Never has a life sentence been so richly deserved. The man who repeatedly stabbed to death a young woman he paid to have sex with, and then killed her toddler, throwing both bloodied bodies into a well, belongs behind a very high prison wall for the remainder of his days. He said in court that he couldn’t remember doing it, and I believe him. It’s well documented that when some people fly into a frenzy they ‘blank out’, suffering selective amnesia – but that only makes them more dangerous.
This double murder is yet more evidence of the sickness in our society, where misogyny simmers just beneath the surface, erupting in conversations where men aren’t carefully watching what they say, which means that the truth about how they really feel and think emerges. You hear phrases beginning with “in-nisa this” and “in-nisa that”, and expressions like “they’re taking over”, and “women now have the upper hand”, or “women really don’t know their place anymore”. It crosses the social spectrum. A cleaning woman told me recently she doesn’t like one particular friend her husband has because he really hates women in general and his wife in particular; in fact she considers him a bad influence on her husband. She knows without being told whenever he’s met him for a drink because he comes back home and starts throwing his weight around, running his finger over the table checking for dust and complaining about the number of dirty glasses in the kitchen sink. My advice was to tell him that if he doesn’t like seeing dirty glasses in the sink he could always wash them himself, and when he checks for dust, she should hand him a duster. Sadly, some women are conditioned to run and wash the glasses as soon as the man of the house yaps and whines.
Chauvinism and machismo are not the same thing though, as misogyny is the sheer hatred of women rooted in fear and suspicion. In much of Europe, including, surprisingly, Italy, the law and cultural indoctrination have had a very positive effect in changing the mindset of centuries in which women were habitually treated and legally considered as inferior human beings, or children, to be put into the absolute care and control of men. In the south, most particularly Spain, Portugal, Greece, Sicily, Malta and North Africa, women continue to be feared and despised, and the general feeling is that they should not be allowed to get “out of control” – for which read “men’s control” – or there will be undesirable consequences.
The frenzied stabbing of a young woman and her toddler is only the latest in a long series of murders and attempted murders of women by men with whom they were sexually involved at some point. Because each case is presented to us in the media as “a murder case”, with no distinction made between murders such as these and, for example, the shooting of a police officer by bank robbers, the emerging pattern is obscured. Look back and remember just how many such vicious stabbings of women have been over the past few years. They follow the same pattern: the woman somehow thwarts or rejects the man, and he flies into a mad frenzy, stabbing her not once or twice, but so many times that the doctors performing the autopsy probably have to keep an adding machine by their side. There was the notorious “I killed her because I loved her” case a few years back, when Diane Gerada was stabbed more than 20 times by her husband, as she lay in bed next to their infant son. He then poured lavatory cleaner over her body as she lay dying in the balcony, where she had crawled to in a vain attempt to call for help. There was the teenage girl who was stabbed virtually to shreds by her boyfriend when she told him that her parents would not allow her to see him anymore. He was arrested and charged with her murder. There was the young woman last year, who opened the front door to admit the father of her young daughter and ended up being stabbed more than 50 times in front of her extremely traumatised child. The man was arrested immediately and charged with the crime. Fifty times! It’s almost beyond comprehension. And that’s just the stabbings. I’m not even going to bother starting with the shootings, the beatings and assaults, and the throwing of bothersome wives off cliffs.
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They tell me that there is no deep-rooted misogyny in this country, and that women are respected here. Well, that’s a good joke for a Christmas cracker. My mother told me and one of my sisters about a television programme she had seen on the way women die at the hands of the men in their life (or the men formerly in their life) in Spain, and the regular news reports about women stabbed, shot and even burnt. One man had thrown petrol over his wife and then chucked a match in her direction. She was appalled. “But mum,” we told her. “Don’t you realise that the same thing goes on here?” Sylvia King wasn’t married to the man who burnt her alive; she was his wife’s best friend and had helped her to leave him because of his violence and abuse. When the murders of women are presented to us on the news in a haphazard fashion over months or years, we fail to realise that there is a common thread running through them all: the violent annihilation of a woman by a man who has failed to get his way. The women might be his wife, his mother, his sister, or even his wife’s best friend. Have you forgotten the fairly recent case of the Mosta man who shot his sister because she had burnt his toast once too often?
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How many men are violently murdered by the women in their lives? I can remember only one such case, around 25 years ago, when a woman and her lover conspired to kill her husband and dump his body in a valley in Mosta. Women don’t even kill the men who beat, abuse and cheat on them, or leave them in a state of deprivation with mouths to feed and no money. Yet in a population of just 400,000, we have had all these murders of women by men. There are two shelters for women who suffer violence at the hands of their spouses, and they are packed to the seams, with many waiting to get in. Before you offer an opinion on the general esteem in which women are held in Malta, I suggest you visit one of these shelters and see for yourself.
All these Maltese men who have stabbed, shot or otherwise murdered or maimed their wives, girlfriends or ex-girlfriends have had other options open to them. They could have filed for separation; they could have simply left home. Even as I write this, I have just read another news report of a man who has been denied bail by a magistrate (at last – they’re beginning to take these things seriously) after he was arrested for assaulting his wife and threatening to kill her. The prosecuting officer explained that this was not an isolated incident, but the latest in more than 20 years of abuse. Also in the past few days, the Court of Appeal confirmed an eight-year jail sentence for a man who had pushed his girlfriend off a balcony, condemning her to life in a wheelchair, when she told him that she didn’t want to see him anymore, and that she was pregnant by somebody else. “I did it because I loved her,” he argued. “You did it because you confused love with control,” the Court of Appeal said.
Men like this, whose response to being thwarted by a woman with whom they have been (or wish to be) sexually involved, can only have been raised in an environment where women are regarded with contempt – the ‘Madonna/whore’ syndrome. Misogyny is learned; it is not a congenital disease but a social and cultural illness. If you listen carefully to the conversations taking place all around you, and listen carefully to the language used and the attitudes displayed, you will soon pick up the insidious or overt misogyny. The way Maltese men discuss women, even their own wives and girlfriends, is horrible. The only woman who is sacrosanct is usually their mother, but she is a saint and not a sexual being – the ‘Madonna/whore’ syndrome again. Generally, the more perfect a Maltese man considers his mother to be, the more likely he is to find fault with his wife. This is apparently the case in Italy, too, which is why they have such a poor birth rate and a rapidly ageing population. The women have wised up.
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I can see some sort of light at the end of this very dark tunnel, though. Defence lawyers no longer think it acceptable to put forward the argument “he killed her because he loved her so much and she made him jealous”, or some other shocking
variation on this theme. Who kills the people they love? I detect cultural change too in the way these cases are reported in the media, and in the general reaction to them. Some years ago, I would have heard men justifying the actions of the murderer. I would have heard women make excuses for the stabber or shooter, saying things like “Min jaf what she did, for him to kill her!” Some years ago, when such cases went to trial, the ‘guilty’ verdict would never be unanimous, or the Maltese version of unanimous, which is 8-1 as in the most recent such jury trial (the one being a deliberate measure to leave the criminal in doubt as to who voted against him).
These appalling murders of women by their sexual partners or their former sexual partners, are indicative
of a deadly disease in our southern Mediterranean society. It is precisely because of this that they have to be more severely punished than
other murders, not less severely punished as they have been up to now on the grounds that they are “crime of passion”. Mr Justice Galea
Debono was wholly correct in handing down a life sentence to this man. That life sentence is not just a punishment, it is also a message to Maltese society.