When you think about violence against women, whose face do you see?

One in three women experience gender-based violence during their lifetime – it’s time to make some noise

When you think about the violence inflicted on women, whose face do you see? Far too many of us will have cause to think about our neighbours, friends and relatives. According to the official UN statistics, one in three women alive in the world today will see gender-based violence.

Then there are the faces of the latest woman whose disappearance or murder has made the news, moved the nation, and forced the authorities to talk about making our streets safer, or tackling our culture of misogyny; all the earnestly promised change that never comes.

Say the names of those women, and their faces come immediately to mind; the photos by which their distraught families hoped they could be found, or wanted them remembered.

Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. Joy Morgan, Sarah Everard, Sabina Nessa and Zara Aleena. Go back through the decades, and we still see the faces of Milly Dowler, Rachel Nickell, Suzy Lamplugh, and many more.

And of course, for every one woman (cis or transgender, anyone who identifies as a woman) whose murder creates national headlines, there are thousands that do not; killed by abusive partners or other attackers whom they thought they could trust; the horrific toll of a world where one woman is murdered every eleven minutes in her own home.

Whenever we hear these stories, whenever we see these faces, they stick with us and eat away at us. But to confront those horrors every single day, to do it as a vocation, with each knock on the door bringing a new face and a new story of abuse: that is the life of Nozuko Conjwa, a manager at the Nonceba Family Counselling Centre in Khayelitsha, a township outside Cape Town in South Africa.

Nozuko’s work is supported by funding from The Circle, the UK-based NGO founded in 2008 by Annie Lennox, with the brilliant Raakhi Shah at the helm as CEO, to fight for a world where women and girls have equal rights, equal opportunities, and do not have to go through life trapped in the chains of violence and fear.

The Circle asked me if I would consider making a film based on Nozuko’s descriptions of the women who come to her for help, which is being shared online to mark the start of this year’s 16 Days of Global Activism against gender-based violence. Lorien Haynes worked with me on the project and the amazing Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays the role of Nozuko.

To read Nozuko’s words, to hear the accounts of such violence and cruelty and know these are not the exceptions in her work, but the norm, is devastating.

The expectant mother fighting for her life, and her unborn baby’s. The woman who came round from an attempt on her own life trying to say sorry to her abusive partner. The young mother was stabbed while breast-feeding her child.

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Short though it is, I know She Came To Me will not be an easy film for many people to watch. These are the stories of the young women in Khayelitsha who had found the courage to survive these ordeals and seek help. We hoped to do justice to Nozuko’s words and reality and hear her message of defiance and resilience.

We aim for this to be shared with others and resolve together to do what we can during these 16 Days to support the work of wonderful women like Nozuko, and show solidarity with all those millions of women and girls around the world living under the shadow of violence and abuse.

Saffron Burrows is an actor, director and supporter of The Circle