I had to laugh when I read it. That is a nightmare? Imagine if they were 200 miles away in Tripoli. Forget the 200 miles – imagine if they were just four miles away in an open centre for refugees, or a couple of miles further away from that, in a detention camp.

We have descended into the realm of the ridiculous. If reporters have no imagination, and are forced to repeat themselves about Bisazza Street and buses, then surely somebody should give them direction. Aren’t daily morning and evening brainstorming meetings held between members of the news team and editors anymore? If they want nightmares they could usefully tell us what it’s like to be imprisoned under plastic and behind chain-link fencing in this blistering heat, with nothing to do all day and night but stare vacantly.

If they want nightmares involving Maltese people, because apparently the home-grown touch is all, they could pin down some friendly member of the social services, and knock some awareness into their readers that there are nightmares beyond a pedestrian shopping street and the loss of parking space. There are real-life stories, for instance, like that of a Maltese woman, still in her early 20s, whose four or five children have been seized by childcare officials after being found in the most terrible squalor. They include a toddler the back of whose head is flat and hairless because he was kept permanently strapped lying down in his cot. He is unable to walk, because he never learned how, and cannot eat solid food.

If they can get past the steel doors of Dar Merhba Bik and persuade some of the women trapped there to talk to them, they should be able to redefine their idea of a nightmare. Several of them long to be able to stand about on a bus-stop for hours complaining about Arriva, but they can’t leave the premises because they might well end up with a knife in their chest, as has happened to others already.

Boat-people only make the news for a few hours when they arrive or are rescued, and that’s where the story ends for the press. If the United States or France ‘takes some for us’, as it is usually put, then they make the news again for another five minutes. We will rush to film them leaving.

The drama and sulking and tantrums about the buses is so small-minded. Honestly, what do people expect? Perfection from day one? I’m not surprised there are lots of problems. I’m surprised the problems are not a great deal worse, given lack of cooperation and deliberate sabotage by a significant part of the workforce and the fact that, with these things, you can’t exactly rehearse or have two weeks of trial runs.

You start cold. Your trial run is your real, live run. But the whining is incessant. Instead of being positive about the fact that what we believed impossible – the burying of the old system and most of those who worked in it – has actually happened, we are delighted because we have a new topic to get riled about.

In other news, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has been photographed triumphantly leaving house arrest hand in hand with his enabler wife. His supporters are thrilled because the credibility of his Manhattan accuser is being undermined, weakening her case in the eyes of those who make the following non sequitur: “She misstated her income to claim benefits, therefore she lied when she said that the head of the IMF rushed naked out of his hotel bathroom after pretending the room was empty, pinned her down and forced her to fellate him. It is true that his semen was found on her uniform, but maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe he asked her and she said ‘Yes, why not? I love having sexual encounters with strange old men who I’ve never seen before.’”

You see, that’s why women almost never report a rape. Unless the circumstances are most unusual, it’s always her word against his, and unless he’s a known criminal and convicted rapist already, it’s going to be she who is on trial. Every bit of her background and personal life will be scrubbed out and hung out to dry. She will be further humiliated, made out to be unbalanced, manipulative and a liar, and who wants to go through that? That there should be a process of scrutiny is essential, because you can’t throw a man into jail purely on a person’s accusations when there is no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But tearing the accuser to shreds is just reprehensible. It means that fewer women will report rapes and more rapists will go free.

Strauss-Kahn’s supporters were wrong to gloat so soon, though. Anger at the manner in which his New York City accuser is being treated has brought forward another woman to accuse him of having tried to rape her. And this time she has a name and a face and lives in France: Tristane Banon. Eight years ago, she said, he tried to force himself on her “like a rutting chimpanzee” and she fought him off. She spoke about it publicly at the time but did not request prosecution because she was ‘persuaded’ - there you go – that nobody would take her word against that of the head of the International Monetary Fund, such an important man.

“Seeing Strauss-Kahn freed then afterwards eating in a smart restaurant with friends just made me sick,” Tristane Banon told the French newspapers. But his lawyers have got to work on her already, dismissing her claims as imaginary, and threatening to sue her for defamation, which would make it necessary for her to prove her accusations beyond doubt, an impossible thing given that nobody else was there.

In another twist, the chambermaid has sued the New York Post for saying that she is a prostitute, that she ‘welcomed a string of paying male customers’ after Strauss-Kahn was arrested. And how would the New York Post know that?

So there you have it: the women who are sexually attacked are denounced if they speak about it. They are made out to be hysterical fantasists with a revenge complex and dubious morals, liars and cheats and prostitutes. Meanwhile, their attackers are silently admired for everything but the stupidity of getting caught, while some people wonder out loud what the fuss is about. Come on, they say, it’s not as though they were virgins. As though that has anything to do with it.