What was Magistrate Joanne Vella Cuschieri thinking?

Yesterday I read in disbelief a report from the Court of Justice in Gozo.

Magistrate Joanne Vella Cuschieri, a failed Labour Party general election candidate last photographed in public at a boxing-match with Police and Army Minister Manuel Mallia and her drug-addled brother, who was made a magistrate by her very close friend the Justice Minister Owen Bonnici, had found a man guilty of psychologically abusing his daughter, and ordered him to pay her 83,000 euros in compensation.

There were so many holes in the evidence that I thought it must just be deficient reporting. The daughter said that he had made up a rhyme mocking her because she was plump, and used to chant it at her. But I read the rhyme in another newspaper report and it wasn’t something he had made up at all – I vaguely remembered it as one of those ‘typical’ Maltese children’s rhymes.

In fact, somebody pointed that out on the comments-board.

The daughter spoke of his violence and abuse, but cited no examples except this rhyme and his telling her, just the once when her baby sister was born, that he would lock her on the roof, take her toys and give them to the new baby.

Gosh, what terrible abuse, I don’t think – it sounds more like one of those misguided and unmeant threats that some sorts of parents make in the heat of the moment when they’re wrung out and their child’s behaviour on top of everything else is driving them nuts.

I’m not justifying it; I’m putting it into perspective.

Calling the chanting of a rhyme (which turned out not to be true) and this single threat abuse worthy of 83,000 in compensation is a deep insult to all those children who really and truly are abused by their parents.

A psychologist testified that the father had no parenting skills and that he has a paranoid personality disorder. My reaction was that very many people in Malta appear to have this disorder and several of them are in public life. Are they to have their children taken away from them?

The court also heard the testimony of a teacher who taught the girl when she was in primary school, and said that she often manifested signs of anxiety. But why would it have been the father, necessarily, who caused her that anxiety?

The young woman said that she did badly at school and at 20 was still trying to get her O-levels. How ridiculous, I thought. If you’re still trying to get your O-levels at 20, your parents have nothing to do with it.

The reasons for my uneasiness about the case were confirmed when a young woman called Michaela Cordina posted a comment beneath the report in The Malta Independent (reproduced below), identifying herself as the sister of the young woman who filed the court case against their father.

Her comment is self-explanatory, but here is the main gist. It was their mother who was the problem. She didn’t look after them. She used to go out clubbing and come home drunk. Her father used to work at a restaurant and he was the one who fed them, bringing home food. The rhyme her sister complained about was on a cassette they had as children, and which they all used to sing.

Her parents split up when she was nine and she was so unhappy at her mother’s behaviour that she chose to go and live with her father. When she went to live with him, she could barely read and write but caught up as soon her life had new stability and she is now at university.

But her sister stayed with her mother and never caught up, going from bad to worse instead. As Michael Cordina points out, the only parental influence on her sister’s life from the age of 11 was her mother, so why is her father being blamed for her failure at school?

Ms Cordina says that she wasn’t called as a witness. But it was up to her father and his lawyer to call her as a witness in his defence, and yet they did not. One wonders why. Maybe he didn’t want to involve her. That in itself would make him a better parent than the mother, who seems to have spent more time winding the other girl up against her father than concentrating on her schooling.