I am at once transfixed and appalled by the terrible story of Emmanuel Camilleri, who has already spent 400 days in prison – he was sentenced to two years – for the sexual abuse of his eight-year-old daughter, which never happened.
As more and more details emerge despite the court-mandated mystery surrounding the identity of the other individuals involved, the horror increases and one wonders how it was possible for this case to drag all the way through the magistrates’ court and then in and out of the Court of Appeal, despite the abundant evidence that there should never have been any prosecution to begin with.
One wonders, too, what catastrophe of professional neglect in several quarters has led to all this being brought up only now, when Camilleri has languished in prison already for more than half the term to which he has been condemned, even though the information was – we are told repeatedly – right there and available even before he was found guilty and sentenced.
This case began 12 years ago, which means that the daughter who is now 20 was then just eight years old. Her mother, who was estranged from Camilleri and refusing to grant him access to the children on the grounds that he had stopped paying maintenance (he had lost his job), filed a police report saying that the girl claimed her father had raped her. Camilleri immediately filed an official complaint/request for prosecution with the police (kwerela) for criminal slander because of these allegations. He is now suing the prosecuting officer, Louise Calleja, who saw the case all the way through to its conclusion, and she said in court last week that yes, she did know that Camilleri had responded to his wife’s accusations with a request for her prosecution for slander.
When the child was interviewed by the police, she gave a description of penetration and stuck to it. A medical examination found no sign of any such penetration. No child of eight, unless horribly brutalised in circumstances not indicated in this situation, has any concept or understanding of sexual penetration. It does not even occur to a child of that age that something like this occurs in nature, let alone between a man and a child, and more so a child who is his. So it follows that if this particular child did not experience sexual penetration by her father directly, as the medical examination showed, then the process was described to her by her mother and she was rehearsed in its description.
As soon as the child was old enough to understand what was happening and how she had been used, she recanted her testimony. This fact was brushed aside. When she was old enough to act independently – at 16, by which time both she and her father had been dragged through hell for eight years – she went to the police accompanied by her father and made it clear that she had lied about him under instruction from her mother. The police now claim that though their visit was logged, there is no record of its purpose.
The prosecuting officer also says she did not know that this girl and her brother, while still children, made 25 reports of abuse against their mother, to the police. This is because she is in the Vice Squad, she said, but the reports they lodged were processed by another police department. This lack of coordination is frightening. I don’t know why Camilleri’s defence counsel, Tonio Azzopardi, has expressed shock and incredulity that this could be possible. I am assuming that he did not know about those reports of neglect, either, otherwise he would have brought them up himself.
True – it is far more shocking that the prosecuting officer did not know because of a failure to cross-check police reports and systems - but the defence counsel should have picked up the information from the daughter.
Why has it only been mentioned now that the girl’s brother, who died of cancer when he was just 14 – possibly because he did not receive the required medical care in time due to parental neglect – had been thrown out of the house by his mother and was found sleeping on the streets? Or was this not-insignificant information brought up in court and ignored as irrelevant to an examination of whether the other parent had sexually abused the other sibling?
The thought that due process could fail so dreadfully, causing a man to be imprisoned even by the Court of Appeal for a crime which a multitude of evidence suggests he did not commit, distresses me. But I am far more greatly distressed at the knowledge that two children filed 25 reports of non-sexual abuse and neglect against their mother, and their pleas for help were ignored or dismissed by the police whereas a single report of sexual abuse made by their mother was seized upon immediately with relish.
Did the children’s reports even reach Social Services? The result was a boy, who ended up with cancer and dead at 14, sleeping on the street. What sort of miserable, frightened and horrible life must he have led? His sister’s life can’t have been much better, with her only consolation being that she is still alive. Imagine being forced and manipulated by your own mother to tell lies and invent stories that will have your father subjected to police harassment, trial and eventual imprisonment over a 12-year Calvary.
And let’s face it: the mother’s psychological state cannot have been good at all. With no income once her husband stopped paying maintenance, possibly no family support that would allow her to work, two children to look after and the usual mountain of bills to pay, it’s a safe bet that she would have sunk into depression that became rapidly worse and that much of the neglect of which her children accused her, and her unsound decisions that led to this mess, would have been the result of that.
This sorry story is the result of an immense failure of support systems, with lack of coordination of information and a surprising absence of emotional insight by investigating officers who did not see what was really happening and what was required – or who thought and operated only within the narrow box of their particular job description. Had the mother been given proper support from Social Services, psychological as well as financial, when her husband stopped paying maintenance, none of this probably would have happened. The police should have been able to see this, to see the bigger picture instead of the narrow accusation of child rape which even then seemed unreasonable and which was immediately countered by the father with a request for prosecution for slander. Instead, what we have now is four lives in hell and one life extinguished after a brief period in living hell: the mother in prison awaiting trial for perjury, the father released from prison after 12 years of psychological torture and 400 days behind bars, the son dead at 14, the daughter at 20 knowing nothing beyond all this misery, and the prosecuting officer being sued for unprofessional behaviour in this case towards the end of what was an otherwise unblemished career in the Vice Squad.
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