This week we mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. If you are a man reading this, sit still and take the blow you have spent years dodging.

In this country, a woman is murdered every four days, often by the same hands that once held her. Pause. Feel that.

Behind every statistic is a woman you will never meet: A mother telling her children to hide in the wardrobe; a teenager deleting messages while her stomach knots; a woman parked outside her own house, too afraid to walk through her own front door.

What do you call it when the safest place in a woman’s life, her home, becomes the most dangerous room she will ever enter?

A national emergency.

“Most violence against women is committed by men. That doesn’t make all men guilty. But it does make all men responsible.

Violence against women is not a “women’s issue”. It is a men’s issue. It is a moral crisis that starts in the lives of boys and ends in the graves of women.

So we must stop pretending that the problem belongs to someone else.

Ask any frontline worker, and they will tell you that our shelters are full. Police are overwhelmed. Courts are slow. And too many men who are documented dangers remain free long enough to destroy yet another family.

Most violence against women is committed by men. That doesn’t make all men guilty. But it does make all men responsible.

Violence does not begin with a fist. It starts with control and ends with respect in the habits of our daily lives and how seriously we take the dignity of women.

We need men who shut down the jokes, the slurs, the casual degradation. Who refuse to let misogyny float past as background noise. Who catch the signals, such as the tension in her voice, the withdrawal from friends, and who understand that noticing is the first act of care.

Coercive control should be criminalised in every state. Police must be able to act faster than a restraining order. Shelters must never turn a mother and child away. Justice for First Nations women must arrive before it is too late.

But laws will not fix what culture broke.

Women already carry the fear. They should not have to do the repair work.

This is the moment to show it. Not with talk, but with change. Not by lighting a building orange. But by ensuring no woman ever again has to fear the man who promised to love her.