When Raphael Axiak was arrested for killing his father three years ago, his description of how he and his siblings had been raised reduced me to tears. Whenever I hear something this horrible, I don’t imagine myself in that situation, I imagine my sons going through the same thing, and this brings home to me the full horror of the story. I really cried for that man, and foremost in my mind was the thought that, as if all his suffering were not enough, he would now have to go on trial for patricide. He would spend years in prison if the jurors decided to stick to the literal letter of the law, which would lead to an unjust, rather than a just, result.

Through the past three years, I have often wondered what became of him and his family, and how they were coping. Then some days ago I found myself confronted over breakfast with the heart-wrenching, gruesome testimony of William Axiak. I read it through eyes swimming with tears. It was unbearable. But the renewed anguish I felt at what they had endured was this time tempered with relief. Raphael Axiak would be found not guilty of the murder of his father. I knew it as soon as I read that first newspaper report. The jurors, like me and possibly like many thousands of others, were crying. As sibling after sibling testified, and then their brutalised mother, the jurors, like all those who snatched up the newspaper every day to read of more ghastliness, would have been moved to extremes of that blessed form of pity: not the pity of contempt, but the pity that brings mercy and understanding. That only comes from empathy with the one who suffers. The jurors would have had to be stony-hearted in the extreme to condemn Raphael Axiak to prison for patricide after hearing all that. It would have been inhuman, as inhuman as the actions of the despicable man who is now dead.

Even the police inspector who testified did so with a great deal of compassion and apparent sympathy for Mr Axiak. The prosecuting lawyer, whose job it was to secure a conviction, must have felt terrible. He was in a truly dreadful position. I don’t imagine that he wanted Raphael Axiak to go to prison, no more than anyone else did, yet he had to stand there in court and argue that he should be found guilty of murder. What a struggle with his conscience that must have been – fortunately, it appears to have been obvious to all in that courtroom that the ultimate aim of any trial is justice, and that justice in this case would not be served by imprisoning Raphael Axiak for 30 years for patricide. Even one year would have been unacceptable.

It is significant that the jurors understood quite clearly that, in order to ensure that Mr Axiak did not spend a single year in prison, they would have to decide that he shot his father in self-defence. It would not have served this purpose to decide that it wasn’t self-defence, but then to qualify this with a plea for clemency on the grounds that nobody could blame him for killing such a dangerous and nasty brute, or that the nasty and dangerous brute deserved it, and more. Despite it being arguable that it was indeed self-defence – as the prosecuting lawyer pointed out – there can’t have been much wrangling with conscience in the room where the jurors took their decision. Had I been a juror on this case, I wouldn’t have hesitated for five minutes. Despite thinking that it wasn’t necessary for Raphael Axiak to shoot his father and that it wasn’t self-defence at that particular moment, I can more than understand what made him do it. I am even surprised that it didn’t happen years before, given the torture and the savage behaviour of the dead man. But I would have reasoned that the ultimate aim was justice, and justice meant letting Raphael Axiak go, not jailing him – so as a juror I would have used the means of securing this end, saying that it was self-defence, when I didn’t really think it was, or convincing myself that it was self-defence and quelling any doubts that I might have. I would not have been able to live with myself otherwise. I am quite sure that several of the jurors reasoned this way, too. So do many of the people I have spoken to about this case.

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As the psychologist-priest said in court, it is a “miracle of miracles” that Anthony Axiak’s sons and daughter, raised from birth amid such terrible cruelty and forced to endure acts of sadism every day of their lives, are normal and responsible, good and kind. This is one for the psychologists and sociologists to deal with; I won’t even dare to enter the dangerous territory of why some men, raised in loving and civilized homes, grow up to be psychopathic criminals, while people like the Axiaks, traumatised by their own father on a daily basis from birth, watching the victimisation of their mother and raised with their aunt in the same household as their father’s sex slave, turn out to be as far removed from psychopathic brutes and criminals as is possible.

