I am following with interest the trial for perjury of Lisa May Camilleri, but most particularly the testimony against her of her daughter Leanne, 21.

Under Maltese law, people cannot be obliged to testify against their parents, grandparents, siblings, spouse or offspring, but Leanne Camilleri has stood testimony voluntarily against her mother.

You might recall that this is the case in which a man was sent to prison for the sexual abuse of his minor daughter - the young woman in question, when she was a child. After he had been in prison for around a year, she came forward and said that she had a confession to make: that she had lied under oath, that her father had never violated her, and that her mother and grandmother had coached her in her false testimony to the police and in court. I believe she has been granted clemency or immunity from prosecution. I certainly hope this is the case, because she has suffered more than enough. Her level of suffering when she was a minor, at the hands of both her parents, was so great that they should both be jailed for a long time for that alone.

Her father has spent time in prison already, inadvertently but I can't bring myself to say unjustly, because he deserved it and more. I hope that when her mother is found guilty - for it is clearly a case of when and not if - then the severity of the magistrate's judgement will reflect not just the perjury itself but the context in which it took place, and the suffering caused by the mother's behaviour towards her daughter.

The story of what Leanne Camilleri and her brother endured is almost too painful to contemplate. For yes, she had a brother. He died of cancer at 15, because the extent of the neglect to which those two children were subjected means that he did not get the treatment he needed before it was far too late. When he was already ill, and still a child, their mother expelled the two of them from the house and onto the street. They used to sleep on benches in public gardens and scrounged for food. Shockingly, no neighbours or anybody else seems to have noticed what was going on, or could be motivated to tell the police or Social Services if they did. And the children themselves did not know enough to understand that they could go to the authorities for help.

Leanne, who was older than her brother but still a child herself, became responsible for him. "My brother was always afraid that we would have nowhere to sleep and nothing to eat," she said in court. "Even when he was ill, our mother threw us out of the house." Adults are often diagnosed with cancer after periods of extreme stress or prolonged emotional trauma. Maybe that is what happened to that poor child, who is now dead. It is not only his death that is upsetting, but the fact that in his brief life, he knew no love, no kindness and no security. He lived the life of a city urchin of 150 years ago, and that life was just as brief.

The main focus seems to be on the mother and her evil, as though the father were merely peripheral, as fathers so often tend to be in Maltese culture. But the father is guilty of the grossest neglect and abandonment of his children. I had once written something about this when the news first broke of his wrongful conviction for sexual abuse, and received many comments from people who said I couldn't blame him for anything because he wasn't living at home with them, and that I couldn't blame him for walking out because he couldn't have been expected to live with a woman like that.

Those comments made me furious. He couldn't be expected to live with a woman like that, but then he abandoned his children to the care of that very same woman he couldn't be expected to live with. He walked out, and he left them there. He saved himself, and he didn't give a damn what became of them. Not only did he leave the house without them, but he didn't even begin a legal battle to win full care and custody of them. And he didn't check up on them, either, because then he would have known how bad the situation was and he would have had to do something about it. But he probably preferred not to know.

I was shocked and disbelieving when I read that a woman in 21st-century Malta threw her two minor children out of the house, one of them ill, to fend for themselves for days on end. But I was more shocked and disbelieving in my conclusion that this meant they had been abandoned by their father too. If they hadn't been, they would have gone straight to him after being thrown out by their mother. The fact that they did not, that they didn't even know where to find him, tells us everything we need to know about what a great father he was to them. Leanne Camilleri was eventually taken in by a family in Siġġiewi who is not even related to her in any way, and finally discovered what love and care are like. "The people who were meant to love me broke me instead," she said in court yesterday. But when you are a child, you don't know that. You think it is normal, because it is all the normal you know. I am truly at a loss to understand why neither of her parents is being prosecuted for neglect and abandonment - time-barring, perhaps? - though both of them should be.

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