I was scrolling aimlessly on the internet a few years ago when I came across an interview with Anneke Lucas. Sex trafficked and sold into an elite paedophile network at the age of five or six by her mother, Lucas’s story was a hideous one full of exploitation, lost innocence and her journey to undo the damage done through therapy and spirituality.

The fact that she was able to talk to the interviewer in such a calm and level-headed manner about the horrors she had been through was not only admirable but extremely memorable because, sadly, few survivors of childhood exploitation can similarly express themselves.

Childhood is a time of rapid and extreme formation. The patterns we build as infants and our ability to love, trust and self-support or lack thereof stay with us for our entire lives. This period is sacred not only because children are beautifully naïve but because everything that happens to them today will probably be reflected in who they are tomorrow. This is precisely why I continue to take great issue with our laws and court rulings when it comes to abuse and minors.

Just this week, a 55-year-old man was jailed for raping his two stepdaughters, aged 15 and eight.

Heartbreakingly, the youngest victim even told the police that she tried to hide under her bed to escape the man and lost consciousness while she was being raped. As part of a plea deal, all he got was 12 years’ imprisonment.

Then again, I suppose we should be grateful for even that since, in the same week, a 26-year-old man was handed a two-year prison sentence suspended for four years after “pleading guilty to acquiring and uploading pornographic material featuring minors and being in possession of child pornography”. What a joke.

It is becoming increasingly deplorable that our laws simply do not cater to the realities of the society we find ourselves living in. The whole point of punishment is that it mirrors the severity of the crime, and giving someone a suspended sentence for literally taking an active part in exploiting minors is ludicrous. Yes, his name may be on the sex offenders register but, given how highly restricted access to it actually is, it’ll hardly have much effect on this criminal’s daily life. It also hasn’t escaped my notice that it sometimes feels like crimes carried out on computers seem to appear “less real” to the Maltese psyche.

There needs to be far more awareness about the lasting impact of rape and exploitation on individuals. It’s not just the violation that should be put on trial but what that defilement has contributed to the existence and understanding of the world the person now has.

Some minors never completely heal from the crime committed against them, pursuing unhealthy relationship patterns and struggling with a sense of worthlessness.

Perhaps if more of us were better educated by mental health sector workers about the life-shattering effects abuse has on children such lenient judgments would no longer exist.

For these abusers, it’s just a few years at stake; it’s their victims who are forced to carry out the lifelong sentence.