Thousands of years after the building of the temples at Hagar Qim and Tarxien, we appear to be intent on creating yet another fertility cult, as if to prove that we are barely out of the Stone Age, when it comes to intellectual and spiritual development. Somewhere on the road to the airport, there is a giant phallus made out of scrap materials and masquerading as a work of art. That, it may be – after all, Damien Hirst pickles sheep and sharks and sells them for millions of dollars a piece. Yet, protruding as it does from a roundabout on a busy highway, it looks a little odd. I saw it for the first time when driving back from the airport with a friend, who shrieked: “Look! A giant w****!”. I took one look and almost crashed. Whoever claims that it is not what it so evidently is must be a virgin who has never been to Amsterdam.

Fortunately, the campaigners for chastity before marriage have not chosen this location for one of their “I waited…” billboards.

That part of Malta has become like a fairground ride on the fertility train. Drive along for a few more minutes, and there, on the Rabat road is another fertility roundabout, this one decorated with a naked couple in a passionate embrace. She is built like a brick, with bold secondary sexual characteristics. He is square and stocky, to match. Any baby they have is not going to be able to wear hot-pants, that’s for sure.

And now, thanks to the altruism of the movement that calls itself Gift of Life, which appears unable to think of better ways to spend its money, the fertility cycle has been completed.

Drive from the phallus to the couple about to copulate, and carry on a little further to Naxxar. There, on yet another roundabout (of course) is the inevitable result of all this roundabout action: a pregnant woman. Only she is not a normal pregnant woman, with the foetus inside her as nature dictates. Instead, she is a freak pregnant woman, with the foetus on the outside. It put me in mind of one of those 1980s films, like The Fly, The Thing, or Alien, in which some weird creature takes over a person’s body and morphs it. If it is discovered beneath a heap of earth two thousand years down the line, archaeologists will have endless fun speculating what kind of weird fertility cult would make such a thing: the Goddess of Pregnancy, depicted with the external foetus.

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It’s the Information Age, or so I am told, but this latest development in our fertility cult would have made the people of the Stone Age very proud. I saw the pictures and read the reports of the unveiling – itself a ceremony thousands of years old – and the first thing I thought was how little must be different between that scene and the day the fat figures were first hauled into position at Hagar Qim.

What is happening today is also a form of fertility cult. If it has anything at all to do with religion, then it is the religion of the days when the process of sex and procreation was enveloped in magical rites, and when pregnancy and birth were incomprehensible mysteries. Our knowledge of biology has moved on a little since then. So has our attitude towards religion.

Now, it’s about decent behaviour towards others, rather than a relentless obsession about who has sex with whom and when, to beget what.

I suppose old habits die hard, and the Mediterranean fixation on fertility, thousands of years old, is not going to be shaken off easily just because it’s 2006 and we’ve joined the European Union. That would be asking too much. So let’s roll out more of these fertility statues. We’ve got more than enough roundabouts to cope.

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I suppose the time has come for some postgraduate student to write a thesis on roundabout art (perhaps that last word should be in inverted commas). I take a great interest in this subject, a hangover from my own student days when I read anthropology. The two main themes of roundabout art are sex and death. After the preponderance of naked couples feeling each other up, scrap-metal phalluses, and pregnant women bearing strange foetuses outside their bodies, the most popular form of roundabout decoration is a memorial to the dead – the collective dead of World War II (though only those from the town or village where the roundabout is situated, of course).

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Last week, a Maltese man was jailed for corrupting repeatedly over seven years the girls he had adopted, who were five and seven when he brought them over. This man turned the lives of two small girls into a hellish nightmare. Their mothers signed them away in the hope that they would have a better life than they could ever give them in their impoverished country, and this is how they ended up. It doesn’t even bear thinking about. Well, as long as we have our fertility cults, all is hunky-dory. We can worship foetuses and let the children go to hell.

What does bear thinking about, though, is the fact that their adoptive mother was not charged alongside her husband. Let’s put it this way: she would have had to be completely blind, deaf and dumb (the intellectual sort of dumb and not the inability to speak) not to realise that her young daughters were being repeatedly defiled by her husband.

The physical damage would have been visible – unless, of course, her husband maintained exclusive responsibility for washing them and dressing them, and even that would have been strange enough, ringing the alarm bells of suspicion. She might also have wished to ask her husband what he was doing in the bathroom with both his naked daughters, one of whom was old enough to get pregnant and so well beyond the age where her father should have been washing her.

If she had stopped at covering up for the man, it would be bad enough. But she took things 20 steps further, blaming the girls and excusing him. She told the investigating officer that it was the girls who used to make passes at their father, until he succumbed. A five-year-old girl who is gagging for sex with her father? I don’t think so. She must live in a parallel universe, to imagine that she could say something like that, and the rest of us would shake our heads and agree that five-year-old girls can act like this nowadays, and what is the world coming to when you can’t even trust your kindergarten-age daughter with her father, without her making a pass at him.

* * *

I really cannot understand, on the face of the evidence that I have read in the court reports, why this woman was not arrested and charged for the criminal neglect of her children. They may have been adopted, but their legal status is exactly the same as that of a parent’s biological children. The law does not discriminate between adoptive children and biological children. Yet, I can’t help thinking that if these two girls had been the couple’s biological children, he would have been thrown in jail for a great deal longer, and she would have gone with him. Even in the reactions to the reports of the crime, you can see that beneath the disgust at the defilement of two small girls, there lurks the mitigating sentiment that he’s not their real father.

Last week, a woman was jailed for 18 months for the serious neglect of her six-year-old daughter, who she treated like one of her cats. Had she instead turned a blind eye while her husband defiled the girl every day, she would still be out and about, without a criminal record. Yet, there is no doubt in my mind as to which is the more horrible crime, and the greater neglect.

Parents can neglect by omission and not just by commission, and in fact, most neglect is by definition the result of omission, when a parent fails to do that which he or she is morally and legally obliged to do. In this case, the mother of those two girls was morally and legally obliged to guard them against the sexual predations of their father. She didn’t even try to prove that she didn’t know anything about the attacks. Instead, she justified them by saying that it was the girls who preyed sexually on their father. She must have done this in the belief that she can only be prosecuted for something she did do, rather than something she failed to do.

The reasoning appears to be that it was he who defiled the girls, and not her, so there is no count on which to charge her.

With reasoning like this, if the “cat-girl’s” father had been living in the family home and failed to stop her mother from treating her like an animal, he would not be considered culpable.