As a newly-wed in the mid-1970s and having taken up residence in Birkirkara, I had only left the Cottonera area about a year before, where the message had been subtly and often not so subtly driven into our psyche that yobs there were kind of assembled straight off Mother Nature’s lap, when the incident happened. Even worse, I had only been driving for a few weeks.

As I drove my Datsun down a one-way, three-metre-wide street, people on doorsteps suddenly started waving and mouthing something at me in unison. “Ah,” I told myself, “they seem to know I am new to the traffic scene, and with such limited space they desperately want to protect kittens and toes.”

Seconds later I realised why the band of waving maestros had been so insistent. A car was coming from the opposite direction, and it soon was a question of who of the two of us would reverse to allow the other to pass. My macho side won the day; I stopped the car, switched the engine off and asked the other driver to please make way for I had the Law on my side. The retort in Maltese was unprintable, as some of the waving maestros quickly came to my side.

“Do as he says, do as he says,” they urged me with fear in their eyes, “you know who that is. He won’t go back. He does this at least twice a day.” It transpired that the other driver was a notorious local yob with a national reputation. As people around me grew visibly paler and more agitated – after all they had to watch this daily farce occur with monotonous regularity outside their front doors – I knew I had to sweat it out.

It seemed, however, the yob that day had been fed his favourite – mama’s macaroni dish, and to my and most people’s surprise, he suddenly decided, with much banging on car windows and banging of doors and a rich vocabulary of unprintable words, to reverse back the 20 metres necessary to allow me to squeeze past. His look as I did so scalded me permanently. I am sure the excited onlookers thought I had just had the luckiest escape of my life, which it could easily have been.

Yob culture in Malta has since flowered and bloomed. Thirty years on, I think it is part of all the negative elements that have been afflicting our tourism industry, striking at our own peace of mind as a nation and rendering communal life on this island boring and dangerous at the same time.

It is evident all over the place. On the road, in the street, at the cinema, the supermarket, schools, shops, restaurants, bars, soccer fields, Valletta, Sliema, the villages, the towns, upstairs, downstairs, posh parts, the pits and it is still growing. The yobs of Malta have fun at the expense of the rest of us. They have the police in their pockets and the wardens become a mass of goose pimples every time they come face to face with the phenomenon.

It is no wonder; therefore, that nothing is being done to fight it. Like that famous gluey, green stuff in the film Blob, it is oozing out of every possible hole in the texture of Maltese society, inching its mouldy way into our nostrils. The helplessness on the part of the authorities and their uniformed tin soldiers is palpable. In fact the odd flare-up occurs only when yob meets yob, which is often a highly combustible concoction worth running away from in time.

Elsewhere in Europe, yob culture is no less a problem, but it is at least being met with much resistance and the boundless dedication of people actually paid to do so, i.e. politicians and civil servants, policemen and neighbourhood patrols. Parish and town councils in Britain, for example, are gradually being given powers to crack down on yob culture with on-the-spot fines. Prime Minister Tony Blair has even announced a huge extension of anti-social behaviour orders, known as ASBO, across the country.

Of course Malta’s problem is law enforcement. Yobs have the time of their lives ignoring all the rules in the safe knowledge that whoever is responsible to police them will not dare take them on. How else can one explain the existence of so many unroadworthy vehicles on our roads when we have had compulsory VRT tests for so long now? Is there not a single traffic policeman or traffic warden curious enough to check them out, road licences, insurance policies and all?

Yob culture gestation does not depend only on lager louts having

a laugh a day. It feeds off the monster of noise pollution. The island

of bells, yells and smells is still

the island of bells, yells and smells gone electronic, alas. Add to all that, the earth-shattering music blasted out of consoles inside old Ford Escorts driven all over the place by look-alikes of that erstwhile yob character, Frankie Quattromani, outstandingly portrayed by Ray Calleja on Super One Television some time ago.

Is it not the time we woke up from our slumber to declare war on the yobs? Loutish behaviour is not a Maltese character trait, nor is it a southern or northern malady. It is not to be confused with the teddy-boys and beatniks of the 1950s, the mods, rockers and hippies of the 1960s and those into heavy metal and punk rock of the 1970s, for these were sub-cultures that thrived on social change and innuendo. In the particular case of yobbish behaviour, the government, especially, must ask teachers to set up a national disciplinary code for schools. As in Britain, we need the determination to make tackling such behaviour a top priority.

I am sure that police officers find that 95 per cent of their work revolves around tackling anti-social behaviour. Groups of children in the villages and towns are getting larger and larger, and it is now not unusual to find children from age 10 upwards drunk or drugged. It is indeed pertinent to ask what exactly the parents are doing or what questions they ask. The police, for all their vulnerability, are not being supported either by upper management, the court system or the government.

We have also created “ghettos” by crowding yobs in one area. Germany and the Scandinavians have got it right by building homes and flats and only permitting 10 of these unsavoury characters in every 100 spaces. That way, you don’t get that culture – they’re outnumbered and have no choice but to keep quiet or be thrown out!

Many today rightly believe that we need zero-tolerance, with fines being paid by parents of yobs and adult perpetrators. The problem is that the parents could be the super-yobs their sons and daughters are trying to emulate.

Yobs are not born though, they are a product of our society. Respect should be taught from the cradle. Until a child reaches an age where he or she is responsible for his or her own actions, the parents must be held accountable.