Hasn't Leanne Camilleri, the 20-year-old whose false sexual abuse allegations landed her father in prison for more than a year, had enough of a terrible life already? When she was found guilty of perjury, after having owned up to what she did, a merciful court put her on probation for three years and ordered her to do 100 hours of community service -which seems almost redundant given that she works as a carer already.

Now the Attorney-General, apparently unable to leave well alone - vide the National Bank cases which the government again lost on appeal - has appealed against that judgement because he believes Miss Camilleri has not been given a harsh enough punishment. This is really quite inhumane. There is no true justice without factoring in the whole context of Miss Camilleri's situation. It emerged clearly in evidence and repeated testimony that she has been making those allegations since she was eight years old, an age when children do not even know what sex is. Nobody now doubts her testimony that she was made to say those things by her mother, who was engaged in a bitter feud with her father, with a hatred so deep it clearly unbalanced her mind to the point where her young son, suffering from cancer, was neglected by her and even before that was abandoned on the street for a while. The fact that it was not true and that she was made to say it as a child forms the basis of the perjury case, but the Attorney-General's objections appear to be rooted in the belief that once Miss Camilleri reached the age of reason, more so when she reached adulthood, she should have retracted, recanted or whatever the more apposite word would be in this scenario.

Of course I agree with the Attorney-General in theory on this matter: that faced with the reality of your father in prison on the basis of the lies you have told, you would come to your senses and own up to the truth, if only because I can't see how anybody but a psychopath or the thoroughly morally disordered would be able to live the rest of their lives without being crushed under the weight of guilt. But isn't that exactly what happened? This is why there was a perjury case at all - because Leanne Camilleri collapsed with guilt, anger and remorse and told the truth. She told the truth repeatedly, even when it was suggested that she was, for some reason, lying when she said that she had been lying about it since the age of eight.

Does she deserve to be put through more of this? No, she does not, and she should not be. Pause for a minute and have the imagination to think what her life must have been like: 20 years of unutterable grief, misery, chaos and instability. This young woman, this girl, has never known normality, never known love, never known care, and never known any form whatsoever of security and stability. Her parents have between them ruined the two decades of life she has had so far. I do not cast the father in the role of innocent victim in all of this just because he was falsely accused and imprisoned. These are two separate matters.

The fact that he failed his son and daughter is indisputable, and playing the poor weakling who was helpless in the face of their mother's wrath, so much so that he had to walk out and set up home elsewhere, and then with somebody else, is not going to help him in this respect. He has forgiven his daughter, he said. Why say it? In normal parenting, that kind of thing goes without saying. We are not programmed to bear grudges against our children no matter what they do or how badly they behave, even against us. Forgiveness doesn't even enter the equation. Only sorrow and grief do.

The same cannot be said of the reverse, though. Children are programmed to bear grudges against their parents and often do, justifiably so.  It is not an equal relationship: the parent is the protector, and when the protector fails to protect, or even becomes the aggressor, forgiveness can be difficult, even impossible. What Leanne Camilleri's father should have said is "I hope she forgives me for having failed her so badly as a father." It is symptomatic of just what a bad parent he was that he thought of himself first and in terms of whether he forgives her rather than the other way round. At this point I would expect him to speak out in her defence, to argue for the perjury appeal to be stopped, that she be left alone, that he doesn't want that to happen to her - just as he argued in his own interests. He doesn't seem to have stood up for her in childhood - let's face it, if she had loved him as a father when she was a child she would never have done the dirty on him no matter how much her mother tried to force her into it - so the least he could do now is put up some token defence of the daughter he let down so badly when she needed him most.