When is poverty at its most dangerous? It is not, as you might think, when we begin to notice the frequency with which we step over rough sleepers on our way to the shops. It is not when we hear of children going to school hungry. It is not even when people begin to die from hunger, from cold or in desperation, at their own hands.

On the contrary, poverty is at its most deadly when we no longer notice, we no longer care, we no longer even question it. This is the point at which poverty ceases to be a temporary crisis, a challenge to overcome or a tragedy to be mourned, and becomes a permanent state of affairs, embedded into the very systems and structures of our society, not an obscenity, but normality. It is a grim hypothesis, but I would suggest this is a point we have already passed.

Allow me to summarise a few of the stories that have passed under the radar in the UK over the past week or so. In Nottingham, a food bank has closed its doors – not through lack of demand, but because it alleges that the city council was referring desperate and vulnerable people to its service as a first port of call, thereby allowing the council to deny residents statutory hardship payments and other services. The news came a few days after a report into food banks was published by a consortium of charities, including Child Poverty Action Group, Trussell Trust and Oxfam, which found that the number of people accessing three days’ worth of emergency provisions had risen from 128,000 in 2011-12 to 913,000 in 2013-14.

In Sheffield, academic researchers published an analysis of the impact of welfare reforms on residents in the city. Among other findings, they calculate that households with dependent children are estimated to lose £1,690 a year. Lone parents with dependent children can expect to lose an average of just over £2,000 a year. Men and women with health problems or disabilities are also losing out. Residents of the worst-hit wards are likely to lose five times as much as those of the least affected.

Meanwhile the charity Homeless Link reports that while homelessness across all ages is rising, youth homelessness in particular is soaring. Homelessness caused by financial problems due to benefit reductions has increased sixfold (from 1.7% of cases in 2013 to 10% in 2014). Over 90% of 200 charity and council homeless agencies surveyed said that benefit sanctions had affected the ability of young people to access accommodation. They found that 58% of under-25s seeking help from councils and charities with homelessness had one or more other problems such as mental illness, a learning disability or other complex social needs.

In its annual poverty monitoring report published last week, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) laid out the extent to which poverty is not just a consequence of unemployment, finding that two-thirds of people who found work in the past year had taken jobs for less than the living wage.

Last month the education and equalities minister, Nicky Morgan, wrote for the Guardian that the coalition government had reduced the gender pay gap to its narrowest ever level. The JRF report illustrated how this had happened: among the lowest-paid quarter of the population, women’s wages have reduced by 40p an hour since 2008; over the same period in the same sector, men’s wages have reduced by 70p an hour.

As far as I can tell, not one of these stories made national broadcast news; few troubled even the inside pages of the broadsheets. The media, however, are not entirely to blame. Scouring the press releases sent out by the Labour party in the past week, it is all but impossible to find mention of poverty, inequality, homelessness or hunger. Instead, there are countless volleys in the race to the bottom over immigration and benefit claims. Notwithstanding the efforts of the Green party, mainstream political debate refuses to countenance such issues as a living wage.

It seems we have drifted to being a nation of coarse indifference – or perhaps defeatism – to the bleak reality of poverty. Like the state of poverty itself, it becomes difficult to envision an alternative, a route of escape. We are not the first generation to face austerity. But we do risk becoming the first generation to declare itself indifferent to its horrors.