Safe Home’s Aisha Dee on the tough conversations she had to have

When Aisha Dee went to the bathroom in the first few days of production on her new show, she found a sign behind the door.

Safe Home is on SBS On Demand. Picture: SBS

When she’s felt overwhelmed on set, Aisha Dee will often take refuge in the bathroom.

The Australian star of The Bold Type and Sissy told news.com.au that it’s the place she goes to “have a little cry in private” when she feels triggered.

On one of the first days of filming on her new series, Australian drama Safe Home, Dee went to the bathrooms before in the production office, and found behind each stall door was a laminated sign that read, “We’re making a show called Safe Home, this is the story we want to tell and we are trying to honour and pay tribute to the victim-survivors, if you are feeling triggered, here are some numbers you can call, there are resources”.

Safe Home follows Phoebe (Dee), a young woman who goes to work for a family violence legal centre. Phoebe is a PR person, she’s not a lawyer and the four-episode series charts her experiences in being exposed to a world that’s seemingly new to her.

While Safe Home is grounded by Phoebe’s story, it also weaves in the tales of other women going through traumatic experiences which vary from in familiarity of audiences’ perceptions of what constitutes family violence.

It’s the kind of subject matter that can be triggering, for those watching these series, and those who made it. Hence the sign in the bathroom.

Aisha Dee is the lead of Safe Home. Picture: SBS

“Seeing that sign immediately gave me a sense of safety and I felt like I was being held by our producers. That resource was available not just to the actors but also to the crew and everyone across the board. It made a really huge difference, and I’ve never really experienced that before.”

Dee felt the weight of the responsibility of the series in portraying family violence with sensitivity and care.

“You can’t do something like that and do it willy-nilly,” she said. “So, my initial reaction [to the project] was I really wanted to make sure that however we’re telling the story, that we’re respecting and honouring the real people out there, the victim-survivors that have actually gone through it.

“And I felt that from the creative team behind that. I knew we were all going towards the same goal.

“Even though I still felt a little bit scared, sometimes that sense of nervousness and fear, like butterflies in my stomach, sometimes that’s a sign that it’s the right move, the right project.”

Co-starring Mabel Li and Virginia Gay, Safe Home’s ambition is to spark conversations about an epidemic. The series makes deliberate choices in depicting different forms of abuse, from subtle signs and coercive control to overt displays of violence.

Safe Home is a four-episode Australian drama. Picture: SBS

Dee talked about how the series gave her a deeper understanding of family violence at different points – that it’s not just about the moment someone is punched but it’s about how it starts.

“It explores those moments that go unnoticed, the moments that your instincts might tell you it’s bad but we don’t give ourselves the permission to trust that instinct because we’ve seen stories that perpetuate this narrative that it’s only violence if someone’s being physically hurt.”

Creator Anna Barnes had worked in a family violence legal centre in a similar capacity to Dee’s character, and a lot of the details in the series comes from her own experiences. Dee found Barnes to be an incredible resource because of the writer’s specific knowledge.

While it’s difficult to gather data on a crisis that still largely happens behind closed doors and is often unreported, the Australian Bureau of Statistic estimates one in six women have been a victim of physical abuse from a partner and one in four have been a victim of emotional abuse from a partner.

“When you look at the statistics, it’s kind of impossible to escape because either you have experienced it or you’ve experienced it through someone that you love or care for.”

Mabel Li in Safe Home. Picture: SBS

For Dee, working on the show has given her renewed focus on the people in her life, to have conversations that she didn’t feel she could previously broach.

“Unfortunately, I have so many people in my life that I can talk to, connect with and have conversations with. [Safe Home] gave me this permission and a sense of bravery to ask questions that maybe I didn’t feel brave enough to ask before, or didn’t think to ask before because when these happens, they’re so traumatic.”

Dee said she had that Australian approach to trauma, which was to pretend it didn’t happen and make jokes about it. But now she knows she can ask the hard questions.

“It was challenging at times but the goal was always to give voice the victim-survivors who maybe haven’t had a voice, and to shine a light on the things that have in the shadows for a really long time.”

Safe Home premieres on SBS and SBS On Demand on Thursday at 8.30pm