Sometimes the reasons we turn away from something – too difficult, too grim, too painful – are the very reasons we need to stay rooted to the spot, and watch.

From the opening seconds of the SBS three-part documentary series See What You Made Me Do, which premieres tonight, you know it’s going to be hard going. Emergency call recordings open the audio track, and a man speaks: “I’ve killed my partn … my ex-partner.”

“So you’ve killed your ex-partner?” the 000 operator asks.

“I’m pretty sure she’s dead yeah. She’s not moving at all. So I’m pretty sure she’s dead. Yeah.”

The statistics on domestic violence in Australia mean we all know, on an intellectual level, that calls like this happen with appalling frequency in Australia – but to be placed in the moment when a woman is actually becoming one of those statistics is a moment that gets you in the gut.

It’s a horrifying hook, but an effective one that drags you into the series, which is based on Jess Hill’s 2019 book of the same name. Hill is the host, taking us on the journalistic journey she mapped out in her book, which was an extraordinary work. There is power on every page. It was a meticulously researched piece of longform journalism that comprehensively covered a national crisis with a compelling combination of personal stories, expert interviews and reams of academic research. But to see it brought to life on the screen, with the raw power of people talking to camera, adds a gripping, heart-in-mouth dimension.

There’s the victim survivor Jessica Nitschke, who met her abuser on a dating app and within months had gone from a bright, confident career woman to a shell of a human lying listless in hospital, her life ruined. There’s the family of Katie Haley, killed by her abusive, controlling partner, sharing with us their story and their deep and unrelenting pain.

There are the former policemen who specialise in helping women out of dangerous situations, finding the tracking devices on their cars, the tiny cameras placed by perpetrators in their bedrooms and living rooms and, ominously, in their kids’ soft toys. There are the counsellors who meet women in secret rooms in shopping centres – the only safe place where they might not be followed – to plan escape, to show them the safety net that might save their lives.

In part two of the series, Hill deals with the question so many pose: “Why doesn’t she leave?” By now we all know the answer: leaving is the time that is most dangerous for women in abusive relationships.

But Hill says there’s a more pressing question that dogs her about the men who abuse: “Why does he do it?”

Here Hill, the empathetic investigator, reveals the yearning for understanding and context that drove the journalistic impulses in her book as well. She takes us to a men’s camp where reformed abusers try to answer this question. These are voices we don’t often hear, and while they are compelling, it’s wise that the series doesn’t spend too long with them.

Soon enough we are with the victim survivors again, this time at a support group where we learn about the children who are victims and how so often they are ordered by the family law court to spend time with their abusers. It’s heartbreaking; nothing has left Hill more shocked or disturbed than Australia’s family law system, she says.

Shocking, too, is the story of Yamatji mother Tamica Mullaley, which sits on the dangerous intersection of racism and abuse that finds Indigenous women 32 times more likely to be hospitalised for domestic abuse than non Indigenous women. Mullaley’s baby Charlie was murdered by her abusive partner – but it Mullaley who was arrested that night for allegedly being violent towards the police. She was not, as her aunt says, being a “good victim”. It’s an outrageous miscarriage of justice that stands out in a series that provokes so much outrage.

See What You Made Me Do will be available with subtitles in six languages (simplified Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Hindi, Punjabi and Korean), with audio for blind or vision-impaired viewers. It’s part of a bigger programming push from SBS for domestic and family violence awareness month; the second episode on 12 May will be followed by We Say No More, in which panellists explore how domestic abuse affects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

After the final episode on Wednesday 19 May, Hill will join another panel of experts in a one-hour special to discuss possible solutions to domestic abuse in Australia. And it is an issue, as Hill says with optimism in her series opener, that is solvable.

It’s challenging to watch this series. But the paramount challenge is the question of what do we owe these victim-survivors who are finding the strength to speak to us? And what do we owe the women at risk? What do we owe all the good people helping, trying to make them safe?

If these people have the courage to speak, we owe them the courage to watch.

If outrage follows, then good. As Hannah McGlade, an academic and lawyer who focuses on Indigenous justice says, nothing is going to change unless we are outraged, unless we say: “No more.”

• See What You Made Me Do premieres 8.30pm on Wednesday 5 May on SBS