When Dave Pelzer wrote a book about his childhood, in which he was singled out for scape-goating by his mother and miserably abused, it became an international best-seller. People couldn’t believe that such things happen, but they do. The mental picture which we have of abusive mothers is of those who are abusive to all of their children. We cannot conceive of a woman who will raise her children fairly normally, but single one out for maltreatment.

Yet this kind of behaviour is a fact of life. The woman takes an intense dislike to the child, either because the child, through inherited characteristics, reminds her of relatives with whom she has a bad relationship, or of the circumstances in which conception took place, or of the child’s father and a period of her life that she would rather forget, or even because she has serious psychological problems and externalises them, so that the child ends up as the personification of all that is wrong with her life.

This singling out for ill-treatment is possible not just because the mother has failed to form a bond with one of the babies born to her. Plenty of mothers don’t bond with their children, and yet still look after them well, even if they fail to love them. What we are talking about here is something much worse: it is the dehumanisation of the child in the eyes of the mother, allowing her to behave with cruelty. It is the same psychological process that permits the evil treatment and murder of entire groups of people because of their ethnicity or religious belief. Once they are dehumanised, anything is possible.

I have just read an excerpt from the new book by Carmen Callil, the former publisher, about one of France’s worst Nazi collaborators: a Frenchman who so hated Jews, believing them to be sub-human, that he personally arranged the collection and dispatch to Auschwitz of at least 7,000 French children from Jewish families. I was beside myself when I read it. It was just too much to take in: the description of hundreds of terrified children, many of them too young to navigate stairs, packed into buildings with the windows closed so that nobody could see what was happening, without food or water, and told, with sickening perversion, that they were being taken to find their parents (they had already been murdered).

When the time arrived for them to be taken to the cattle-trains, those too weak or too young to walk were carried sobbing hysterically by French policemen and Nazi guards and packed in like cargo for a three-day journey, again with no food or water, in complete darkness. Many of them died on the way. The youngest child on record as being shipped to his death in this horrible way was just nine months old, a babe-in-arms. None of the children survived. They all died in the storage depot, on the cattle-trains, or in the camps, where they were gassed or shot almost immediately because they were not useful for work. Or they were taken by the mad Nazi doctors for their cruel experiments (better that they were shot).

The only way we can understand this being done by Frenchmen who went home to their families and to their own children, and by German men who were probably raised in a fairly normal environment – they cannot all have been raised in hell, to end up like that – is by also understanding that in their minds, these men were not dealing with human children, but with animals. The children had been dehumanised because their Jewish parents had been dehumanised. And so they were treated like chickens, rabbits, or the cattle that usually were transported in those trains.

Yes, there are twisted people who are capable of immense cruelty towards others whose humanity they recognise. Indeed, it is the very act of cruelty towards other humans that gives them pleasure: think Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, the notorious moors murderers of 1960s Britain, who tortured their teenage victims and sent tapes of their cries of pain to the parents. But such people are freaks. They can never be normal, which is why they are incarcerated until they die.

This is something very different to treating a person, even a child, like an animal precisely because you no longer think of him or her as human.

There are individuals who see all other people as not human, but as objects there to be used and manipulated. These are psychopaths. But the thousands of Germans and French Nazi collaborators who sent people to their evil death were not all psychopaths; only a few of them could have been so. The rest had just persuaded themselves that Jews were sub-human.

Most of us have seen the dehumanisation process at work in some area of our lives. It is what happens during bullying, when one person is singled out in the playground, classroom, or workplace to be picked on, usually at the instigation of a nasty ring-leader. As others join in, the victim rapidly ceases to be human in their eyes, and just exists as an object to be taunted and battered, verbally and physically.

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This week, a Maltese woman was jailed for 18 months for treating her six-year-old daughter exactly like one of her neglected 30 cats. The girl was left to spend most of her time with the feline members of the household, she was fed sporadically, left in filthy clothes, and locked onto a balcony with no access to a lavatory, so that, like the cats, she vacated her bowels on the floor. She stank of cats’ piss, was covered in cats’ claw-marks, and had flea bites over her body. Yet oddly, she wasn’t feral, but chatted to the soldiers and policemen who rescued her from that balcony after neighbours called at the police station. She even knew who Spiderman was. “Oh, you’re just like Spiderman,” she told the paramilitary man who climbed up to rescue her. She spoke endlessly about her family of cats, but hardly at all about her mother and her six siblings, four of whom were already adults and living their own lives.

I have heard people express their shock that a woman who raised four children without neglecting them – at least that is what was implied in court; we haven’t heard their version of events and have no right to it, because they are now adults – and who went on to look after twins who are younger than this little girl, should have singled this one child out for maltreatment.

Yet this is precisely how it happened: this one child was dehumanised; the others were not. I could not help noticing, from the court proceedings, that the woman was not cruel to the girl in the sense of taking a twisted deliberate pleasure in leaving her hungry, cold or outdoors in all weathers. What struck me was precisely this: she treated her in exactly the same way as her cats, which appear not to have been well-treated, but rather left to their own devices and occasionally thrown food.

This is not an argument in the woman’s defence, of course – far from it. If we could use the argument that these people thought of their victims as animals, and so cannot be judged or sentenced as though they had been dealing with human beings, where would we be? It is merely a brief and superficial attempt at understanding the weird ways in which the mind works.

Indeed, the 18-month prison sentence that this woman received was nowhere near enough, even though the magistrate – a mother herself – did what she could to push it higher by one degree because of the chronic nature of the woman’s behaviour towards her daughter. I was taken aback to find out that the maximum sentence for this kind of ill-treatment of one’s children is just one year; this in the country that erects monuments to foetuses, and has its politicians campaigning for an even tougher abortion law than the total ban we already have (!).

This small girl, left locked on the balcony or on the doorstep in the cold and rain for hours at a time, upset her neighbours greatly. Some of them befriended her and sneaked her pieces of food. In May 2004, when they saw her once more locked on the balcony with her own excrement for company, they called the police and insisted on action. They came straight away with social workers and members of the Civil Protection Department. Yet the magistrate said in court that this was not the first time the neighbours had called the authorities to report the abuse. Why was nothing done? Why were they ignored or brushed off? I would imagine that the Social Policy Minister has set in train an investigation to find out why no action was taken to rescue this child, on the basis of earlier reports made by neighbours. I hope I am not being idealistic.

Yes. We are obsessed with foetuses and oblivious to children. And as though to drive the point home, now a Maltese man has been jailed for six years – far too short a time – for raping his adopted daughters repeatedly over many years. They were five and seven when they were brought over and they said in court that he began interfering with them immediately. When they protested, he slapped them around the head. This went on for years and years, until one of them was old enough to think she had become pregnant by her ‘father’.

They finally worked up the courage to speak to a priest and then to a guidance-teacher, and the police and social workers were called in. This man admitted in court that he had sex with the girls, but that they had ‘assaulted’ him. Oh yes, they raped him! At 11 and nine!

I can’t get away from the image of those two little girls, plucked from the horror of an orphanage, bewildered and unable to comprehend what was going on, shipped out to Malta, unable to communicate because they didn’t understand the language, and then, this weird man shutting the door and fiddling with their private parts.

It is all so, so revolting. L-aqwa li m’ghandniex l-abort!