Today’s commemoration of International Women’s Day will bring with it the usual sets of statistics on gender employment and wage gaps, gaps between the sexes in education, the boardroom and in politics – all undoubtedly statistics worthy of follow up investigation, analysis and policy action.

There is no doubt that Malta, and indeed just about every country in the world, needs to do more to address gender inequality on all levels and these figures give something of a snapshot of the dog-eat-dog world in which women are competing.

It is a cut-throat world in which women not only have to compete for the labour market, but it is also one in which they are competing against male colleagues who on the whole are paid more for their labours and who find it easier to land certain jobs.

These women that these statistics refer to, however, are mainly those who have voices, but what about those without a voice? While much of today’s statistics will either decry a lack of or boast of policies that attract more women to the workplace, to the boardroom and the political sphere where their talents and voices can be best expressed, what of the women whose voices and talents have been silenced or thrown by the wayside?

What of the women who suffer every day in silence, trapped in a way of life that demeans their very existence, those women who yearn not for a boardroom position but to merely be in a position in which abuse in all its heinous forms - physical, psychological and emotional - is no longer the order of the day?

What of those women who finally manage to summon the courage to report their abusive spouses, but whose reports are buried in an ever growing stack of ‘domestic disturbance’ reports?

What of those women who, despite finding the inner strength to press charges against an abusive husband, find little justice from the courts, which have been shown time and time again as being inexplicably reluctant to order an abusive husband out of the matrimonial home, and who then become entangled in years of legal proceedings? What of the country’s laws that condone corporal punishment, which mean that a mother can only look on helplessly as their children are slapped, punched and kicked?

Sadly, there are so many voiceless women who simply settle for such treatment because they do not know any different, they resign themselves to their fate because they have seen such behaviour handed down from generation to generation. This generation, with the heightened awareness that this day and age provides, must be the generation in which this is all brought to an abrupt end.

Recent research has revealed that at least one in four Maltese women have experienced violence at least once in their lives, and that at least half of those have suffered sustained abuse. And despite recent awareness raising efforts by the Commission ion Domestic Violence and a parallel, like-minded EU campaign, many women in such seemingly hopeless positions do not know that help, in the form of Agenzija Appogg and its 179 helpline, is out there and that all they have to do is pick up the phone and ask for it.

The recent introduction of divorce legislation has provided a ray of hope for many women who have found themselves in such circumstances. Many more abused women now know that they are not chained for life to an abuser, that there is a way out, and that the state can no longer force that woman to remain in that relationship, unable to close that nasty chapter of their lives and start a new chapter in life.

That legal instrument is now, thankfully, available to them and, perhaps more than that, the focus on domestic violence in the divorce referendum campaigns – to varying extents and ends – raised a great deal of awareness. The referendum’s result should have also delivered a sense of empowerment with which to drag themselves out of the domestic quagmire they have found themselves in after having chosen the wrong partner in life.

But more, much more, needs to be done.

And our message on this International Women’s Day, is a call for more women to take control of their own lives, to take action, to shake off the shackles of a life of abuse, and to stand up for their rights by taking concrete action to end the abuse.

Those women who are suffering need to give themselves a voice. And the best thing that a woman in such circumstances can do for themselves, and for womankind as a whole, would be to make that call to Appogg, to ask for the help they so direly need to break free from their life of fear.

179 is more than a helpline, it is a lifeline: use it or convince someone who needs to use it to do so.