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(3.5 stars)
I picked up this book because I have an interest in family law matters. Written by Professor Anne Buist, This I Would Kill For, is written from the perspective of Natalie King, a forensic psychiatrist who is called upon as an expert witness in the Children's Court. King has her own issues, a pregnancy, two possible fathers, and ongoing mental health challenges that she needs to manage as well as a demanding job. The book repeats many of the common myths of "hard-done-by dads" and "false claims made by women in order to get custody and maintenance" that persist despite evidence to the contrary (women are no more likely to make false claims about child abuse, than they are to make false allegations in relation to other sorts of crime). In places the repetition of these ideas - that "the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was giving every woman with a grievance a method to get what they wanted: an intervention order, more maintenance, payback for infidelity" started to shit me a bit.

The story centres around a former couple, Malik and Jenna, who are engaged in a custody dispute. Their daughter, Chelsea, is showing signs of having experienced child sexual abuse, and it is Natalie's job to uncover whether it safe for her to have shared parental custody. New to this sort of case, Natalie struggles with the responsibility: "Even if there wasn't any evidence of abuse, surely it would be better to just lean towards safety?" Turns out the law isn't a truth-finding exercise, it's "about balance of risk and probability."

The book has some interesting things to say about the lifelong impacts of childhood trauma and the chemical changes in makes in the brain: "Kind of a psychic scar with a physical basis." It's also nice to have a female protagonist who is living with mental health challenges as a sideline, rather than the book being about those challenges. There's also something to be said for a psychiatrist who has actually experienced mental health stigma: "Psychiatrists knew the cost of stigma—yet here she was feeling its full force inflicted on her. The label, her past indiscretions, would always dog her. This was what her patients had to deal with all the time."

There's also an interesting media commentary sideline, where Professor Buist gives us a peek at the impact of media commentary on expert witnesses, and the resulting Twitter abuse it can generate. It left me wondering how these things impact expert witnesses from giving unpopular testimony they might be critiqued for in the first place. While I didn't fall in love with this book, or the character, I can see myself delving backwards because of the author's real life experience making its way into fictional Australian books.