every man is different. Some men are gonna fit the like combinations of different patterns. So we never wanna sort of like try to categorize people cause people are really uncategorizable. Okay. There’s no like personality type A, C, or D. Yeah. But having said that, there are some personality strands that seem to show up again and again and when research is conducted, so.
Just to give a basic overview. So if we say that there’s basically two big chunks that we can look at. So the first being an abusive person, particularly a man who is calculating and knows from the outset what they’re about to do. So these are the sort of like highness. Cystic types, even psychopathic types where like from the first date they’re sort of setting the scene and they’ve got a plan.
Yeah, they’ve got a plan. They might be pathological liars. They might be setting up a whole fantasy that has no bearing on reality, or they could just be playing the same modus opera brand they’ve done in every relationship that those guys are not necessarily very attached to that woman. Emotionally, they just really want someone they can control in that intimate way for various reasons.
Could be because they need someone in an intimate space that they can have control over. It could be that they want to extort them for money. It could be, and there’s all sorts of different reasons. So they’re really dangerous when they’re about to be left or when they’re about to be exposed. And they are also probably that the ones who are most likely to really easily groom police or you know, because they feel the safest when they’re in control.
So they can easily just sort of turn on a dime, switch the persona, do the Oscar winning performance of, I’ve got the crazy partner look at her screaming and crying and I’m perfectly composed precisely cuz they’re actually not really emotionally, you know, churned up by that. They’re really in the minority, even though a lot of people sort of seem to think of them as like the majority, that’s just the minority.
The other type or the other kind of pattern we see is. Really paranoid, insecure, codependent guys. These are the gray area people that I’d love to feel like they can be prevented. Yeah, I think you can, I think you got a much better chance with these guys. And this is the same as, um, Matt and Sarah Brown in New Zealand.
They run the group like she’s not your rehab. And they do work with men in prisons and they say like, We don’t work with the guys who are like highly narcissistic. Psychopathic, you know? Yeah. We work with the guys with trauma and the horrible thing is, is that women and men alike who are in these situations will just absolutely sacrifice themselves to try and.
People who’ve got these really traumatic backgrounds who show so much potential. Like these aren’t by and large evil people. You know what I mean? Like they are people who are loving, who have really beautiful sides to them, but they’re insecure. They’re insecure, they are paranoid. They have shame-based personalities, which is to say they have.
Deeply unacknowledged shame. So they see shame when none was intended. They will read into a very normal thing, like you just leaving something on the bench as like, you did that to offend me or because you disrespect me and you, you didn’t hear, when I say I don’t want things left on the bench anymore, and that’s a sign that you have no respect for me.
You know, and then they, in that humiliation and that like absolute conviction that they are being wrong. They will then turn around and turn that humiliation into fury. And so one of the, the really big patterns that we see in perpetrators is this type of humiliated fury. How dare you, you made me do this.
And that’s the title of the book. It’s really important to be able to, I think from a societal level, be able to tell the difference between guys who given the right sort of attention or given the right, like being able to work with them in the right way, that there’s a chance that they can be reformed.
And then there are other guys. Nothing will ever work and this really sad and horrible thing to come to grips with is sometimes there are guys who will just need to be surveilled. By the state or by whoever it is to make sure they don’t kill people like that. That is just the truth of it. There will be a selection, but to your earlier point and encouraging point, that’s the minority.
Mm. But they can cause an enormous amount of harm to a very large amount of people because they go from a relationship to a relationship and it’s just like, you know, someone like Ron back Star, I don’t know how you would’ve reached that guy. That guy needed to be monitored. That might seem, I don’t know, really harsh or like we are just sort of trading one type of violence for another and using state violence.
But to be honest, like there are horrific murders for mil suicides, homicides that are taking place and are being perpetrated by men of whom we have been warned. And who have shown every red flag and who have been utterly resistant to any attempts to get them to change. But they’ve been clever enough to evade police or to, you know, not do anything.
They don’t even need to be that clever. That’s a thing that it’s like they are totally obvious. People are reporting to police that they are afraid that this person’s gonna kill someone. And you know, the constant refrain is, oh, has he hit her? What’s the crime I can charge? , you know, instead of, Hey, we know that there’s this like eight step homicide timeline where there’s each escalating behavior shows a greater and greater likelihood that there is going to be a murder.
And look this guy tick all those boxes. We have that knowledge. There’s no excuse for that not to be applied. And I think there’s one thing which is all about, we need to find ways to make victims, survivors safe adults. And. And sometimes victim survivors don’t wanna report their perpetrators. In fact, a lot of the time they don’t most of the time.
But we also need some way to prevent those same perpetrators from moving on from that person to the next person. And that’s what we are trying to figure out. How do we do that? And is that what you are working on as well? Is that kind of your next step with what you’re investigating? Yeah. Well, and I guess that part of that was about expanding the laws to recognize coercive control so that we are not just looking for individual incidents, but we are looking for a pattern of behavior such as what Roland Baxter exhibited, so that that controlling behavior is seen as dangerous as physical violence.
