Is it just me or have you noticed too how the local front pages of way too many dailies are littered with two types of crime – attacks against women and abuse of some sort of drugs?

Yesterday was another typical weekend classic with some man reportedly driving his car into his partner (which surprise surprise he is denying!) and an 18-year sentence reduced to 14 years for a drug trafficker while some other poor miscreant was found with drugs, doing nothing differently to our cocaine snorting middle classes who are never arrested for the same crime as our working classes get caught doing.

In Malta today, finding someone with drugs, almost as newsworthy as reporting anyone found eating pasta! There are two main issues I want to raise today though about our apparently most common or most commonly reported crimes.

First that these two crimes type of news are so regularly reported and consistent that worryingly, we hardly take any notice of them anymore.

What does this mean then, what does this say about Maltese society? That we apparently take wife or girlfriend beating for granted ?

And what about our nonchalance over drug arrests? Is the steady trickle of drug arrests, from poor petty courier trying to grab a way out of poverty to user turned peddler while the big fish remain among us and protected, leave us cold and disinterested? Or that since most of us either have taken or know people who take or are sometimes in the company of people who take drugs that this is just non news?

But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, what does the prevalence of these two types of crime tell us about Maltese society, its values and its failings, its aspirations and its darker realities?

The British press, on the other hand, crime-wise at least is currently mainly focused on knifings of youngsters and what this says about modern British society. They push and prod politicians to take action. Gordon Brown has responded and is now talking about having instant prison sentences for those found with knives in certain areas of Britain where gang warfare is rife and rampant, though young men carrying knives by is now not only a way to attack but also a way to defend oneself.

There might be many more drug arrests but the media try to focus on stories that grab the public imagination, as well as stories where of course the largely right wing press lay the blame firmly at government’s door, or at least call for action from the political classes.

Are our media doing the same? Do they just report these stories or are they, indeed should they be using these stories to prod politicians and society at large into action so that there is zero tolerance to all forms of abuse against women, as well as zero tolerance for those who make great livings out of drugs while we stop criminalising users?

Are we, and indeed is our media analysing deeply what our local crimes say about Malta and the Maltese, and more importantly what can be done to lessen these crimes?

They are of course entirely different crimes that reflect different and darker aspects of the Maltese psyche and the myth of happy families. All the many crimes against women here, largely unreported and kept perhaps at bay by all the amazing people who work in the protection of women services such as Dar Merhba Bik reflect our sad and Catholic Arab attitude to women.

Because make no mistake, neither of these two religions values us enough. We live in a country of male only priests and yet we know from life that women are the mainstays of society not men. And this country also penalises drug users more than wife beaters.

And what really is the news on the drugs scene? It is not that now because an election is approaching we suddenly have more news of drug arrests, I wonder why. The news is really that drug use is mainstream, as mainstream as bullying of women. Lately one reliable source told me syringes were found at University, that syringes litter the Addolorata cemetery and many of our public playgrounds. Young people’s use of drugs is the issue not arresting a few couriers cum users. Drug use is up and arresting couriers is not lessening drug usage at all.

And that is what should be engaging the energies of our journalists and our politicians. Not just reporting crimes in the most basic and unquestioning of ways but using these crimes to make us all think about the way our society is developing, the values and boredom of our young people, and how we can seriously lessen the drug and the violent culture which is not being helped by films, playstation games, internet usage and the like.

Our lives are becoming just like movie, plastic, unreal and very vanilla (boring in teenage speak).

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