Journalist’s ‘incredibly powerful’ work the result of four years of research into domestic abuse, with lens turned firmly on perpetrators

“Domestic abuse and coercive control steals people’s language away from them,” says Jess Hill. She has spent the past six years of her life trying to give it back.

Hill has won two Walkleys, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards for her reporting on domestic violence. Now, she can add the Stella prize to that list.

The journalist’s 2019 book, See What You Made Me Do, was announced the winner of the $50,000 prize for Australian women’s writing on Tuesday night. The book is the product of a four-year investigation into domestic abuse with the lens turned firmly on perpetrators. In it Hill asks: why do abusive men make the choices they do, and what systems of power enable them?

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It’s a book that Louise Swinn, chair of the judging panel, called an “incredibly powerful” work that “meticulously dismantle[s] all of the lazy old lies we associate with domestic abuse”.

It is an immense project, but Hill’s objectives for the book were initially much more tightly focused.

“I wanted people to understand what victim-survivors had been through and why they’d made the choices that they’d made,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I especially wanted people to understand what many victim-survivors go through in the family law system. That was my initial frame: I want to get a visceral feeling across to regular people about what it feels and looks like to go through domestic abuse.”

Not long into that process, Hill realised she needed to turn the spotlight on to the perpetrators instead. Why did these men choose to act this way? That reorientation threw up all kinds of complications.

“That was just such a deep rabbit hole. Personally, it was very difficult to contain,” she says. “I was actually having to excavate so many things that I believed – so many biases and stereotypes – but also really having to contend with a lot of anger about what these guys do.”

Swinn said See What You Made Me Do “does much more than draw attention to this crisis – it offers solutions for reform”.

“The statistics are utterly horrifying, and Hill’s extraordinary call to action cannot be ignored.”

Alongside Hill in the shortlist for the Stella were 2016 winner Charlotte Wood for her novel The Weekend; Tara June Winch’s novel The Yield; There Was Still Love by Favel Parrett; Caro Llewellyn’s memoir Diving Into Glass; and Josephine Rowe’s collection of short stories, Here Until August.

While the main prize of $50,000 is generous, the other authors in the running will not come away empty-handed. Each shortlisted author receives $2,000 and a three-week writing retreat in Point Addis on the Victorian coast, in addition to the $1,000 they received for being longlisted.

Hill says the proceeds from winning the Stella will go some way towards recouping what she invested in the writing of her book, especially after the project snowballed.

“I thought the book would only take six months to write. That’s all we could afford,” she says. “And [by then] the book was just not anywhere close to what I wanted it to be. We thought, well, we just have to see this out until it’s finished. And that cost us so much.”

Foremost in Hill’s mind while writing the book were the victim-survivors she had met, whose stories she told, and who she became very close to during the process of writing about their lives. She says she hopes the book’s Stella success will help it reach a wider audience.

“If more people can understand this, we’re going to have a better functioning society. It’s just not good enough to me that there are millions of people who are alive right now who have lived through domestic abuse, who are not understood by the rest of Australia,” she says.

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“Even if it just went out to people who’ve lived through this type of abuse, you’re talking about 2 million women who’ve lived through intimate-partner violence, millions of grown-up children. So the numbers on that scale are enormous. But I also want this to talk to every psychiatrist, every police officer, every psychologist, every judge.”

The 2020 Stella awards ceremony was livestreamed on the Guardian and featured an address from former prime minister Julia Gillard. It was a virtual event thanks to emergency social distancing measures due to the coronavirus pandemic.

In the wake of calls from victims’ advocacy groups to better support domestic violence services during the Covid-19 crisis, Hill says she believes we need to be “more creative” in how we get women in contact with services.

She mentions by way of example a scheme in France in which women could use a code word at a pharmacy that would trigger a response from domestic violence services. “There’s no one solution that would make it safe for women to get in contact with services.”

Leaving an abusive relationship may seem extra daunting in the midst of a global crisis, she says. But “it’s very important to know refuges are open, and they are safe”.