Jess Hill on gender, power and change

Jess Hill is a journalist, author and educator who has achieved renown for her groundbreaking writing on gendered violence. Her first book See What You Made Me Do became a bestseller and was awarded the 2020 Stella Prize, while her journalism has won two Walkley awards and an Amnesty International award.  

In 2021, Jess presented a three-part television series adaptation of her book for SBS, which became the network’s highest-rating factual program. Since then, she has written a Quarterly Essay on how #MeToo is changing Australia, made a podcast series on coercive control titled The Trap, and a three-part series on Consent, titled Asking For It.  

Jess Hill visits Ku-ring-gai Library as a part of the 16 Days of Activism campaign to discuss gender, power, and the necessary conversations we all need to have.  

About the book 

A searing investigation that challenges everything you thought you knew about domestic abuse 

Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four Australian women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with. But too often we ask the wrong question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it? 

Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators – and the systems that enable them – in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience – abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce domestic violence – not in generations to come, but today. 

Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do radically rethinks how to confront the national crisis of fear and abuse in our homes. 

About the author 

Jess Hill is an investigative journalist and the author of See What You Made Me Do and Quarterly Essay 84: The Reckoning. She has been a producer for ABC Radio and journalist for Background Briefing, and Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail. Her reporting on domestic abuse has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards. See What You Made Me Do won the 2020 Stella Prize and the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Adult Non-Fiction Book of the Year.