Much rhetoric is being published these days about the rights of children. Today I would like to revisit this topic from a more realistic and pragmatic perspective because I often wonder what exactly these rights are and whose responsibility it is to ensure their day-to-day application.

Just a week ago, a child in one of our Homes for Children told her carer that she would willingly give up her most cherished music, favourite clothes and her new mobile phone just to hear her mother say ‘I love you’. In fact, this is the first and fundamental right of every child: to be loved and cared for. With this solidly in place, you can then build the blocks of education, Christian initiation and the sequential steps of social development.

Thankfully, many children in Malta are blessed enough to enjoy this right throughout their life. But there is also a growing percentage of Maltese children who are not only deprived of the right to be loved and nurtured but who are daily submitted to all forms of abuse and cruel treatment. Eventually these children attract the attention of the police or social workers and are put in a Home. Here they’re out of danger and live in a clean and safe environment. More often than not they will also have more luxuries in the form of toys and entertainment than their peers who live with their families, so we all pat ourselves on the shoulder and say ‘we did a great job’.

While it’s true that these children lack nothing in the Home, what they need most is still unavailable to them and that is regular, carer/child opportunities where emotional repair can start to happen. This is their one last chance at learning that love, like cruelty, is also a reality.

This is not the fault of the carers. These, particularly the religious staff who are there day and night for them, are stretched beyond what is humanly possible to help undo the emotional damage these children have experienced in their young life. The ratio between children and staff in the Homes is often as low as 1:8 or 1: 10 children, though there are times during the day when this ratio raises to 2:8 or2: 10 children. The carers’ work is much like a mother’s work with her children. It includes cleaning, cooking, washing and ironing and attending appointments at Appogg, school or medical / hospital visits. Good will is certainly not lacking but the reality is that there is little time for individual attention or carer/child interaction.

The other important issue about which I have written and spoken to our political leaders, and to which we continue to give precious little attention, is the family environment from which the children were removed in the first place. A lot of the kids continue to return to this chaotic and harmful setting every weekend and every Sunday evening they return to the Home agitated, angry and unable to settle because of the violence they witnessed among family members and often too towards themselves. This is an essentially toxic environment yet it remains unchanged and untreated.

It is not unusual that these young Maltese citizens in children’s Homes tell their carers that their dream in life is to one day ‘kill or injure’ their parents because of the cruelty dished out to them by those who are supposed to love them and which they find very difficult to make sense of. Can this be true?

Malta had better believe it if it does not want to see a grand scale explosion of delinquency and hard crime in the near future! Then our focus would not be on whether people should or should not cohabitate or divorce but on building bigger and safer prisons to make us all believe that our society remains ‘Catholic, law abiding and family oriented’.

Sr Jacqueline Jones

Counselling Psychologist