That is not quite what I meant.

Unfortunately, the only experience of Libyans which the vast majority of Maltese people have is of Libyan hamalli.

Imagine if the only Maltese people you knew were the kind screaming at Silvio Parnis’s coffee mornings.

You are honestly saying that only hamalli and ignorant men beat women?

It is a fact that violence against women comes from every social strata.

Also many men do not look at all like wife beaters – actually some of them are meek outside.

So you do not really know what your not hamalli Libyans do.

I know hamalli and ignorant people who have the greatest respect for their women.

I’m not one of those people who says ‘Malta and Gozo’. Gozo is part of Malta.

As long as one of the two had sufficient money to run a household for both, what mattered was that they shared a similar social background.

Plenty of ‘tal-pepe’ people had no money at all, or just a civil service or army salary, for example.

Women with no dowry were not marriageable.

In centuries past, people did not marry for love and love and marriage were completely unrelated to each other.

Marriages were contracted for pragmatic reasons, and men did not marry women with no dowry when they could marry a woman with a dowry.

It’s as simple as that.

And no, the police should NOT take every report extremely seriously. They should work out, using their experience and the balance of probabilities, which ones are malicious, which ones are a fuss about nothing, and which ones are truly warranted.

The definition of ‘domestic violence’ is now so wide and so ridiculous that I truly doubt there are very many marriages which would escape.

Given some of the horrific situations described to me in the women’s shelters, I can’t help but find it offensive that a POLICEWOMAN reports her ex husband/boyfriend to the police for banging on her front door and swearing.

If she couldn’t open the door and deal with that herself, then she has no business being a policewoman for starters.

If the law against murder were removed in Malta, you wouldn’t be able to move in the streets for corpses.

It was a settlement on the daughter to make her marriageable – in other words, literally a way of making men more likely to take her off their hands.

And after marriage, it was the husband who controlled and administered the dowry, not the wife.

Please don’t try to teach me about women in society because this is one of my subjects.

Please accept that even in Malta until 1993, women lost almost all their autonomy on marriage. Up to 1987, they even lost their jobs in the civil service/teaching.