Raw one minute, burnt to a crisp the next

I assume everyone here will be familiar with the expression that translates (very roughly) into English as: “If it isn’t raw, it will be burnt to a crisp.”

Well, I think we might have just overdone things (pun intended) even by our rather lofty national standards of leaping from one absurd extreme to another. Still too early to say, of course… but our latest pole-vault between extremes may even be worthy of a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.

In the space of two weeks, there have been two much-publicised arraignments over allegations of ‘child abuse’… I use the term very loosely, by the way, for reasons that should become manifest quite soon. One of these cases involved a clergyman from Gozo, accused of molesting a number of teenage girls. Another involved a MUSEUM teacher, who stands accused of ‘brushing a 10-year-old boy’s genitals’ as he helped him out of the sea. In both these cases a direct or indirect link can be made with the Catholic Church, which (let’s face it) has suffered of late from a global epidemic of paedophilia scandals.

Other than that, they are chalk and cheese really. Except in one detail. Both cases have exposed an unprecedented thirst on the part of the public for DETAILS… accompanied by an equally unprecedented zeal on the part of the forces of law and order to have the suspects pilloried on mere suspicion alone.

And before even turning to the specifics… this in itself marks a clean reversal of the way similar cases had been treated in Malta up until very, very recently.

Compare these two arraignments to the situation just a few years ago, when the Dar San Guzepp scandal was only just beginning to break. For those who’ve forgotten the details, Dar San Guzepp was a home for orphaned boys in Santa Venera, formerly administered by the Missionary Society of St Paul. Its spiritual director, Fr Godwin Scerri, had been appointed to that position in the 1980s by former Archbishop Joseph Mercieca, soon after returning to Malta from Canada.

He was retained in that role even after it transpired that a warrant for his arrest, in connection with child abuse allegations, had been issued by the Canadian police in 1983.

Along with Fr Charles Pulis and the late Bro. Joseph Bonnett, Fr Godwin Scerri was later accused of having sexually molested a number of boys at the institute. The local Church’s reaction? Roughly comparable to countless analogous incidents of clerical sex abuse worldwide: Archbishop Mercieca appointed an ad hoc tribunal, presided by retired judge Vincent Caruana Colombo, in order to ‘try’ the three prelates according to the Curia’s own in-house laws.

It was only when the victims turned to the police in 2003 that the case went to court: where it was duly heard behind closed doors, and the two surviving suspects were eventually convicted.

But the accusations themselves had already become public knowledge by the late 1990s. I remember the case quite clearly because it posed a dilemma for the newspaper I worked for at the time. There was, as I remember, a marked reluctance to report the full extent of the allegations: not so much for fear of angering or offending the Catholic Church, but more for fear of angering or offending our own readers…who were in the main incensed that what was viewed as a sensational and generally insalubrious case was even being given so much media prominence to begin with.

Matters came to a head when Lou Bondi – who back then still considered himself a journalist – exposed more details than most viewers could actually stomach in an edition of Pjazza Tlieta on TVM.

Again, I remember the reactions quite clearly. Bondi (who later, during the 2008 visit of Pope Benedict, also doubled up as the victims’ official spokesman) was accused of milking the victims for all they were worth, of sensationalising the issue, and using it to tar the entire Catholic Church with the same brush, and variations of the same theme. Why did he not also make programmes about the good that the Church does in Malta and the world? What was his hidden agenda? Etc., etc.

There was, in brief, a knee-jerk reaction among certain sections of the public to somehow imply that journalists like Bondi were exaggerating the story in order to ‘harm the Church’ (the same questions were asked of my colleague Karl Schembri when he wrote about the same subject; and of me, too, when I commented about it in my own column).

You could almost say this was the standard reaction to similar allegations of sex scandals involving Catholic priests back then. In 2006, another priest from Gozo – Fr Anthony Mercieca – was accused by disgraced US senator Mark Foley of having molested him 40 years earlier in Florida, at a time when he (Foley) was an altar boy. These allegations formed the basis of a lawsuit filed by the Miami civil courts against the Miami Archdiocese, which was eventually settled out of court.

The reaction in Gozo, however, was to come out in full force to defend Fr Mercieca. This is how the Associated Press described it in 2006: “People on the Maltese island of Gozo defended a native priest accused of molesting a former U.S. congressman as a boy, saying Saturday he was a well-liked, private man with a quiet demeanour”…

You will surely note how this sort of reaction – i.e., the blanket assumption of a conspiracy theory – goes well, well beyond the maxim of ‘giving the suspect the benefit of the doubt’. Benefit of the doubt means that, until absolutely certain, one shouldn’t really comment about the case at all. There was, however, no ‘doubt’ in the minds of the many people who outspokenly defended the suspects in these cases. These were innocent, blameless and even exemplary men, who were victims of a gross fabrication aimed at besmirching the Church they represented.

