Malta No more lost boys

Times of Malta
Sunday, August 7, 2011

Claire Bonello

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There is something utterly and profoundly saddening about their description of their childhood years, where they had to scramble for crumbs of affection by putting up with the sexual abuse of theircaregivers. The blighting of their innocence was compounded by a betrayal of trust – perhaps an even greater wrong.
Understandably, the public’s feeling of revulsion was targeted at the perpetrators who had carried out the abuse. Now that the court has pronounced judgment, these feelings are once again being expressed and swelling into something approaching the hysteria of an online lynch mob, as commenters vie with each other to dream up the most atrocious punishments for the abusers.
Again, this is a perfectly understandable reaction to the disgusting and wicked nature of the offence and the fact that it was committed upon the most vulnerable members of society, so I don’t find it shocking or out of place.
What I do find worrying is that in competing with each other in dreaming up the cruellest punishment for the perpetrators (castration, rape and murder are currently hot favourites with the online mob), we are ignoring the far more serious issue of how and why the abuse happened. How could sexual abuse have taken place over the span of at least two decades without anyone other than the victims having a clue as to what was going on?
Why didn’t anyone have an inkling as to how these children were being treated? Was it a cover-up by the Church? A conspiracy of silence of the authorities who didn’t want scandal to rock the island?
Despite the widespread belief that the abuse went on undetected for one of these reasons, the victims’ testimony and their account of events show that it was due to another – perhaps more disturbing – reason.
Put quite simply, no-one knew about the boys’ ordeal because no-one was looking. And they never spoke out about their plight because no-one was there to listen to – and believe them – other than their abusers.
At the time of the interview, I couldn’t get my head around this. I couldn’t envisage a situation where there was absolutely no-one to turn to, no helpline to call, absolutely no channel of communication with the outside world. When I asked Magro why on earth they hadn’t told anyone about what was going on, his answer was simply that there was no one they could trust.
There was no one there to support a whole generation of lost boys abandoned by their parents and rendered

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invisible to the rest of society because of their status as institutionalised children.
The following extract from my April 2010 article shows what it was like for them: “The boys could find little solace in the outside world. One of the teachers at the school they attended took to giving them lifts in his car and feeling them off when the opportunity arose. It seemed that their vulnerability, their utter lack of a support system, made them easy prey. Is it any wonder why they kept their abuser’s sordid secret to themselves?
“Few outsiders entered the home. Joseph Magro does not remember any social worker or inspector coming to inquire as to how the home was run, or if standards were being adhered to. The direct perpetrators of the abuse may have been the priests who molested them, but some responsibility must be borne by the parents who shunted them off to strangers and by the state which conveniently forgot about them.
“With hindsight, one wonders how it could have been allowed to happen… allowing a group of boys on the cusp of adolescence in the exclusive care of a few individuals, with no supervision or sporadic checks to see that everything was above board.”
Of course things are different now. There is more awareness of the possibility of abuse – sexual or otherwise. Monitoring mechanisms have been put into place. If this sordid saga has served any purpose – it will be that of deterring other abusers from committing offences.
However, it should also serve to remind us that baying for the blood of perpetrators is not enough. To prevent abuse happening in future, something other than hysteria is necessary.
Public scrutiny of institutions, adequate government regulation and oversight, effective complaints mechanisms, and inspection systems are the only ways of ensuring that we don’t have any more lost boys.