Journalist Jess Hill will return to SBS this week with three-part docuseries Asking For It, nearly two years after the premiere of her previous collaboration with Northern Pictures, See What You Made Me Do.
According to the director of both projects, Tosca Looby, there were two key changes this time around that shaped production – freedom from COVID restrictions and an absence of source material.
Unlike See What You What You Made Me Do, in which Hill expanded on her 2019 book of the same name to examine the fine lines between love, abuse, and power to better understand domestic violence, Asking For It stands on its own as an exploration of the sexual revolution that’s taking us from the ‘sexual liberation’ of the 1960s and ‘70s to the era of ‘enthusiastic consent’.
Looby, who also produces the series, said while the production process was easier in the sense they were allowed to travel and did not need to deploy remote crews as they had in 2021, the subject matter showed itself to be “quite different” in multiple ways.
“You think, ‘Okay, we’re in the same grim territory’, but we actually managed to have a bit of a laugh in the third episode, which you certainly never can with domestic abuse,” she said,
“But because this was a broader subject matter, we did manage to get a bit more lighthearted and a bit more solutions focused without getting quite as dark – not to say that this doesn’t get dark, but it felt like a very different series.
“The other major difference, too, was that Jess Hill had written the See What You Made Me Do book, which gave us a framework, whereas this time, we didn’t have a framework and we discovered consent is a really difficult subject once we got started. You realise the word ‘consent’ is masking a whole lot of other things.”
In Asking for It, Hill joins advocates who are attempting to drive change in Australia in regard to quality consent education and meets prominent victim survivors including Saxon Mullins, Grace Tame, Noelle Martin, and Adele (delsi) Moleta, each of whom shed light on their experiences navigating the legal system, fighting for law reform and dealing with trauma.
The journalist takes on the role of not only narrator and interviewer but also active participant, as she experiences a consent-friendly LGBTQIA+ dance party, examines the work being done to educate male youth by sex and consent educator Richie Hardcore, as well as that of Reset Australia, an initiative designed to tackle emerging digital threats. The series even takes audiences overseas to South Africa, where bespoke care centres are being tested, along with courts that create a cocoon of care and justice for victim-survivors.
As with See What You Made Me Do, Looby said showing a duty of care to the subjects was a top priority.
“What we’ve discovered is unless you make people feel really safe in working with you, they’re not going to disclose anything because they’re already traumatised and wounded by processes and people,” she said.
“They might have had to go to the police, who have told them that there’s nothing really there worth prosecuting, or they’ve gone to court and it’s been a really traumatic experience.
“Even someone like Grace Tame says all the time that the media just turned her story into trauma porn.”
Asking For It was shot across 2022, having been developed for three months prior, with Hill a consulting producer, and Northern Pictures head of factual Karina Holden executive producing.
Looby worked with long-time collaborator Rachel Grierson-Johns on the editing process, which she identified as one of the most challenging aspects of the production.
“In theory, the edit was eight weeks per episode but it ended up being a bit longer than that because of how fiddly it was,” she said.
“We’re a team that has done a lot of work together, especially the editor and I, and it was really interesting because I’d go out and film stuff that I thought was really powerful, and then she would get in the edit and say, ‘Eh, it’s okay’, and there would be other times when it was the reverse of that.
“That’s never really happened to us before, and I think we come at this subject with so many preconceptions that it’s difficult to take stories at face value without bringing them into it.”
Following the premiere of Asking For It on April 25, SBS current affairs program Insight will air an episode exploring the topic of consent at 8:30pm April 25, while SBS Learn will deliver teaching resources based on selected clips from the series, exploring respect, consent, and power through age-appropriate materials for school students.
The resources are being developed in partnership with the eSafety Commissioner and Body Safety Australia.
Looby said she wanted the series to act as a catalyst for further household conversations.
“I really just would like for it to make people talk about it around the dinner table,” she said.
“So far, I feel like it’s doing that and it’s certainly what it made us do.”
Asking For It premieres 8:30pm April 20 on SBS and SBS On Demand and continues weekly.