There is a common myth that the higher up the social scale you go, the more sexually perverted you will find people to be. I think it’s the opposite, and there is plenty of evidence to back up this conjecture that the further down the social scale you go, the more sexual perversion you will find.

For reasons that I don’t have the inclination to go into, sexual perversion appears to flourish where ignorance is greatest, where brutality is rife, and where there is scant regard for the dignity of the individual, even if there is any awareness of individual dignity as a concept.

Another problem that contributes to this mess is that, at the bottom of the social scale and more so among the underclass that hovers on the breadline, children are often subjected to a violently authoritarian upbringing that leaves them with no awareness of their rights and of their personal dignity. Women of this kind of background tend to be more downtrodden and preoccupied with the struggle for survival.

Their notion of marriage or of setting up home with a man can be skewed and archaic, with the man seen as the chief provider – even if he provides only nominally – who must be accommodated in all his whims and wishes, even if those whims and wishes include fondling his sons’ genitals, raping his daughters (or his sons), and subjecting his wife to his desires to copulate with other women right under her nose and with her full awareness, knowing that she will not walk out or throw him out.

The massive paedophilia trial going on right now in France is a case in point. It is so sordid that you wonder how people could possibly lead such a life except through the mammoth ignorance engendered by the sub-culture of poverty – coupled, of course, with congenital lack of intelligence.

The testimony of Franck V., who like in Malta cannot be named so as to shield the identity of his children, is revolting. His father raped him and his siblings on a regular basis, and testified at an earlier stage of the trial that his children were nothing to him; he didn’t care about them at all. He kept on bringing them into the world, though – and one wonders about the woman or women who first allowed him to father their children, and then failed to protect them against the monster. Franck V. grew up to rape his own children, and to watch, saying nothing, while his father raped and fondled them, too.

Again, where were their mothers? The answer is probably that they were right there, allowing the whole sick parody of family intimacy to take place. If you can’t believe it, then perhaps you should re-examine the scarcely credible attitude that was rife among certain married women in Malta at the time when so many large families lived in slum conditions in just one room, which left no privacy and contributed to the festering of incest.

“Better that my husband should sleep with my daughter,” this kind of woman would reason, “than that he should seek sex outside the home.” The daughter, in other words, was not a threat to the integrity of the home, but ‘another woman’ might shatter it by tempting the husband away.

And of course, there was the element of shame: if the husband slept with ‘another woman’, people would talk – but they wouldn’t find out he was sleeping with his daughter, and if she got pregnant, it could be passed off as somebody else’s. The girl would have to submit to her father’s advances because girls, in those days and particularly in that sub-culture, were subject to total paternal control.

The mothers not only failed to protect their children, but at times they would actively encourage their daughters into the position of ‘substitute wife’ – though only for sexual purposes – if they had tired of their man’s sexual demands, but still thought of men as ‘sexual animals’ who had to be gratified in the home lest they seek gratification elsewhere.

Some of my readers might not believe these things to be possible. If so, they live a very sheltered life and possibly keep their eyes and ears deliberately closed to protect themselves from unwelcome knowledge. These things, in Malta’s sub-culture, are still happening today – and worse.

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Women further up the social scale may protect their children more fiercely, but they manifest the same symptoms of accommodating their husband’s perverted or deviant sexuality, as long as no third person is involved. The husbands don’t even regard it as perverted or deviant precisely because no third person is involved, and they perceive themselves as having sexual rights over their wife.

Their reasoning goes something like this: Catholicism prevents me from having sex with a woman other than my wife; therefore, my wife has to accommodate me in all my demands, even if she doesn’t like them, because I don’t have the option of going elsewhere.

These men insult their wives and call them dojoq and worse, wearing them down, until they agree to feature in the porno fantasies of the man they are unfortunate enough to be married to. Of course, two consenting adults can and will do whatever they wish, but it’s more than a little different when one of those adults has been bullied, badgered, blackmailed or bribed into giving in to the demands of the other.

You never know what goes on behind closed doors until the wife finally files for separation and, sometimes, the truth comes out. More often, it doesn’t, because she is too humiliated to give the details, even if it will help her case.

The woman who was made to strip naked, wear a dog-collar and grovel, for which she was ‘rewarded’ with a rather more expensive dog-collar from a high-end brand jewellery house, couldn’t bring herself to give that kind of detail in court. Who can blame her?

Suffice it to say that I know of women who have had their housekeeping money withheld if they refused to perform the sexual circus feats of an in-house prostitute, others like the woman just mentioned, who were ‘paid’ (yes, like prostitutes) with a piece of expensive jewellery each time they performed a particular service, and another who gave in because her husband told her that if she didn’t do it, he would find a Russian prostitute who would.

My advice to the latter, had I been in a position to give it, would have been to tell him to go ahead, to have his personal effects delivered to his office, and then to write a thank-you letter to the Russian for relieving her of such a dreadful burden.

But would this have worked? No, not really – because that kind of man would have carried on living in ‘his’ house and behaving like a pig, and the wife would have had a choice between living with him or being given shelter by her parents. Women with no income can’t even rent a flat, let alone buy one.

The common link with all these women is not just that they discovered their self-respect too late in life, and that for a time they thought there was something wrong with them because instead of enjoying certain kinds of sex, they felt humiliated (they didn’t know enough to understand that their humiliation was the whole point of the exercise, because it was the only thing that could excite him), but also that they were financially dependent.

This makes it easier for husbands with too many kinks in their sexual nature to throw their weight around, demanding this and that and shutting up their discontented wives with a piece of jewellery here and a holiday there, or instead withdrawing funds so that the wife ended up a beggar in her own home.