Take one look at the news this week and it’s impossible to ignore that it’s been a bad period for women at the hands of Kiwi men.

I actually made a conscious decision to stop reading the stories out of Brisbane this week.

I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to know the awful detail. I knew enough to know a man had committed a monstrous act. That his poor ex wife and children had been murdered in about the worst way imaginable. That was enough for me. There is no extenuating circumstance or extra detail that can in anyway reduce or excuse it.

So when the Police Officer in charge of the investigation made those very ill-considered comments about the man at the centre of the murders. I agreed, he had to step down. I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt – I’m sure it was a case of simply not thinking, rather than deliberately and seriously suggesting there might have been some justifiable reason the man did what he did. It says something, don’t you think, about our collective attitudes, that even an experienced detective could casually make a comment like that. In the interests of the case, the frenzied media scrutiny, and families who are going through… well, can you imagine? It’s a good decision for the officer to step aside. 

From the horrors in Australia, we turned to the man who murdered Grace Millane. Her poor mother, looking at a computer screen and reading her pain down the line to a courtroom on the other side of the World. What an appalling thing for a family to have to endure.

Life in Prison will satisfy a lot of us,  but then consider this question from White Ribbon: One person has been locked away but are New Zealand women any safer?

In the 12 months after Grace Millane’s murder, a higher than average number of women in New Zealand die at the hands of their partner.

This is the thing. For the headlines and attention on two sensationalist cases, there are who knows how many Kiwi women whose stories we never hear. Women and children beaten or murdered by their partners. Women and children who don’t make the news.

Why don’t we care as much about those stories? Why aren’t we just as outraged for every death?

As I said just a minute ago, it’s been a bad period for women at the hands of Kiwi men.

But then…  it’s always a bad period. We’re horrified for Hannah Clarke and her children. We grieve for Grace Millane. But as a society, we don’t change.

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