Malta has just been added to the United States of America’s ‘watch list’ on human trafficking, but though the EU Observer reported this on Tuesday night, the newspapers here seem overwhelmingly concerned instead with issues of national importance like parking spaces at the Sliema Ferries (counted and enumerated)

The EU Observer’s report is accompanied by an aerial photograph of Valletta and the caption: “Valletta, Malta – Women who cry out for help risk being punished by the police.”

I suppose the difficulties with operating in a country the size of a town is that national newspapers are also local, and sometimes even operate at the level of parish newsletters, hence the parking spaces given more coverage than the turmoil 200 miles away. If that’s what the market wants, it’s what the market gets, but I can’t help thinking that this sort of narrow focus actually encourages readers to be even more inward-looking and navel-gazing than they were to begin with. If the national newspapers make parking space in Sliema a national issue, then individuals don’t feel so petty and stupid for talking about this as though the consequences for Malta are more serious than what is currently happening in Tripoli, which we first ignored and have now forgotten.

On Tuesday, three Maltese brothers and their friend, who were up in court charged with trafficking Chinese people, escaped conviction because the Attorney-General made a mistake in the bill of indictment. And last week, two couples each composed – what a surprise – of a middle-aged Maltese man and a Romanian woman in her 20s were hauled up before the courts charged with white slavery. Two other young women, also Romanian, had told the police they were lured to Malta with promises of a waitressing job, then held captive and forced to lap-dance and worse.

But that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, isn’t it?

Just as there are people among us who were total ostriches about how attitudes towards divorce had changed (“we don’t need it or want it”), so society as a whole appears to be sticking its head in the sand about white-slave trafficking and just how sordid some of our church-goers and family men really are. If they acknowledge the existence of forced prostitution at all, they take it for granted that the tourists are Protestants or atheists bla skrupli jew valuri u morali. If a woman wants to sell sex for money, that’s her pigeon. But buying and selling women, bullying, beating and imprisoning them for prostitution and its variants, is a crime under international law.

Cyprus and Estonia were added to the human trafficking watch-list at the same time as Malta was. The United States report said that “the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing” in Malta, Estonia and Cyprus, and that the governments of these three countries have failed “to provide evidence of increasing efforts” to fight the problem.

There were other EU member states on that watch-list already, and this is the company Malta keeps there, apart from Cyprus and Estonia: Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Latvia and Romania. I trust you can make out the common factors. The US report describes a situation in Cyprus that is remarkably similar to Malta’s: sex clubs, which use women trafficked from post-Soviet countries, frequented mostly by Cypriot and Greek men, and a government which does not tackle the problem of complicit officials.

One notorious establishment in Sliema, some years ago now, was run by a former policeman. When neighbours reported to the police that they had heard women calling for help and children crying, and that it was quite obvious the ex-hotel was being run as a brothel because of all the Maltese men coming and going, somebody within the force must have tipped off the owner before the police raided, because they found nothing. The owner must also have been told who made the report, because the next morning she found all her car tyres shredded.

The ratings for all these countries, Malta included, are similar to those for Guatemala and Malawi. The rating is based not on the amount of human trafficking in these countries, but on the state’s commitment to fighting it. Russia, Moldova, Turkey and Ukraine are also on the United States’ human trafficking watch-list, and with similarly low ratings.

Hilary Clinton, who spoke about the report on Monday (United States time) said that American diplomats will now take to task those who are on the list. I wasn’t surprised when Douglas Kmiec was relieved of his duties, but now I am even less so. To believe that your duties, as US ambassador in this part of the Mediterranean, are primarily concerned with inter-religious dialogue is to be disconnected from reality.

“This week, US diplomats around the world will be meeting with their host-country governments to review action plans and provide recommendations when needed,” Mrs Clinton said. “Even in these tight economic times, we need to look for creative ways to do better.”

Malta is singled out in the report for trafficking for labour, too: “African migrants currently residing in Malta may be vulnerable to human trafficking in Malta’s informal labour market. There were anecdotal reports that Malta may be a transit country for African women subjected to sex trafficking to continental Europe.”

The report mentions by way of example the case of a Somali woman last summer who complained to police that she was press-ganged into prostitution, and instead of being helped, found herself prosecuted by those same police for having false documents. She was sentenced to six months imprisonment.

The refusal to see what is going on in Malta stems, I think, from the same root as the refusal to see that Malta needs divorce legislation: an inability to admit that people in Malta have sex with other people to whom they are not married, and more so, that some of them are particularly base about it. This denial of reality was epitomised in the horrified reaction to Alex Vella Gera’s now infamous short story. It portrayed a totally accurate picture of how lots of Maltese men see women and sex, but he was accused of being an outrageous pornographer and prosecuted for his pains.

Exactly who do the outraged think traffics these women or pays for cheap sex with prisoners in Buġibba flats, or for women to debase themselves horribly at stag parties, after which they all go home to their wives and girlfriends? For a true picture on sex in Malta, the ostriches had best speak to the people who run the state clinic for the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases.

It is not as though this is anything new. The Maltese have a long and fabled association with the sex trade. It is this very association which gave us all such a rotten name in England in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, when it seemed that every Maltese man in London who wasn’t a student was a Soho ponce or white-slaver. Imagine how much more convenient it is for the new generation who now don’t even have to leave home to do it.