I fear for my daughters and I feel an onerous responsibility for my son.

Sixty-three women killed by violence in this country this year.

It’s still only September.

Men who hate women so much they kill them with axes, burn them, stab them, beat them to death. They kill their children too or otherwise ruin their lives.

I want to know the story of each, and I try to find out. I don’t mean the “story” in a prurient “that’s a terrible/shocking/disturbing” story sense. I mean the set of circumstances that gives rise to Australian men doing such things. And in the end, despite the myriad personalities and the domestic circumstances involved, the family court orders and anything else, it crystallises down to one thing: entrenched gender imbalance.

Men assault, rape and kill women and their children because they think they have a right to. And that is a terrifying, overwhelming problem that should exercise all of us, but none more so than Australian blokes.

Men who murder women they know either don’t care or think they’ll get away with it. And why wouldn’t they? Society fails women and children over and over. The courts bail and grant custodial access to – give the benefit of far too many doubts to – the most evil misogynists, men covered with danger flags, so that they can inflict violence on the same woman or others. Women and children at risk aren’t protected.

Someone will always listen to the perpetrator’s “justification”, argue mitigation if instructed. A judge will always consider the arguments, such as they are.

The media, meanwhile, dwells on the victimhood of the dead women, asks again and again what more they could have done to protect themselves from murder.

I fear more than ever for the women and the girls I know

As a man watching all of this happen I feel I have one choice: to look inside myself and at all the men I know and love, and ask: am I – are they – capable of this?

It’s a reasonable question. Australian men who look and sound like all of us – regardless of colour and economic circumstance – kill the women and children closest to them.

My answer: no. I don’t think so.

But I still want to scream with frustration, sorrow, sympathy and anger for the dead and injured, that I live in a place where attitudes towards gender are so perversely skewed that one in five young people believe women are partly responsible for rape, one in six think “no” might mean “yes”, many think stalking a female partner is OK and that drunkenness can mitigate the circumstances of forced sex and assault.

But I do think that one of the many things that must now happen (beyond federal, state and territory governments spending whatever it takes to protect women and children) is this: men have to call each other out on their behaviour; name casual misogyny where they experience it; older men must mentor the younger about the dangerous wrongs of the pervasive gender inequity in Australian society and what they can do to ameliorate it; and society’s male role models – cultural, sporting, commercial, educational and, yes, political – have a duty to not only lead by example but to stamp on hatred of women and violence against them, in their respective orbits.

Easier said than done, perhaps.

For where does a bit of biffo on the footy ground end after a Saturday night session in the rooms? And who cares if nobody ever asks the WAGs what they think rather than just dwell on their gowns and figures? What harm’s really done, anyway, by a few sexist lyrics or a little desensitising screen violence? And who cares if one of the country’s highest profile shock jocks advocates tying the nation’s first female prime minister in a chaff bag and drowning her or the man who’d replace her stands next to a sign calling her a female dog?

I fear more than ever for the women and the girls I know.

For my older adult daughter who must negotiate a society and an urban landscape where there are evidently so many men who would randomly, indiscriminately harm her, just because she is a woman.

For my little girl, who has all this ahead of her – unless men take control and make sure things change.

And I feel an onerous responsibility for my son, as all men with boys now must.

Somewhere in the next week or so in Australia, chances are that a man will murder a woman he knows well and possibly his and her children.

What should we men tell our sons when they ask us: why?

Do we say the men were tied up in messy custody disputes? That they were drunk? That they just “snapped”?

No. We must tell them that our fellow men kill women because something about Australian society has conditioned them to think that they can.

And as overwhelmed and as frightened as that might make some men like me feel, we have to somehow call it out and do anything we can to change it.