There are quite a few people who cannot seem to be able to wrap their heads around the notion that a family of five siblings and their mother lived for some 30 years in terror of the father and husband. As we read with almost morbid fascination about the years of mental and physical abuse suffered by the Axiak family, it was as if a door had been opened on a world few of us could even comprehend.

During the endless office debate about this chilling story as it unfolded in the papers, a comment often voiced was: “How come none of them tried to leave – why did they stay there and take it?’

This question seems to overlook the fact that when you have lived in a state of fear throughout your life, terrorised by someone who seems larger than life because of his violent nature, your psyche becomes warped.

By all accounts, the man was nothing short of a psychopath. In all probability the fact that he was eventually killed by one of the sons was inevitable – one of them finally snapped. When the son was acquitted last week on the grounds that he acted in self-defence it was summed up exactly in the heading of our sister paper “Free at last”. He and his whole family were finally free from the prison which the father had put them in because of his unspeakable behaviour.

So back to the question of “why didn’t they do something about it?” But this question presupposes that we are dealing with a normal scenario.

Of course, “normal” people would not let themselves be bullied into submission by a man who rants and raves.

But when that man is your father, who has conditioned you since childhood to obey his every whim because he will casually point a gun to your head whenever he doesn’t get his way, well then normality flies out the window and compliance, as well as self-preservation, sets in.

Although they grew up to be hefty, strapping young men, the four brothers were so afraid that they could not summon up the courage to confront him. Fear is crippling. It can overwhelm you to the extent that it makes you powerless.

In contrast, in their mind’s eye their father (although according to the testimony, he was physically smaller than them) must have seemed like the incredible hulk. The power he held over them was not only due to the weapons he kept all over the house, but because of the possible repercussions to their mother, sister and aunt who not only suffered beatings, but in the case of the aunt, forced sexual relations.

The mother was a mere teenager when she married him and, from her own description, extremely naïve. She was beaten both physically and psychologically, humiliated and mentally scarred by years of living with this man who flaunted the fact that he was having sex with her sister and told her children to call her hmara.

May I also add that the priest who told her to put up with her husband and have a child so that he would “change”, has a lot to answer for.

During the trial, other witnesses corroborated the family’s story, so people have also wondered – how come none of them did anything before this?

Well, even this is understandable – it is the “I don’t want to get involved syndrome” – and unless you have witnessed violence yourself it is very hard to explain why it can make you want to distance yourself from the situation lest you get dragged into the fray. Who would want to get on the wrong side of this man, who was obviously unstable? It may sound shameful, but it’s true that we all want to save our own skin.

On the other hand, it’s unbelievable that no police were ever called in to curb the uncivilised antics of this man, if only for disturbing the peace. I’d hate to think this man was so out of control that even the police were afraid of him.

The lid that has been lifted on what goes on sometimes behind the closed doors of our ostensibly “Catholic” homes should make us stop and get our priorities straight about what the real problems are in this country.

Who knows how many more families are living in terror right now, in a pressure cooker situation similar to that of the Axiaks, which threatens to explode at any second?

Then when something tragic happens we all tut-tut and wonder why no one ever did anything about it.

Maybe our holier-than-thou politicians should stop being so uptight about “issues” which they have fabricated themselves, like the recent abortion polemic, and zero in on the much more widespread social problem of domestic violence.

Horror stories such as that of the Axiaks make it even more imperative for the long-awaited domestic violence bill to be passed with urgency. It has taken seven years for this bill to even reach the debate stage in Parliament. How many more tragedies are we waiting for?