Over the last 10 years, 3,250 children were born in Malta whose paternity was registered as ‘unknown’. This makes the mothers whores with too many clients to keep track of, or just women who got too drunk to remember who they had sex with, slept with passing strangers who have since left the country, or went with more than one man in the brief time-window when it is possible to get pregnant.

But that’s not the whole story, is it? Women in those categories must make up only a tiny number of those 3,250. The others just don’t want the authorities to know that they know, and perhaps even want to hide it from the father himself. There are legitimate reasons, as the law now stands, why they might wish to take this course of action. The assumption is always that they want to cheat social services, either alone or in collusion with the father, into giving them benefits as a single parent. Though there must be many cases like that, common sense should tell us that this isn’t what it is all about.

The real problem is where there is no relationship with the father, registering him as such will create one. But it will create only a legal relationship with enormous problems and hindrances for the mother and child, and no true benefits. Once he is down as the father, a man gets rights which he is able to exercise even if he does not fulfil his obligations. A father, for instance, is able to curtail a child’s freedom of movement by refusing to sign for a passport or petitioning the courts to prevent the child from being taken to live in another country. And when a child’s freedom of movement is curtailed, so is the mother’s.

I knew one woman, an Australian born of Maltese parents, whose daughter was unable to leave Malta, even for a day-trip to Sicily, until she turned 18. Her estranged father, who never played much part in her life, had successfully petitioned the courts to slap a permanent travel ban on her, on the grounds that her mother might take her to live in Australia, using a holiday as a cover-up plot. Understandably, this did nothing to make the girl love her father more, but rather the opposite. But this didn’t matter to him, because his motivation was not love for his daughter but spite towards her mother.

The women who tell the Public Registrar that they do not know who fathered their child are not all slags or sluts or social services bums. A good number of them are actually decent women who have taken what they believe to be the best decision for a harmonious life. Observers might think it’s the wrong decision, but this is probably because they simplify the situation and don’t understand what the emotional and legal consequences are for both mother and child if a man who is almost a stranger to or completely estranged from the mother is down in the birth registration as the father.

If the woman thinks the father is a decent man who will make a positive contribution to the child’s life – and I don’t mean financially – even if she is not in a relationship with him, then it is likely she will put his name down when registering the child’s birth. If she does not trust him, if she thinks he has a malicious streak, that he is irresponsible and difficult and will turn out to be trouble for her and the child, then she will not register him and, if possible, she will even try to conceal the pregnancy from him or tell him that he is not the father. She will want to keep him out of the child’s life, and she will see him as a threat. Women in general, though there are a great many exceptions and we all know a few, are hyper-protective of their infants and will seek to eliminate all sources of trouble even before they occur.

This is a decision a woman does not take lightly. She certainly takes it a lot more seriously than the decision to get pregnant – which, in circumstances such as these, is rarely a decision at all. I remember how one woman I knew agonised, while pregnant, over whether to register her former boyfriend as the father, and this because he was extremely unpleasant to her and she thought that he would use his rights over the child – a child he didn’t want – as leverage against her for the next 18 years, making life hell for both her and the child.

This woman was financially independent and wanted money neither from the father nor from social services. She had real and justifiable reasons for not wanting to register the father that were quite independent of money. At the same time, she did not want her precious child to go through life with a birth certificate marked ‘unknown father’, or to lie to the child about not knowing who the father is when she knew and was in a relationship with him when the child was conceived. She didn’t want her child to think of her as a slut, and equally, she did not want that child to go through life with all sorts of questions which she could answer.

More than 3,000 children born in the last decade in these circumstances represent a real problem that must be addressed. To dismiss all of their mothers as social services defrauders is facile. The real problem is that, under Maltese law, the rights of fathers are not dependent on their obligations. They have both rights and obligations, just as it should be, but they are able to exercise their rights independently of fulfilling those obligations. The man whose child plays no part in his life can still play a part in hers. Given that this is the main reason women do not put down the father’s name when registering their child’s birth, there the solution lies. The law has to be examined in search of ways which will eliminate this source of the mother’s anxiety, allowing her to register the father without the fear that he will remote-control her life, through her child, for 18 years.

Few women would wish their child to grow up with a ‘father unknown’ birth certificate – not because of the stigma, but because of the damage it does to the child’s psychological and emotional development, with the attendant burdens in adulthood. So we should assume that when women take this enormous decision, they have a good reason for doing it. Though some short-sighted individuals do wish to defraud social services and others actually do not know who the father is, the majority take that road because they cannot face being harassed for 18 long years by a man with whom they wish to have no relationship at all, and whose involvement in their child’s life they consider to be more trouble than it is worth.

This is a difficult one to resolve because a revised law cannot strip a father of his rights unless he fails to fulfil his obligations. But what if he is willing to fulfil his obligations but the woman doesn’t want him to do so because she doesn’t want him to exercise his rights? There has to be a way out and the government has to set about finding it. But first it has to acknowledge the real source of the problem, which is not desire for a social security cheque.

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