Spotlight on domestic violence - ‘SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO'

JOURNALIST JESS HILL DELVES DEEP INTO THE CRISIS THAT’S SWEEPING AUSTRALIA IN HER POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY

- Sara Tapia

Every week in Australia, one woman is killed by her former or current partner. And while this statistic is shocking, it’s one heard so many times in relation to domestic and family violence that it’s hard not to wonder whether we’ve become desensitised to the obvious crisis that is happening in our own backyard. “I don’t think we often stop to think about just how many people that is,” investigative journalist Jess Hill, who has reported exclusively on the subject for the past seven years, tells WHO. “The fact that we say one in four women are subjected to [domestic abuse] since the age of 16, you’re talking about 2.3 million women alive today … 2.3 million. And that’s not even counting the women who grew up with it, whose parent or parents perpetrated it.”

The numbers are scary. And made even more alarming when you take into account that most Australians who experience domestic abuse will never report it and their abusers will never be called to account. In her upcoming documentary series See What You Made Me Do, inspired by her award-winning book of the same name, Hill shines a light on the homes where abuse is destroying lives.