Te Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis set out earlier this year to establish a more permanent move against the scourge of sexual violence by encouraging victims and perpetrators alike to speak out. That campaign offers more hope than most, given that the key is for a community to refuse to accept such behaviour, but it too will struggle for on-going momentum. With all due respect to those who are trying to make the Far North a safer place, we are unlikely to witness similar public opprobrium until another offender is prosecuted.
Nothing is going to change until communities address the issues that lay the foundations for the suicides that are the most appalling symptom of a level of dysfunction that, despite brief moments of outrage, is allowed to continue.
We could start by refusing to accept a suicide toll that is currently not far short of double the road toll. We all get very exercised about the rate at which people die on our roads, but we barely respond to the fact that many more people take their own lives.
Last week the Chief Coroner described the suicide rate, which rose over the previous year to 564, as disappointing. Despite all that was being done, she said, the figure stubbornly remained in the mid-500 range.
The provisional road toll for 2014 was 295. The trend is a positive one - 795 people died in 1987 - but the enormous expenditure of money and effort that has been devoted to reducing the road toll has not been replicated for suicide. Perhaps reducing the rate at which we die on the road is simpler, but the fact that the suicide rate is going up rather than down should be more than disappointing.
The problem is that we expect the government to do something while our response as communities is to stage public marches stating that we care. We might get better results if we actually did something to address the causes of suicide.
In terms of our young people, who are patently amongst the most vulnerable, we need to do much better at providing the safety and security that is so often lacking. We need to address, as communities, the evils of drug and alcohol abuse, violence, and the erosion of parents' fundamental responsibility to care for and protect their kids.
There is no point in wringing our hands when a child dies if we are not going to make an honest attempt at changing their world to give them hope for a future that should be their God-given right.
We as communities need to cease tolerating standards of behaviour that chip away at the potential for many children to grow up happy and ambitious. We need to insist that children are cared for, physically, emotionally and intellectually, in such a way that suicide will have no appeal. And we need to do this ourselves. If the government and its various agencies could they would have; the reality, as the recent review of the manner in which children in state care are provided for once again revealed, is that they are doing a worse job now than ever.
Whatever the reasons for that might be, nothing will be gained by yet more reviews, reports and changes in policy. We as families, as communities, as a district and a country need to declare that we will no longer tolerate what is happening, and resolve to do something about it.
That won't be palatable to some people. An effective response will depend to a large extent upon intervention, and we don't do that very well. We believe that people have the right to raise their children as they like, but nothing is going to change until everyone understands that no one has the right to create an environment that drives children to despair.
Kelvin Davis has started the process by urging us to talk about sexual violence, to cease accepting it as a fact of life and to actively protect those who are vulnerable to it.
We need to accept his invitation, and we need to broaden its scope. Good people need to set a basic standard of behaviour and care for others that is not negotiable, and that everyone is expected to recognise.
If some people need help then they should receive it, without question. The point is that no one is going to do this for us. If we don't do it ourselves it isn't going to happen.
Last week Northland MP Winston Peters said in this newspaper that state care is not the answer. He berated the government for failing to address the core issues that he said were responsible for social breakdown, and resulted in children being placed in the care of the state. It will be a cold day in hell when any government can provide the answers he's looking for, and he was right when he said but "unless we have a serious, introspective examination and admission of failed cultural behaviour then nothing that the state can do can help. Unless we in the Maori world accept that there is an unacceptable level of parental irresponsibility that only we can fix then we will go on wasting taxpayers' money."
No bureaucracy can fix poor parenting and its awful repercussions, and Mr Peters is right to point the finger directly at parents.
We now know that 90 per cent of state wards end up on benefits. They are likely to be poorly educated, involved in crime and will become solo parents. That is the reality for the 5000-odd kids who are in state care at any given time, but there are many times that number who have not been counted.
That is a large part of the reality behind our suicide rate, not only in terms of young people but also adults who survive a perilous childhood but do not escape its repercussions.
Giving these children, and the adults they become, a real future will not be easy, and will take time, but the sooner we start the sooner we will see results. Marching to express concern is only a gesture, and we need much more than gestures.
