March 8... many still wait

Labour's White Paper on domestic violence will be seven years old this year. And it has been five years now since Lawrence Gonzi pledged, on Woman's Day 2000, that the domestic violence law would have passed through Parliament by June of that year. But victims of domestic violence are still without proper legal protection. The violators can still enjoy the comfort of the family home while their victims and their children have to seek shelter elsewhere or else continue risking their lives in a violent environment.

Reports, including those of the World Health Organisation, show that family violence causes more death and disability than cancer, malaria, traffic accidents and war. In Malta there is an average of one case of domestic violence reported every day and experts often say this is just the tip of the iceberg because this is an area where, because the victims fear the perpetrators, they choose not to report and thus risk making matters worse.

We can only hope that if we are promised the domestic violence law this Woman's Day, as we have been promised for the past five years, this time it will be for real.

We also want to hear why we are still without a breast-screening programme for high risk cases of breast cancer and whether it is on the government's agenda or not.

And we want to hear about when the government will be setting up the promised regulatory framework for child-minding services. The funny thing is that that two budgets ago there was an allocation of funds to subsidise working parents who send their under three-year-olds to nurseries. We were told in that budget speech that for the parents to claim the subsidy, the nurseries have to be licensed.

Over two years have passed since that speech but still there is no regulatory framework and there are no subsidies. I wonder where the money allocated ended up. Maybe down the Mater Dei Hospital money-gobbling machine... or maybe it went for the Brussels building... or the Brindisi "investment". Who knows? What we know for sure is that neither the subsidies nor the regulations saw the light of day. And the children of the parents who thought would benefit from the announced scheme are now in primary school.

But it is not all negative. It is good to hear that the Nationalist Party will be introducing positive action measures so that more women are active at the decision-making levels of the party structure, albeit they have been extremely critical of the Labour Party for the past decade since we took similar steps within our party. That is at party level. At government level more attention should be paid to increase the number of women where boards and committees are concerned. Women are still highly under-represented in national decision-making structures, as the government's own data shows.

Needless to say, the female perspective is necessary at this level. Maybe not everyone likes to hear it, but it is a fact. Unless there is a critical mass of women at decision-making levels, issues, such as the feminisation of unemployment and the feminisation of poverty, will not find their place on the national agenda. We know we have these problems, together with the aforementioned ones of domestic violence, breast-screening, childcare etc. which need to be addressed immediately.

Another March 8 is with us and we are talking of the problems we spoke about last Woman's Day and the one before, and the one before, and the one before... and no action has been taken by the government. Many still wait.

Ms Dalli is shadow minister for public function and women's rights.