February 1988. Telefono Rosa was born as the temporary instrument of research aiming at marking out, through the women's direct voice, the "overwhelmed" violence, hidden in the health workers' or police members' reports. In a very tiny room, five female volunteers, with the simple aid of a notebook and a pen, take turns at listening to innumerable women calling from all over Italy. They listen carefully and sympathetically, thus qualifying Telefono Rosa, since its birth, as new form of social service. Violence, affecting women in their specificity, is hugely spread out at various levels and in any social ambit, and it is often generated in those commonly considered reassuring institutions such as the family, the school and the workplace: that is what alarmingly emerges in the reports by Telefono Rosa, along with the ascertainment that what women lack is information. Telefono Rosa is therefore a real service available to all those women who want to break the barrier of silence and sacrifice, the indispensable allies of the culture of violence. The association arranges weekly legal advising sessions, because the acquisition of one's fundamental human and civil rights, as well as the knowledge of the existing means to reaffirm them once they are breached, appear to be the essential condition to escape a situation of imposition and abuse.

February 1999. Three hundred and fifty thousand women applied to Telefono Rosa to tell their stories of ordinary physical, psychological, economical violence, to talk about their existential discomfort, to testify their impossibility to accept the rules of a male universe. On the other end of the line, the same female volunteers, not five any longer but now sixty, ready to inform, address, report. They constituted themselves, back in 1990, as the National Association of Telefono Rosa, in order to be fully organised. Their skilfulness, tested though a wide range of very diversified cases, has been growing during the last years thanks to the arrangement of internal training courses. Today the Association is able to supply varied and specific advising. Together with female lawyers are female financial advisors, female psychologists and family mediatresses.

The constant attention paid by mass media; the creation of a supporting committee made up of women occupying key positions in the world of culture, politics and institutions; a new office provided by the Municipality of Rome, where it is more comfortable to guest women coming to tell their own stories; four telephone lines. All that has contributed to change an emergency-like service into a properly working instrument. Parallely to such evolution, the need for widened considerations has matured, the need for surveys probing violence in its genesis and in its manifestations. In a sense, starting from women's direct evidence, the Association elaborates every year a research report about the phenomenology of violence, inside and outside the family, whose final scope is reporting such a serious social plague to the public opinion for an efficient prevention. The same purpose of defeating violence is adopted by the training-informing courses about sexuality, health, women's rights, organised by the Association and open to whoever might want to take part in. Fighting violence is important, but preventing that violence is somehow generated and defusing the mechanisms that activate it, is fundamental.

Telefono Rosa was born in February 1988.

The National Association of Telefono Rosa was born in summer 1990.

Current number of women working in the association: 60 Telephone service: Monday to Friday, from 10am to 1pm, 4pm to 9pm.

Types of consultancy: legal, banking, psychological, family mediation.

Number of women who have applied to the service: 350,000

Telephone calls mainly coming from: Italy and European countries (firstly Switzerland and Germany)