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Following hot on the heels of See What You Made Me Do, Journalist Jess Hill returns to SBS with Asking For It, reigniting a national conversation about the epidemic of sexual violence impacting millions of Australians.
Premiering on Thursday 20 April at 8.30pm, SBS’s new documentary series Asking for It explores the sexual revolution we’re all living through: one that’s taking us from the ‘sexual liberation’ of the 1960s and ‘70s to the era of “enthusiastic consent”.
Over three episodes, Jess joins advocates who are forcefully driving change in Australia and learns why they are insisting on quality consent education, embedded across our national curriculum, from kindergarten onwards.
Jess also meets the prominent victim survivors spearheading Australia’s consent revolution including Saxon Mullins, Grace Tame, Noelle Martin and Adele (delsi) Moleta who shed light on their experiences navigating the legal system, fighting for law reform and dealing with trauma.
Throughout the series Jess interviews a range of experts, community groups and consent educators from across Australia and beyond our shores: from the incredible work being done to educate male youth by sex and consent educator Richie Hardcore, to Reset Australia, leading the charge in tackling emerging digital threats.
Jess experiences the joy of a consent friendly LGBTQIA+ dance party and reveals the pioneering work in South Africa that’s testing bespoke care centres and courts to create a cocoon of care and justice for victim survivors.
SBS Head of Unscripted Joseph Maxwell said: “See What You Made Me Do was one of SBS’s most successful factual programs in 2021 and we’re proud to partner again with Jess Hill and the team at Northern Pictures. The series exemplifies SBS’s role in supporting groundbreaking documentaries that tackle the big issues of our time.”
From rape culture to consent culture: combatting sexual violence
From schools to universities, aged care and in institutions, this series asks: how can we change our rape culture into a consent culture?
According to ABS statistics, around 85 sexual assaults in Australia are reported on average. This number is likely to be a fraction of the total number that occur – with an estimated 90 percent of sexual assaults going unreported.
“The last sexual revolution liberated us from abstinence culture – thankfully – but it turns out that true sexual freedom is still only for some. As #MeToo has shown, ‘sexual freedom’ can be expressed at a great cost to those who’ve had sex they didn’t want,” said Jess Hill, who also acts as consultant producer for the series.
“The consent revolution is the next evolutionary step towards a truly liberated sexuality where everyone involved can expect to feel pleasure. I hope this series really gets people thinking about their own life experiences, and pumps new energy into the national movement to end rape culture,” Hill said.
Meanwhile, Director Tosca Looby said they went to great lengths to understand the journey that victims of sexual violence go through and the efforts being made to combat this problem.
“There’s nothing simple about consent – but we’ve worked hard to take the audience on a carefully crafted journey through the wilds of this issue that’s so fundamental and so misunderstood. We travel with survivors, all the way through our justice system and out the other side – deeply disturbed by what we find,” Looby said.
“We meet the best educators in the consent game – the people determined to get it right. And the audience, from teenage boys to the elderly, who want to speak openly and frankly about sex, in pursuit of healthy, consent-rich relationships,” Looby said.
