* unless it’s inconvenient for us, of course…
I understand this piece is a few days late but you’ll have to bear with me. It’s been difficult to keep up with everything lately and I appreciate your patience. I also believe it is a very important piece, in spite of how fleeting public attention can be on this matter.
We all know that currently, the Labour government is so desperate for any kind of semi-decent publicity that they will say whatever they think will help them recover some trust from the electorate. Unfortunately for them, their nous for what would actually inspire said trust is about as accurate as a darts player on hallucinogens.
In August, the entire country was glued to the nearest screen in the aftermath of the femicide of Nicolette Ghirxi.
We all watched in horror as that nightmare unfolded. We all felt the same exact shock and outrage that erupted over the femicides of Bernice Cilia, Sandra Ramirez, and Pelin Kaya, among many other women who were murdered by men over the past two decades. Every time a woman is killed by a man, the collective wound in the country’s psyche continues to fester with no end in sight.
There is no end in sight because there is no serious political will to address the state’s shortcomings. On the contrary, all we get at the tail end of every tragedy is a slew of pledges which either remain unfulfilled or otherwise end up falling far short of what must be done.
Six days after Ghirxi’s murder, prime minister Robert Abela told his party’s supporters that a new domestic violence centre in a central part of Malta will be open by next year. This came hot on the heels of announcements which were, by design, made to diffuse calls for a fully independent inquiry.
Fortunately, Ghirxi’s family seems to be assisted by a lawyer who is competent enough to point out that the internal inquiries ordered by the police force and the social policy ministry would not pinpoint the state’s failures in relation to the femicide. They are not buying it.
Now, the family have been placed in the same position that so many others who lost loved ones and were not given the right to grieve in peace. Instead of mourning the loss of Nicolette Ghirxi, her family must now carry the unenviable burden of either dedicating huge chunks of their lives to seek real justice for their loved one or trying to quietly suffer through it to preserve some privacy. It is the same burden that the Caruana Galizia family has been carrying for seven years now. It is the same burden that Isabelle Bonnici and the Bartolo family had to shoulder. The cases are different. The reticence to change is the same.
Instead of urgently addressing rampant misogyny, the widespread reach of toxic media channels that influence men into buying into bullshit, dangerous propaganda, and the multi-layered assault on this country’s collective psyche courtesy of your nearest construction site / cramped commercial venue / never-ending traffic queue etc…, our prime minister simply tells us we’ll open a new domestic violence centre and expects us to think this will somehow cut it.
To be clear, nobody should even think of inferring that making this point somehow means I am against further investment in the country’s anti-domestic violence infrastructure. One centre in Santa Luċija and another in the police’s headquarters in Floriana were obviously never going to be in a position to cater for the whole country, so the idea that another one may be on its way is obviously welcome.
However, the announcement is nonetheless problematic. First of all, announcing a new domestic violence centre a few days after a femicide is insensitive, callous, and really duplicitous. These announcements cannot be made as a stop-gap measure to the benefit of a government that has no idea what it’s doing. There is nobody at the rudder at the moment. Just throwing that out there to convince the unthinking that you are seriously stepping up the fight against domestic violence is just wrong.
What the country would actually benefit from is a comprehensive, long-term plan that actually addresses the issue in a manner that targets all demographics in society at once. The only way that something as complex as this can be nipped in the bud is through a cross community re-education campaign that is buttressed by effective, uncompromising enforcement, spread out over years and coordinated by professionals with relevant expertise. Even then, it is unlikely that such a phenomenon can ever be eliminated entirely.
But of course, the Labour government is in no position to pull off anything as elaborate as that. To begin with, its track record with delivering projects in a timely manner is laughable. Secondly, Abela’s government has a track record for failing to stick by its promises, in the same way it failed to stick by promises it made to other families who suffered at the behest of its incompetence.
In fact, the government is barely in a position to provide adequate resources to the centres that are currently active. Police academy numbers have dwindled over the years. The police corps is demoralised and some of the better ones moved on to greener pastures a long time ago.
Meanwhile, the public sector perennially struggles to find a steady supply of dedicated, capable social workers, certainly enough to adequately staff their departments, causing chronic burnout among the ones who remain because they do not wish to abandon their mission. If it weren’t for those kinds of people, we’d have nothing.
So, pray tell – who exactly is going to make up the mixed disciplines unit that is required to provide support to victims of domestic violence in a centre that is open 24/7? Police officers with specialised training in domestic violence are indispensable, for one thing. In cases where there may be a risk of physical danger involved, social workers cannot take action without knowing that the police force is backing them up. Social workers are then the only ones who can carry out formalised risk assessments.
The police force can’t even keep actual police stations open, having shut down several of them over the past few years due to the dwindling numbers within the corps. If a victim of violence who has just gone through an assault escapes from an immediate situation and literally runs out of a building to seek assistance from the nearest police station, who are they going to talk to – the intercom on the wall that has now replaced actual police officers in closed down stations?
And of course, I’d be remiss not to point out that when representation really matters and entities like the European Commission try to respect that, Malta is one of those states that could not refer less. I am, of course, referring to the prime minister’s stubborn refusal to send a female nominee to the European Commission as Ursula von der Leyen struggles to pull together a gender-balanced Commission. According to Politico, Abela is refusing to change his mind about this because it would undermine his authority.
Truly, we are such proud champions of women’s rights – except of course, when it is inconvenient to us.