OK, enough about ancient history. Coming back to the two cases mentioned earlier: I think it’s fair to say that attitudes towards such matters have changed considerably: on the part of the Church, on the part of the various branches of law enforcement in Malta, on the part of the media, and – most significant of all – on the part of the public.

Let’s take them one by one. We now know that Fr Jesmond Gauci, the 42-year-old Gozitan priest accused of molesting girls aged (roughly) 15, was originally reported to the police by none other than Gozo Bishop Mario Grech himself. This marks an earth-shattering departure from Mgr Joseph Mercieca’s way of handling such matters, and up to a point from the global Catholic Church’s entire modus operandi… as evidenced in so many high-profile sex abuse cases covered up the world over.

Kudos to Bishop Mario Grech. Finally, it seems that someone within the Catholic Church has come round to understanding that this particular institution is not, in actual fact, above the law.

From here on, however, things become a little less rosy. Initially, the Gozo court issued an order against the publication of Gauci’s name. I admit this poses a particular challenge to those of us who work in the media, where there is an automatic and self-explanatory interest in naming suspects, regardless of guilt or innocence. But if I may step out of that role for a minute: that, in itself, is not and should not be a driving force in the court’s decision-making process.

There are many valid reasons to issue a publication ban, the most obvious being to protect the victims’ identity… or, (in other cases) out of concern for national security. A lesser known reason – which is sometimes controversially applied in the UK (the case of triple child killer David McGreavy springs to mind) - is to ‘prevent harm to suspects’, where there is reasonable cause to fear that the suspect might be lynched.

Whether this was the reason for the original gag order, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that the order itself was revoked following the formation of a spontaneous lynch mob on Facebook, demanding that the suspect be ‘named and shamed’ (naturally, before the trivial question of whether the man was actually guilty or not was established at law). And that, surely, is NOT a justifiable reason for the court to change its mind.

Likewise, the court also initially granted Fr Gauci bail… only to revoke it at the request of the prosecution, under the exact same circumstances. Again, there may even be valid reasons to revoke bail in this instance (though to be honest I can’t really see any myself: fear that the suspect might abscond, perhaps? If that’s the case, then bail should quite frankly never be granted at all…) But again, there are clearly invalid reasons to revoke bail, too… and satisfying a widespread hunger for revenge masquerading as ‘justice’ surely must be one of them.

This brings us to the most recent case of all: the one that seems to suggest that we might have swung so far to the opposite extreme from the days of Dar San Guzepp, that we are now off the rails entirely.

Anthony Callus, a 46-year-old catechism teacher, has become the latest to stand accused of child molestation. According to the bill of indictment, the offence in question was that he “grabbed a 10-year-old boy from his waist and lifted him out of the water”… “slightly brushing the boy’s genitalia” in the process. It transpires that the original complaint came from the child (though whether it was the child or his parents who filed the police report is not immediately clear).

Either way, times have clearly changed. Considering how, up until a few years ago, concerted efforts were made NOT to report people accused of very real and very serious cases of child abuse… but instead to stoutly defend them from the evil, nasty media that was unfairly out for their blood… my, how far we’ve progressed since those days.

If a man can now face court charges for “brushing against a boy’s genitalia” while swimming – when (to date, anyway), there seem to be no other complaints about the same man from any other quarters: nothing to suggest that this might form part of a serial pattern of abusive behaviour, of the kind that characterised all the other child abuse cases… why, we may as well go the whole hog, and just prosecute every male citizen over a certain age to have ever somehow come into physical contact with a child. Starting with every father who’s ever given his own baby a bath…

But what emerges is not just the profound change on the part of a public that now seems to see child molestation everywhere it looks (when the same public used to adamantly refuse to see child molestation, even when it took place right under its own nose). The attitude of law enforcement has changed, too.

Not so long ago, the police were visibly reluctant to press charges when three priests were accused of serially molesting boys in their care for years. Now, they act with unprecedented zeal on what seems to be the most contrived child abuse allegation this country has ever seen. As for the law courts: this time round, there was no question of a gag order, and certainly no question of revoking bail.

On the contrary: the man was denied bail at first instance, after his name had already been splashed all over the press.

Even from a cursory glance, you can see a very clear pattern emerging. It is as though the law courts are simply making up their policy on child abuse cases as they go along. It works roughly like this: ‘Ok, so we angered a lot of people by issuing a publication order against identifying the suspect in one case... let’s not make the same mistake a second time. Oh, and the same goes for the issue of bail. We screwed up by granting bail once. No need to screw up twice,” and so on.

Sorry, folks, but this is not how justice is supposed to work. There are (or are meant to be) regulations and court practices governing such issues as bail and gag orders… and these practices should have nothing to do with satisfying popular demands for heads affixed to the battlements.

Moreover they should, in theory, be applied separately, according to the merits of each individual case. Mistakes (real or perceived) made in one case should not have any bearing on decisions made in another. Otherwise, the chances of justice actually being served at all, in any case whatsoever, will depend on how badly the law-courts screwed up the last time they had a remotely comparable decision to make.

And honestly: what sort of justice do you call that?