The story published on our front page today tells of the harrowing experience that an intellectually disabled woman had to put up with for nine years.

The court report tells how the woman was kept locked up in a room for nine years, before a woman who moved into the house five months ago plucked up the courage to tell the police, despite being threatened by the woman who kept the victim captive.

We often hear stories of how people are abducted and subjected to all sorts of abuse, but never in Malta. Perhaps the one of the most harrowing tales was the crimes perpetrated by Josef Fritzl, who locked his own daughter up in a basement dungeon and proceeded to rape her repeatedly and father her children.

Ariel Castro was another, who kidnapped three women in the United States and kept them as sexual slaves.

The case currently before the courts in Malta is different. A woman has been accused of locking the said victim in a room for 17 hours a day with a dog and a bucket to use as a toilet. She also used to give the victim Playmobil parts to assemble the toys and in turn get paid for it.

The most shocking thing in this whole sorry story is that the woman’s partner is a police officer who has been placed under internal investigation. The court has already heard that he often used to sleep at the apartment in question. If a woman who was a flatmate noticed the victim’s ordeal, then it surely follows that the man, trained to investigate, should have noticed that something was amiss.

While it is certainly easy to point the finger, and everything always seems clear in hindsight, it is worrying that the victim has been under the radar for the past nine years. The accused’s relationship to the victim remains unclear,  but how does one person simply disappear? Are disabled people registered and checked up on by the relevant authorities? Do social workers ever visit them? There are two faults at play here. One of them is the fact that our society has become more and more aloof and does not engage in finding out about the welfare of others. The other is that there is a fault, somewhere, in the system.

So far, we do not know whether the victim is a registered disabled person or not. But it beggars belief to think that this could have been going on in an apartment and no one realised the plight of the woman. Surely, she might have screamed, called for help, whimpered, wept or pleaded for attention? But again, we are all wise in hindsight. Thank God that the flatmate reported the matter to the police. Thank God the police took her seriously. But as shocking and terrible as this case may be, we must learn from it and find the faults in the system that allowed this terrible event to unfold over nine tortuous years.