This message cannot be ignored

The white ribbon campaign has never been more important.

Over the past month, issues of violence - particularly violence towards women - have been front and centre in our national consciousness.

This week I attended the White Ribbon march in Whanganui, and the renewed passion in the crowd was palpable.

We know domestic violence and sexual violence occurs, but would rather avoid facing the truth that this is not an abstract concept but our wives, daughters, mothers, aunts and sisters being hurt.

That's why the "It's not okay" white ribbon campaign is so important. It forces us to confront the fact that while there have been improvements, and things are getting better, we've still got a real problem to face.

It helps to keep the pressure on the issue.

Too often we develop a kind of "complaint fatigue", as we hear the same concern over and over and over again.

At first, we are enraged, empowered, determined to confront the wrong and put it right, but too long spent hearing about the same problem risks it just becoming part of the background noise. Yet this is a message we need to hear over and over and over again. Society seldom changes quickly.

After so many years of shutting domestic violence away, out of sight and out of mind, we can't expect to flick a switch and have everything become magically better.

We need to keep repeating that message until it becomes slowly ingrained in our cultural subconscious.

Perhaps most importantly, and most powerfully, we need time for new generations to come through, who have grown up hearing us all repeating the message that violence against women is never okay.

That is the most important change we need, because it strikes at the most insidious aspect of domestic and sexual violence.

When we keep it behind closed doors, refuse to confront it, and don't support those who do confront it, we're telling our kids that it is actually okay. We're telling our sons that it is acceptable to use violence against the women they are supposed to love. We're telling our daughters that they should expect to have violence used against them, that this is normal.

So it has been an uncomfortable issue to have front and centre in the media.

Yet confronting our inner demons, whether personal or societal, is never pleasant. Like so many of the big, difficult issues we face, there is no silver bullet, no magic button we can press, no pill we can take.

At least there is something we can all do, that will make a tangible difference - we can keep telling our sons and our daughters that it's not okay.