Solve The problem, rather than just dealing with it

Malta Independent Thursday, 22 April 2010, 00:00 Last update: about 13 years ago

I found myself reading a newspaper report about Dar Guzeppa Debono in Gozo, where unmarried girls wait out their pregnancies, and asking myself incredulously why this ‘home for fallen women’ is being put to readers as something positive, rather than as evidence of a backward society in which girls who fall pregnant are cast out by their parents.

That home was set up as late as 25 years ago – when much of Western Europe had moved on after the social revolution of the 1960s – to take in girls whose parents had rejected them for the perceived shame they had brought on their families by having sex outside marriage and worse, by producing what was seen as a bastard child. A bastard grandchild was shameful, but throwing your pregnant daughter out to fend for herself was not. Such was the hypocrisy that ruined many lives and condemned countless thousands of children to be raised by strangers, and not just in Malta, though here it went on for much longer. It is redolent of the horrible attitudes encapsulated in The Magdalene Sisters, a film which details the incarceration of fallen women and wayward girls in Ireland in homes run by nuns, where they worked as laundry slaves, sometimes until their death.

Dar Guzeppa Debono is the successor to other such homes for ‘fallen women’, invariably in Gozo and hosted by nuns, where families from mainland Malta would dispatch their wayward daughters in the early stages of pregnancy, allowing them to return to the family home only after the birth and without their baby. Meanwhile, they would talk about extended illness necessitating long stays in clinics or indoors, or prolonged visits to relations overseas. Those Maltese parents who could afford to do so went even further, and sent their pregnant daughters to England to ‘drop’ their babies there.

The newspaper report said that there is no similar home on the main island, as there is in Gozo. It appeared to suggest that this is because Gozo is more advanced in extending support to its fallen women, rather than more backward in throwing them out onto the street so that their parents might maintain their standing in the community. But mainland Malta has an excellent support programme for pregnant girls, most of whom are still of school age. The difference is that it is not a residential programme because those who run it are committed to the long-term good of the girls, rather than just coping with the short-term fall-out, and this must necessarily involve bringing the parents back on board.

Some years ago I interviewed the woman who headed the programme and she told me that most parents are furious at first, not least because they consider their school-age daughters to have ruined their prospects. But when they see that the situation is accepted and dealt in an efficient manner, with no hint of shame or embarrassment, and that there are so many others in the same boat, they set aside their own reservations about ‘what people think’ and just get on with it. That is the way it should be done.

Throwing your daughter out because she has announced that she is pregnant is in the same category of totally unacceptable, socially retrograde behaviour as casting your son out because he has told you he is homosexual. Every effort should be made to communicate the fact to parents like this that falling pregnant or being gay are not even remotely the cause of shame, but casting out your own offspring most definitely is, and not just shameful but reprehensible. The Bishop of Gozo was quoted in the newspaper report as praising the home for fallen women as promoting the message of family life and the sacredness of the human being from conception.

Really? What the home is actually doing is picking up the pieces of the mess created by those parents whose view of family life and the sacredness of the human being – perhaps because of the stringent message promoted by some clergymen – has led them to cast their daughters out. We must ask the Bishop of Gozo why he failed to mention this, and why, instead of merely praising the work done by the home, he does not take to his pulpit to condemn the disgraceful, inhumane and antiquated behaviour of parents who care more about what the neighbours think than about what happens to their own daughter and grandchild.

By setting up a home to take in girls thrown out on the street, what these good-hearted and well-intentioned people are doing effectively is telling parents that it is all right to reject their daughter and grandchild because they are there to clean up the mess. We are not talking here about providing shelter for the victims of violent drunks or for babies and children abandoned and neglected by their heroin-addled, prostitute mothers. Those are hopeless cases. Shelter has to be provided. We are speaking here of parents who were perfectly happy to raise their daughter for 15, 16, 17, 18 years, but who then reject her because she is pregnant without being married.

This is not a crisis that cannot be resolved, so offering alternative accommodation to these girls to enable their parents to throw them out of the house without a qualm is to shore up their self-justification and righteous rage. Much more can be achieved through making the parents see that the real shame is in throwing their daughter out. Surely this is possible even in Gozo. Please don’t tell me that society on the smaller island is still so very backward that there remain parents there who can’t or won’t see the real shame in rejecting their own flesh and blood, but can see only the perceived shame of a bastard in the family. If that is the case, then this is a real problem and the very one that should be tackled with more urgent priority than girls who fall pregnant outside marriage. Those are a fact of life everywhere and anywhere except in Islamic shariah states where women are allowed nowhere near men and boys, and where the penalty for pregnancy outside marriage is death or public lashing.