Arancini di riso are literally small oranges of rice or leftover risotto, deep-fried and delicious. My kids love them, so whenever I make risotto I generally make extra for arancini the day after.

My recipe was given to me by a woman I met in a women’s refuge. I was there at the refuge with my eight year old son and he loved the arancini. We were invited to their party and he wanted to come with me. I wanted him to come with me. I want him to grow up and remember that party. I want him to grow up and remember the arancini and the woman who prepared them that evening and above all remember why she was there. You can generally explain most things to kids if you use the right language. Where you say you can’t, it’s often merely an excuse. Yet there is still a certain element of stigma that surrounds women’s refuges, as if the women were in some way at fault, that’s all part of the stigma still associated with domestic violence.

Next Wednesday 8th March women will strike in forty countries all over the world. They’ll strike as part of the Ni una menos movement. It was the slogan launched by a group of journalists when women took to the streets in Argentina in 2015 and has now become a movement. It comes from a text “Ni una di mujer menos, ni una muerta mas” (not one woman less, not one death more) by Susana Chevez, the Mexican poet and activist who was killed in 2011 for having denounced gender crimes and violence against Mexican women. The Women’s marches are joining the strike and planning their A Day without a Woman. It’s an international women’s movement and it’s happening now. The movement is growing every day. In Italy, strikes will take place in many cities and towns from north to south.

There are many forms of violence. It doesn’t have to be physical or even explicit. Violence against women in Italy was identified by the UN 2012 report as cultural and therefore structural. It’s rooted within society. Femmicide takes seed where women are treated as second class citizens, where women are objectified, where there is a belief that a man is superior to a woman.

We all hear stories of women in abusive relationships, both physical and psychological women in non-abusive relationships who stay in loveless marriages for want of any way out. If a woman is dependent economically, it makes it very difficult for her to leave. How many women stay in abusive marriages because they know that if they do at least they’re assuring food and clothes and a roof over their heads for their children? And where the state is not doing enough to provide the right working conditions in which women can work, it is locking the key in the door.

This week the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg ruled that Italy failed to protect a mother and her son from domestic violence. The authorities failed to respond to complaints by the woman and the result was murder of the son and attempted murder of the mother. They were accused of underestimating the violence and thus effectively endorsing it. It’s a landmark case.

Children are still studying from textbooks where daddy goes off to work and mummy makes cakes and they all go off to grandma’s on Sundays. The stereotypes are alive and kicking in the elementary classrooms of 2017. In Lombardy the recent gender theory proposals to help change gender stereotypes in schools were not just refused, they set up a helpline for people to report any examples of gender theory within schools. Yet research proves that violence against women takes root in environments where women are not treated equally to men.

You speak to other women and the story is often the same. It begins with a personal awareness, and this then translates into action.