A man has been sent to prison for eight years for raping a 14-year-old boy twice. I remember reading about this case when it first made the news and wondering why the boy went of his own accord to the man’s flat, to look at football pictures, when he had raped him once already, only to be raped again.

Then I remember wondering whether it was rape or what other jurisdictions call statutory rape (sex with a consenting minor). If girls of 14 can consent (though they may not), then boys of 14 can consent too (though they may not). In both cases, the adult involved gets done for sex with a minor, and rightly so – but commonsense tells us that there’s a major difference between raping a 14-year-old of whatever gender and being a pervert who notices that a 14-year-old can be manipulated into having sex and then going ahead and doing so.

There’s something else I remember reading at the time: that the boy didn’t rush home to tell his mother that he had been attacked by a stranger. She noticed something was different about his behaviour and persuaded the information out of him. The parents of a 14-year-old girl who has had sex have a hard enough time accepting that their little girl has done it out of curiosity or that she has allowed herself to be talked into it. The parents of a 14-year-old boy will have an even harder time taking the information on board that their son has experimented sexually with a man. That their son has experimented with a girl, they would understand even if they are very cross and worried. But with a man – no, that’s too tough. It’s much easier – so to speak, because easy is entirely the wrong word – to accept that the boy was raped, that he was forced into it.

But that’s almost beside the point at this stage. The case has been heard, the court has decided, and sentence has been handed down. What should interest us is the near-lack of disparity between this sentence – eight years for raping a post-pubescent boy twice – and the sentences handed down to the Pandolfino brothers some years ago, for literally preying on two small boys they treated as their victims.

Those men got 10 years, and they attacked the boys sexually on so many occasions that nobody could even begin to hazard a guess. Not only did they rape them repeatedly, but they also set up cameras in the room where they did it, to film the proceedings. The boys were not 14; they were little. The men were their ‘babysitters’, left to care for them, by their irresponsible mother. They sodomised them frequently and they filmed themselves doing it. And they got just two years more than the man who raped a 14-year-old twice.

These things are very hard to understand.

Bottom of the pile

It’s usual for journalists and lawyers to show up at the bottom of the pile in surveys about who is the most trusted. So it’s nice to see that this time round, in a survey commissioned by the European Commission, politicians have ranked even lower. Even tal-business are trusted more than people in politics, and when you’re talking about Malta, that’s really saying something. They’re trusted more than politicians even though they are perceived to be the exploiters of their employees and more interested in money than in anything else.

Politicians are viewed negatively by 32 per cent of Maltese. Next up are civil servants, viewed negatively by 15 per cent, and then the inevitable lawyers, at 10.8 per cent. Only 5.3 per cent see businessmen in a poor light, and journalists – isn’t that lovely, for once – just don’t figure.

Badge of honour

It’s been two years coming, but the Labour Party is set to change its 60-year-old emblem at last, after much talk and far too many political speeches and public events in which the party flag just didn’t feature.

Joseph Muscat thinks he has circumvented the problem of major hostility by finding a less than innovative way to get party members to think of the project as theirs. He’s going to involve them by making the design the subject of a competition open to all-comers, including the abysmally untalented. You can just imagine the results.

A ‘panel of experts’ will then draw up a short-list of what they think are the best designs, and then Labour Party members will be asked to vote by SMS. I’m guessing that Joseph Muscat hasn’t learned anything from the cautionary tale of the public vote, the Baptism of Christ, and the euro coin.

I’m looking forward to it. I love these things. When the general public is roped in to vote, you can always count on the worst and the most inappropriate design winning the day – and on groups of people getting very worked up as to why it should. The results will be something to anticipate, because the Labour Party has decreed that the army of amateur designers is to incorporate the socialist torch, the Maltese flag, and the party name, which is now one word short of the original. None of this makes for efficient contemporary design – but that’s perfectly fitting as the Labour Party is neither efficient nor contemporary.

The party leader has said that the emblem has to change because the party is changing, even while he acknowledged that people will resist the changes because of nostalgia and emotional reasons.

He recalled the words of Labour leader Paul Boffa, who once described the torch as a symbol of progress and love, and a guiding light. Sadly for today’s Muscat and for yesterday’s Boffa, there are at least two generations of people to whom the torch is a symbol of regression, stagnation, hatred, aggression, oppression and violence. And that’s the real reason why Joseph Muscat wants to change the party emblem –- because he has to. It’s also the reason he has banned his supporters from carrying flags and scarves with the current Labour emblem – because it provokes a Pavlovian response of fear and antipathy.

I shall submit my own design, under a false name. It has met with the approval of future voters already: Hello Kitty, wearing a pink T-shirt with the slogan ‘Partit Laburista’ threaded out in violet spangles, carrying the Maltese flag in one hand and a torch blazing sparkly daisies in the other. It will sell out quicker than Farsons bonds, and restore the Labour Party’s fortunes.

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