And just as if not more importantly, well, what do you do once you’ve apprehended that guy? Cause you can’t just chuck him in jail and it doesn’t work. So for those men for whom reform is possible, what do we do? Do we look at, like some people are looking at restorative justice, others really don’t like that idea in intimate partner violence because of the control issue.
You know, there’s amazing ideas about justice reinvestment where you really look to intervene before the violence. Gets to that point and try to improve the lives of both victim, survivor, and perpetrator, such that this behavior won’t feel like what they need to resort to, to feel safe and secure.
There’s so many different things, early interventions. I mean, like, you know, it would take an hour just to describe them. I’m sitting here as a mom. I, I’m a mom of two boys and two girls. Lots of our listeners today have boys. What can we do to raise them and to men? Will not only never do this, but also be the person that calls out that disrespectful behavior to their peers, especially through those daredevil teenage years.
And it’s very difficult because, you know, parents are not the only ones shaping those boys. They are shaped very much by peers. They’re shaped by culture. What I think is really, really important, and this is work that’s like ongoing from the time that they’re really little through to teenagers, is building shame, resilience.
So, you know, really trying to get to that place where the fear of rejection and also really challenging notions of entitlement, entitlement to their partner’s. Time, attention, you know, really trying to get in the. Of any science that they’re sort of objectifying their partners. Cause there’s two things.
One is shame and humiliation and the feeling that their partners are subjecting them to that just by living independent lives. The second is grandiose entitlement, and that’s, I guess, a lot of things around what our watch and other agencies are doing around like, . Don’t just let your boys get away with stuff.
Even if it feels uncomfortable, hold them to account, but do it in such a way that engages them. Don’t just punish them. Yeah. Because then that is feeding that shame cycle. Exactly. Shames come up a lot today, and it’s challenging as a parent because every time we get our kids in trouble, there is an element of shame that they feel.
And so when you set it earlier, I was thinking, Oh, a lot of moms listening like, Oh, am I raising someone to feel shameful? And I’ve actually got a great episode on toxic masculinity with Hunter Johnson. Oh yeah. Yeah. And that’s a really great episode to talk about, kind of finding that balance between entitlement and shame, resilience.
But I do love this idea of teaching your kids to be resilient to shame as well. Totally. And Dan Siegel, who, who does. Work on this type of thing and on how to raise kids positive parenting, which sometimes like when you’ve got a, especially a young kid who’s like in the throes of tantrums and stuff, you’re like, Yeah, right.
Like how am I supposed to not ever model like any type of power over paradigm? I know. Yeah. But that point about instead of when they do something wrong, exiling, like sending them to their room. or making it seem like they are untenable and you can’t be around them to lean into them. Don’t lean out, lean in.
This whole thing with boys and a lot of very well meaning parents have this, and even people with very like clear understandings of gender inequality. This whole idea that you’ve gotta raise boys to be strong and so therefore you’ve gotta raise them not to be mum’s, boys. You gotta raise them to be like, you know, different to the girls.
This is what is setting them up to not be strong, but to be weak and shame based. Because when we teach boys inadvertently that those vulnerable, compassionate, soft parts of them are actually going to make things dangerous for them as they grow up like that, that’s a dangerous thing for them to be.
We’re basically teaching them. Shelve off half of their identity, the so-called like feminine traits of it, which is actually just like half of us and exile it, which means that they grow up sort of only over here in these like valued, you know, exalted masculine traits. People who are raised like that or come to believe that some of them are gonna grow up to do crazy.
They’re having to disembody themselves. So it’s hard as a parent to interrupt some of the messages, especially that boys are getting from peers about being tough and about, But it’s just a constant conversation that has to be had and just through modeling, not modeling, just power over discipline, but every time like the.
The whole word discipline is not just to punish, it’s to teach. A lot of us are getting better at understanding that each of these moments is a teachable moment. And what you don’t wanna teach is constantly that using power and control is the way that you get someone to do what you want, which is what parents in those desperate moments.
Like myself are, are modeling to our kids too often. And it seems so straightforward when you say it now, but it is something that every day as a parent we have to be reminded of, Okay, how can I turn this into a teaching moment instead of just me overpowering that kid? And we’re never gonna get it right a hundred percent of the time, but you know, even if 30% of the time we’re able to have those teaching moments and act almost like a mentor.
To your point as well, model that behavior as best as possible. Jess, such a fascinating chat today. I feel like there’s about three other episodes we could talk about, but I do encourage everyone to read your books and especially the reckoning as well, which I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy of that, but see what you made me do.
Really open my eyes and keep doing the great work that you’re. Thank you.
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