We cannot overlook just how hard it must have been for these siblings and their mother to bare before the nation the most private details of their abject humiliation, including all that disgusting business about the mother’s sister, and the daughter being forced to sleep near her father while he watched pornography. They have lived all their lives in Gozo, remember, where there is a strong culture of secrecy and where the things that happen behind closed doors might as well happen behind the walls of Fort Knox. They have to go back now and face the gossip, most particularly the aunt, about whom much will be said except the fact that she was caught in a trap at 14 and never got out of it.

None of them could be obliged to testify – as such close relatives of the accused, they could have been exempted. But fortunately, their love for the man in the dock, and their sense of justice, was greater than any sense of embarrassment or pain they would have felt at exposing themselves in court. They did it to save their son, brother and nephew, and they saved him in the best way possible. It was the least they could do because, after all, he saved them. Throughout the trial, it was as though the man in the dock was Anthony Axiak, and not his son Raphael. The word ‘victim’ brought to mind the man on trial, rather than the dead man. This was not the trial of Raphael Axiak, but of his father. I could not escape the thought that, had Anthony Axiak been prosecuted many years ago, as he should have been, none of this would have happened. But under the present law, that would have required several police reports by his wife, and as we saw from the proceedings, this was out of the question because she risked death or the death of her children by going to the police – who probably wouldn’t have taken her seriously, anyway, and then sent her home to face the music.

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There could not have been a more forceful illustration than this of the need for the law on domestic violence that Dolores Cristina is pushing forward. The bill has been on the shelf for many years, but it would have had to be a woman minister (not just any woman minister, though) to drive it through. I hope she succeeds. Mrs Cristina said in a newspaper interview that some of her colleagues were reluctant to go ahead with it, telling her that there were other priorities (like entrenching abortion in the Constitution, no doubt), but she pressed on. She is well aware, after all, that there are around 500 new cases of domestic violence reported in Malta and Gozo each year, and that the available shelters are overflowing. Many people ask why Mrs Axiak stayed with her unbelievably cruel husband, and why she didn’t just up and leave, not just for her sake, but for the sake of the children she was in duty bound to protect from the violence of their father. The people who ask this are the sort who would have left, but then they wouldn’t be in such a position in the first place. Men like Anthony Axiak do not marry the kind of women who fight back. They are experts at picking vulnerable women who look up to them, and who have no self-esteem. It is only in that way that they can create what psychiatrists call a “master-slave” relationship. Men like this are instantly wary of women of my type, because we are obviously not the material of which victims can be made. We can actually sense them mentally backing away, fangs bared, even if physically they stay exactly where they are and even try to make conversation. We, too, can identify them immediately, and send out “back off” signals.

To understand why such women stay, you have to understand the nature of the victim. You cannot use your own standards. That is why nobody in court, not even the prosecuting lawyer, asked what should have been an obvious question, “Why didn’t you just leave? Why didn’t you take your children

and go?”, because the answer was also obvious. He had created a master-slave relationship with his wife and children, and they were all trapped.

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The new law on domestic violence, if it goes through, will make it unnecessary for the wife to report her husband in order to start police proceedings. The report can be filed by others, and the wife will not be able to stop the proceedings, as she is able to do now, even if she is threatened or cajoled by her husband. But this of course begs the question: will she be protected? It’s all very well to say that she cannot stop the process, but not if she then has to pay the price in greater beatings until he is jailed or removed from the home (for which end the new law will provide the means). The wife can, of course, stop the proceedings when the case reaches the court, by simply refusing to testify, or by lying about her husband’s behaviour. Indeed, the greatest loophole I can see here is that men who are prosecuted under the proposed new law will beat their wives senseless, threaten and

blackmail them, to achieve precisely this end. If you think hard enough about it, this particular part of the new law does not change the situation much. It only delays the point at which the battered woman can halt the proceedings under threat from her husband. There have to be changes, otherwise it will not achieve the ultimate objective, which should be that of helping women who have a victim mentality, and who do not have the spirit or the means to fight back.