The news that emerged from a recently-concluded court case, that three teachers in Gozo were involved in the sexual exploitation of young girls, was not surprising. It was the way this matter appears to have been handled that has left us somewhat taken aback. All three teachers used to have sex with at least two schoolgirls, and one of the teachers used to film them, in a kind of homemade porn-cum-voyeurism exercise, like a perverted school project.

For some mysterious reason, only two of the teachers were prosecuted. The other one, who goes by the conveniently anonymous name of Joseph Borg – which is the Maltese equivalent of John Smith – has been allowed to disappear into the ether. No action was taken against him, even though he is – or rather, was – a teacher who procured schoolgirls to have sex with his colleagues, and even with him. Who is he, we want to know, why was no action taken against him, and where is he now? Can we have a photograph, please? The crimes occurred in 1998, which means it is probably too late for a prosecution now.

This is where the shortcomings in our media truly show up in cases like these. If teachers who have sex with their pupils are not hounded by the authorities, then they should at least be hounded by the press. This is the kind of serious crime that should be revealed, and its perpetrators exposed to a punishment that is far more effective than a jail sentence: public shame and social opprobrium.

Unfortunately, it is not even the courts that have succeeded in conveying the message, to these horrible men and to others who think as they do, that their crime is indeed disgusting and far beyond what can be tolerated in a developed society. Gozo is part of the European Union. Some of the people who live there, and who have yet to develop even the most rudimentary social conscience, behave as though they are a world unto themselves, concealing crimes, pulling strings their way, forming a protective wall around the truth, and refusing to get involved. Possibly, had the police not found video-tapes of sexual encounters between schoolgirls and teachers, when they were looking for one of these girls after her father reported her missing, which of course obliged them to act, the families of the girls may have insisted on keeping the whole thing out of the hands of the law. As it is, the enigmatic Joseph Borg is counting himself lucky to have been the one who got away.

As for the other two perverted creeps, Joseph Portelli of Marsalforn was given a two-year prison sentence suspended for three years, which means that he won’t ever see the inside of a prison unless he copulates with another schoolgirl – or commits another crime – within the next two years. He, too, is flapping free. The teacher who filmed himself having sex with schoolgirls, on the other hand, has been imprisoned for three years. I honestly cannot understand why the difference in punishment. Is the crime of filming yourself having sex with a schoolgirl, when you are a teacher, greater than the crime of the actual act? No, it isn’t. The crime is in the sex, not in the filming. The filming is merely the incontrovertible proof that the sex took place. No doubt, this twisted man didn’t even feel the slightest shred of embarrassment at the thought of a room full of vice squad officers watching his home movies, and felt like a prize stud instead. What a saddo.

The crimes of these men were exacerbated by the fact that they were teachers. They should have been far, far more severely punished, because of the position of authority which they abused, than any other middle-aged men going around preying on emotionally needy 15-year-old girls. The argument appears to have been made in court that the girls in question were ‘not exemplary’, and that they went with the men of their own free will. Of course they did: 15-year-old girls are wont to have sex, they are growing women, and they are a magnetic attraction to a sad kind of emotionally-underdeveloped middle-aged man, the kind who cannot form a proper relationship with a ‘real’ woman of his own generation. Fifteen-year-old girls are just discovering their sexual power and love to test it. The trouble is that it generally doesn’t work much on 15-year-old boys, who are still uncouth, so off they go, testing it on the grown-ups. But even though they have the bodies of women, they have the brains of children, and can end up in all sorts of trouble. Adults are supposed to protect them from this kind of trouble, and not lead them into it, particularly when they are teachers, who have a position of responsibility and of moral authority. The way these teachers exploited the ‘bad girls’ which every school has is quite shocking. Instead of helping to put them on the straight and narrow, they went right ahead and made the most of the opportunity to get laid.

Now the Gozo Ministry has issued a statement saying that neither the two convicted men nor the one who got away still work at a girls’ secondary school in Gozo. Well, thank you. In the case of one of them, that should be obvious because he’s in prison. In the case of the other two, we need to know where they are working, if at all, and why Joseph Borg was allowed to get away without prosecution for his serious crime. That statement should not have been issued by the Gozo Ministry, because Gozo is not a fiefdom. It should have been issued by the Ministry of Education, and should have assured us that these men will never again be permitted to work in any school in the Maltese Islands.

Meanwhile, Joseph Borg, with his fortunate name and lack of a criminal record, will be able to turn up somewhere else, in some other guise where he can beguile girls in need of help into having sex with him. It isn’t even fair to all the other hundreds of Joseph Borgs who live in Gozo, is it? They deserve to have their name cleared.

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I bought my first jumbo-sized bag of IAMS dog-food this week, as a reaction to the fuss that PETA, the “I love animals and hate humans” lobby has made on the streets and in the media. I am always suspicious of people who can form relationships with animals, who feel terribly sentimental towards them, and who then cannot relate to human beings, and in human society, in the normal manner. I don’t know any of the individual members of PETA in Malta, and they might well be ordinary and nice, but PETA the world over has a terrible reputation for being people-hating before it is animal-loving.

I have been interested in animals since childhood, and often find them more tolerable companions than human beings. But this does not mean that I value animal life or animal emotion above human life and human emotion. If a dog and a person are both drowning, and I can only save one, I will save the person not the dog, without so much as a second thought. The PETA people, I imagine, would save the dog.

PETA are noted for their methods of campaigning, which involve, rather than information, sabotage of those they have named their enemies, and terrorism through the media and other forms of publicity. They helped damage the fur industry beyond repair by using violent tactics, including throwing paint at women wearing fur coats on city streets in Europe and America, carrying out publicity stunts including violent messages like ‘Only bitches wear fur’ and ‘The bitch is the one wearing the fur coat’, until women stopped wearing fur not because they took the PETA message on board, but because they were afraid of PETA’s terrorism. Now that PETA has more or less shut up about that one – because stunts lose their publicity value after some years, and PETA doesn’t know how to build a campaign on proper information – fur coats are back on the catwalk, in the magazines, and on women the world over.

The strange thing is that PETA never assaulted people buying steaks at the butcher, or walking around in leather shoes. It’s the fur coats that got their goat – I wonder why. I even have a fur coat as a raised-finger reaction to PETA – that’s how much the organisation annoys me – though I never wear it and it’s stuck in the wardrobe. PETA is extremist, and all forms of extremism are bad. Extremism is the natural home of people who are maladjusted, some of them seriously so, and quite frankly, I find this kind of mind-set frightening, disturbing, and perhaps even slightly unhinged. People like this have the intense emotional reactions and behaviour that are associated with the teenage years, except that they carry on like this, way into adulthood. It’s not reassuring.

What PETA did with IAMS was grossly unfair, and some sections of the media were equally unfair in giving so much space and airtime to libel by a so-called ‘animal liberation group’. I cannot sit down here and write an article for publication that will cause harm to somebody’s business unless I have actual proof of wrong-doing, rather than a personal vendetta or a film of doubtful origin. Yet it is apparently quite all right for a bunch of ‘animal liberators’ to stand in the middle of Valletta slandering a business operation and causing damage to those who run it. These are the sort of crazed tactics that make me sick. It is exactly the kind of ‘zealot’ psychology that in other cultures and other times led the obsessed to commit acts and espouse ideologies that caused untold harm to the human race. Get a sense of balance, PETA, why don’t you?

People come first, animals come second. Any moment now the members of PETA will start petitioning the governments of the world to allow marriage between humans and animals, unless, of course, they do not consider this a form of ‘animal liberation’ but rather of enforced animal bondage. They really should be shown the door.