Compare and contrast these two cases. A Libyan man has been jailed for a year and fined Lm1,500 for driving a car without a licence and without insurance cover. Meanwhile, five men who organised the production and distribution of home-made pornography, in which one of them had sex with an under-age girl, were given a light reprimand, no prison sentence, and two of them were fined Lm300 and Lm200.
True, the man without car insurance cover could have damaged somebody else’s car, or killed or maimed them – and because he was uninsured, getting compensation would have meant filing a civil suit and then perhaps not getting the money if he didn’t have any. I know what this means because I went through it myself: government cars are uninsured and one of them almost killed me, destroying the vehicle I was in, when I was 19. The long-drawn-out court case resulted in very little joy. Government vehicles are uninsured because the government is supposed to have enough assets to settle claims for compensation. Well, that’s a laugh and a half.
The point is that this man didn’t kill or maim anyone while driving an unlicensed and uninsured car. Plenty of Maltese people drive around unlicensed and uninsured. You can bet that anyone who doesn’t have a valid licence on his or her car has no insurance cover either. When they stop people without a valid car licence, the police and wardens make a show of asking those who are not carrying proof of insurance to go down to the station within 24 hours and show it to the duty sergeant.
Yet there is no efficient system to follow this up. Paying your insurance premium costs far more than paying your licence fee, and the single greatest reason that people don’t renew their car licence is a straightforward one: they can’t do so without showing they have insurance cover, and they can’t or won’t spare the money for insurance. If the police had to round up all these individuals, the jails would be full of people serving a one-year sentence after having been fined Lm1,500.
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As for the amateur pornographers, their non-sentence was a little surprising. Or again, perhaps not. What’s a little light sex on film between men, eh, nudge-nudge-wink-wink-naughty-boys, even if the “chick” involved is really a school-girl, and not just pretending to be one? These men – whose ages range from 49 down to 18 – talked the kid into having sex with the youngest of them, and then filmed the performances. This isn’t anything new; it’s been going on since film was invented, and before that, there were photographs. But you’d think that our attitude towards this kind of exploitation of schoolgirls would have become less tolerant as we became more civilised and not more tolerant.
The magistrate just ticked them off with what sounded like the words of a fond but sorely inadequate father, described by one newspaper as “cautionary words and advice”: “next time it will be jail for you”; “forget about this nonsense”; “it’s not a nice thing when we take advantage of others in this world”; and best of all, “you’re still young, so don’t get involved in such things; you’re harming yourself without even realising it.”
That must have gone down well with the girl’s parents, if she has any and if they care. One of the men apparently got sympathy brownie points by having his lawyer claim that his wife left him when the police called and she found out about his little hobby (and to think there are wives who complain about golf). Of course she left him; good for her. No decent woman wants to be married to someone who films other people having sex, especially if some of those other people are schoolgirls. It’s bad enough that plenty of decent women have no choice but to stay married – because of financial problems or because they see no way out – to men who can’t function without watching a straight run of pornographic films. If you don’t believe me, ask around. It’s as common as cheese, and probably accounts for the nudge-nudge-wink-wink attitude to what is, in reality, a serious problem.
It was a little bit odd of the magistrate to remark that one of the hobby pornographers was harming himself. How about harming the girl involved, her parents, his wife, his children, and his parents, if he had any? The damage done to himself is of no consequence here; it certainly should not be brought up during sentencing. All criminals damage their own lives, but that’s not a reason to let them off lightly. The only damage that counts is the damage that they do to others. This girl has been harmed, and the film of her stupid behaviour will survive, maybe even returning to haunt her.
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This bird-shooting business has long been out of hand, but now it has gone beyond the intolerable. A young osprey was shot in full view of the soldiers who were on coastal patrol and watching it to ensure that it wouldn’t be killed. They pulled the badly injured bird out of the sea, and the man who shot it got into his car and fled. This was the third osprey that is known to have been shot since the start of the current migratory period, and it’s yet more evidence of social backwardness.
As the president of BirdLife Malta – which would be more aptly named as BirdDeath Malta – has remarked, a pair of breeding ospreys attracts a million tourists at the RSPB Loch Garten reserve in Scotland every year, but in Malta, we blast them out of the sky.
Curiously, members of the government then devote time and effort to contributing to the hysteria being whipped up around our abortion laws, which are already the strictest in the world and can’t possibly be made any harsher. The Justice Minister put a great deal of energy into writing to hundreds of organised groups – including the Malta Karate Association and the Floral Club – to get them to support his efforts in this regard. He joined a demo and spoke at meetings, and a whole bunch of ministers and shadow ministers stood around for the unveiling of that poorly-made Gift of Life statue on a Naxxar roundabout. Yet there are no abortions in Malta, because the penalty for those who perform them or have them here is too much of a deterrent. Maltese women who want abortions take the ferry to Catania or a plane to London, and nothing can be done to stop that without turning this place into a pale shadow of Iran.
If all these ministers and shadow ministers were to devote a fraction of the energy they have spent tilting at the abortion windmill to a more necessary cause – doing something about the rampant killing of protected birds – things might change. Yet guess what? Not even one of them has stepped forward to open his or her mouth in public as ospreys and eagles are shot full of lead, shocking large parts of the population and making headline news. No – they prefer to frolic with plastic foetuses, aiding and abetting the Gift of Life movement in its Americanisation of the abortion debate in Malta.
There are only two possible explanations for this. Either they haven’t caught up with the times and realised that the number of people shocked by the killing of protected species far outstrips the number of those who enjoy killing them or who have no opinion about the matter. Or, to put it plainly, they just don’t give a damn. They are more interested in plastic foetuses – which by the way, you can buy off the internet from a site that lists “the 10 most disgusting gifts to give someone” – than they are in real, live protected birds that cease to be protected at all once they reach Malta.
There are no abortions performed here (and the abortions performed in Catania and London are none of our business, legally or morally). But there are plenty of supposedly protected birds being shot every day. It’s time for both the government and the opposition to speak out with words of condemnation, instead of allowing those who shoot protected species to carry on believing that it’s just a little naughty, like making amateur pornography with under-age girls. In their silence, our politicians embarrass us, almost as much as those who shoot the ospreys and eagles which others in Europe work hard to nurture and protect.