The 56-year-old man, who clubbed a man in his 20s over the head during an argument about who should reverse, has been sent down for 15 years. It might seem like an unduly harsh sentence – particularly when compared to the 10 years meted out to the Pandolfino brothers, who kept a little boy each for the purposes of in-house abuse. Yet it’s not this sentence which is harsh, but the other one which was too low.

The young man has been rendered physically disabled for life. Yet what underpins my negative reaction to the aggressor’s behaviour – and no doubt, the negative reaction of the jury, too – is the fact that he wasn’t some young hot-blood, but a man five years away from collecting his pension. You don’t expect somebody of 56 to behave with all the commonsense of a teenager brawling in Paceville after a night of heavy drinking. Now the danger inherent in a road rage argument has been made obvious to all those who didn’t know about it already.

Ordinarily, I would say never give in when you are in the right, but on the road I make an exception. I learned very early on that the combination of irrationality, masculine aggression and a car is a lethal one that should never be challenged, and worse, I learned that lesson in the days when even the police were afraid of certain thugs.

In 1985, I turned from the Auberge de Castille into Merchant Street (that was the way the traffic went in those days) and found a car parked in the middle of the road, blocking the traffic, with the engine off. Its owner was chatting to someone at the entrance to the Foreign Ministry. I waited, thinking that when he saw another car waiting behind his, he would get in and drive off, or at least pull to the side. I waited some more, then some more, wondering whether I was invisible. I sounded the horn, just a little. He detached himself from the group, walked to his car without glancing at me, and then, with absolutely no show of anger or aggression – which made his next action all the more surprising – he threw the gear-stick into reverse and rammed me at speed. Still without glancing at me, he got back out of his car and returned to his conversation.

I was 21 years old and despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still believed that the police would do something about this. I reversed back out of Merchant Street – this was 1985; there was no traffic – and went down to the station with the car number. The inspector looked it up, found the name, and his face went white. It’s XYZ, he said. I advise you not to press charges, and for your own safety, I won’t even take a record of your report. I was shocked and felt helpless, but that was what life was like.

From that day on, I have given in to difficult, unreasonable and aggressive men in traffic situations, when I never do so in any other sphere of daily life. Even if I have to go against the regulations by reversing out onto a main road, I will do so to remove myself, and my car, from an altercation with a man like this.

There is too much risk involved in the alternative, and I have noticed that the risk is greater for women who are not dressed for sex and for young men, who really seem to make middle-aged men snort, stamp the ground and lower their antlers. Two middle-aged men will sort it out between them in that ejja hija kind of way that they have, but the sight of young male blood, or a woman who is behind the steering wheel rather than draped over the bonnet in a thong, is like a challenge to their honour, status and masculinity. There is no way they are going to give in and reverse, even if they only have to reverse five metres while the other person has to reverse 30 metres.

It’s important to remember that with some men, the only place they can be king and rule the roost is their own car. So boy, are they going to rule it. Others may have become accustomed to getting their own way all the time with violence and shouting, and you wonder what life must be like for the little woman at home, if he has one. More important still is the fact that we never know what is going through a person’s mind as he drives along. He might be all wound up with tension. He might be really annoyed at something. He might be mad with rage, at his wife, his mother or his boss – then he finds you in front of him, and you’re the one who gets to bear the full brunt of his anger.

An aggressive, frustrated, wound-up man in a car is almost as dangerous as the same kind of man in the same kind of mood, with a gun. So today’s lesson is: always give in, and always assume that he’s got a crow-bar, a club, or a length of chain in the boot or under the seat, and behave accordingly – which means, back off fast.

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It was reported this week that Malta is among the six EU member states with the highest rate of death through drug abuse, and 80 per cent of those who die this way are young men. In view of the archbishop’s regular tirades against working mothers, it would be nice to know how many of these unhappy souls had mothers with jobs. Given the low rate of participation in the work force of women old enough to have sons who are addicted to heroin or have died of a heroin overdose, I suspect strongly that few or none of them did.

I wish to goodness that the archbishop and many of those who think the way he does would gather some facts at their fingertips before rushing to condemn working women as being the main cause of the breakdown of family life.

In my personal experience – and it is very extensive – the children who are least well equipped to cope with the difficult transition to adulthood are those who have been spoilt and cossetted by mothers who have made them the sole pivot of their existence, quite simply because they have nothing else to do.

If you rush at your teenage son with a hot meal as soon as you hear his key in the door, when does he get to grow up? The answer is never, which is why so many Maltese men make such lousy husbands. It’s a wonder they marry at all, given that their mothers treat girlfriends like a challenge to their position as the most important woman in their little boy’s life, or somebody who has come along to take their job.

These women make their children their job and their sole reason for living, which appears to be precisely what the archbishop wants. Yet the archbishop is not an expert on childcare and this kind of suffocating mothering cannot be worse for the children themselves.

No child wants a heavy mother breathing down his or her neck 24 hours a day, checking homework, organising hobbies, interfering in activities, being a “presence” when friends drop by, and eavesdropping on telephone conversations. It’s a nightmare. The child has no privacy and no room to breathe. The women who behave like this have probably forgotten what it was like to be young.

The real danger to children is not posed by mothers who work, but by mothers who turn their children into the career they never had. They usually produce one of two kinds of adult: the one who can’t wait to flee the stifling nest, or the one who is so emotionally retarded (and this is usually a son) that he or she has to be dragged, kicked or pushed out of the nest, usually at around 35 years old, by which time the reproductive system is rapidly failing.

There is such a thing as a happy medium, but we tend to forget it.

Children are not careers, no matter what the archbishop continues to tell us. Children are individuals, and they need space.

Too much mothering has consequences as disastrous as too little mothering, and when a woman has nothing to do but look after her children, the likelihood is that she is going to sit on their backs until the day they pack a suitcase and leave.