Roamer's Column

It starts off with a dare, I suppose. It could begin at home when Mummy and Daddy are not around, or when either one or the other is never around and is that a bottle that I see before me? But it generally kicks off in an environment when music flows, if that is what the frenetic movement of sound in pubs, discos and discreditable clubs does; or, more creepily, with a visit to the grocer running an errand for Mummy who innocently orders a bottle of good ol' gin.

The habit has an understandable habit of catching on. Something, people cry out, must be done about it. By which they mean the coercive attention of the state has to be brought to bear on a situation that does nobody any good - not the state, not society, not the children.

Let me start by stating the obvious. You cannot legislate a good life. You cannot legislate a moral life. You cannot legislate a happy life. In the United States they tried their damnedest and inserted the "pursuit of happiness" into their Constitution. Many have been brought low by that chimerical chase. What we outside America can do, just, is look around to discover where we, in Malta, are going wrong.

In some areas, situations that were unheard of three, four decades ago, hit one in the face like a once-Ali uppercut, so let us kick off with a ball game that, some fear, is spiralling out of control: the demon drink and its related partner, tobacco. (I enjoy the former and have given up the latter). I am assuming that in the matter of drugs there is nobody who inhabits this minute part of the planet and is unaware that drugs have seared through the minds and bloodstreams of more youngsters (and some oldsters who reckon drugs are cool, even now that this word has gone out of fashion) than we would ever have thought possible.

A correspondence on the subject of youngsters still at school who are demonstrating a strong partiality to alcohol made an appearance in The Times last month. Philip Farrugia Randon and Richard England both contributed to the subject and correctly expressed their alarm. It was claimed that the rate of underage drinking in Malta was the highest in Europe. I do not know whether this is so. I do not think so. Nor am I certain that figures to back the claim have ever been published. That a problem does exist, however, is observable.

Two years ago, a survey of 60,000 teenagers in 30 countries (Malta did not feature) showed British teenagers "as consistently the biggest consumers of drink, drugs and tobacco". I would hate to think that rather like we managed to do at this year's European Song Festival, we have overtaken the British in this area too. A fifth of British children admitted they were smoking daily at the age of 13, or younger. On alcohol consumption, Britain was beaten to it by Denmark, but 29 per cent reported that they had been drunk 20 times in their lives. Binge drinking registered a depressing rating of 30 per cent.

Does Malta have that sort of statistical information about our schoolchildren? If not, it could start to prepare it by sending out an appropriate questionnaire that is answered anonymously by our teenage school population. When we have done that, we can begin to tackle what may otherwise become a truly serious problem. If a swathe of our youngsters is growing up with the taste of alcohol on their minds, the future may become bleak indeed.

A group has now got together and hopes to make a contribution towards the solution of teenage drinking. I am sure it will, but a caveat is in order. It has to get the facts right and the approach it adopts has to be broader than the one that expects the law to be the only remedial factor. That way failure beckons.

What should we be doing for our children?

The battle against child alcohol consumption has to be fought on a wide front. It is simplistic to believe that if licensed watering holes refuse alcohol to an underage patron, who should not be on the premises anyway, then our 13-year-old Johnny is safe. For one thing, Johnny has friends who are two years older than him, who have friends two years older than them. These can create the sort of supply-chain that will end up with a bottle of vodka on Johnny's lap before it finds its retched way on the pavement or wherever the stomach-turning, stomach-burning drink decides to heave the stuff into sight.

None of what I have written absolves the law enforcement officers from carrying out their duty, which should include the right to close down an establishment that serves underage customers. And officers who brazenly close their eyes to what amounts to corruption should receive the sheerest of comeuppances. Such action will serve in a high profile manner pour encourager les autres; but this is simply not enough. The assault on underage drinking has to begin at home. If little or nothing is done there, our little ponies and fillies will have bolted. Attracting them back to the stable will be infinitely more difficult and painful.

First line of attack, then, and I quote a headline that appeared some years ago: Parents must wake up to the realities of their children's habits. A 16-year-old, who was asked to comment in a newspaper in England what he thought of the findings to which I have referred, was brutally simple. "It is understandable that many adults do not understand the magnitude of the problem. In my experience, many parents like to adopt the 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' principle, preferring to believe that their teenage son or daughter is merely indulging in a few glasses of cider or a couple of beers. The reality is often very different."

His conclusion? "For a parent, avoiding such endemic issues... is as irresponsible as allowing a 13-year-old behind a bar. It is also wide of the mark to insist that your teenager does not drink, as the temptation will definitely be there at some point, as is the case with drugs."

Parents and the law are our assault troops against the enemy of alcohol consumption by the young. They need a back-up force. This has to embrace schools where education, if it is to be meaningful, has to assume an awareness of the problem and ways and means of solving it. Not a case of telling children how wrong it is to drink at their age, that too; but more a method of approach that brings home the horrors of what alcohol consumption can do to the mind and the body.

If any group minded to bring about a change of thinking among the young fails to persuade the department of education to introduce audio-visual aids on the subject in the classrooms, it may as well stay at home and write letters to the newspapers.

There is another weapon to be used in the fight for our children. If we believe that they have any influence - and they do - the media have a significant role to play. They can address the problem, communicate directly and without sensationalism with children who may have fallen, or not fallen, victim to the habit, and engage in an ongoing campaign that attracts problem-children to share their experience and testify to it.

All this is still not enough. There has to be an understanding that habits do not grow on trees. If teenage alcoholism exists, there is probably a contributory factor. Peer pressure is one. If Billy, Willy, Silly do it, what is a boy to do? A similar cruelty can be lashed at a girl. If Nelly, Sally do it and look so happy doing it, what is a girl to do? But there is more that steers teenagers into temptation.

Not just peer pressure

I hate starting off a sentence with: "The truth is..." It implies a monopoly over an outstanding value that one simply does not possess. So, a part of the truth insofar as this affects children's behaviour, a large part, is a growing phenomenon in Malta.

An editorial in Il-Gensillum (a still woefully under-advertised newspaper, given what it offers its readers, still poorly marketed - not a single parish church I have been to during the last five years ever has it on sale to parishioners) recently pointed out that last year, one in six children was born out of wedlock. This was 100 per cent up on the figures of four years ago.

On the ground this means that the institution of marriage in Malta can reasonably be declared to be under a tremendous assault and things will probably get worse before they can get any better.

Unintended single-parent families brought about by the death of a spouse already pose a social problem. Single-parent units that are the result of marital break-up or breakdown pose a larger one. Intentional single-parent families pose the gravest one of all. The fact of the matter, no less disturbing for being a fact, is that the indissolubility of marriage is giving way to take-it or leave-it marriage and this for a number of reasons, none of them heroic.

The institution is everywhere under siege. Liberalism, that intolerant creed, would dearly love to see it sink without a trace. It has not come up with a version of society that can be more cohesive without it. Liberals attack traditional values because it is only their removal that can usher in the world they would like to set up with all the ramifications to which such a brave, new world would be prone. Once they undermine the concept of traditional sexual morality, for example, much else would follow. Witness the extraordinary and most recent sally by the liberal wing of the Anglican Church over the appointment of a gay bishop.

Remove the concept of lifelong union from which the family springs, a union exclusive to extramarital sexual activity, which was looked upon with disfavour up to not so long ago (never mind that there would always be adults up to one trick or another) - once they could weaken the marriage-family interdependence, what else could not follow? Sexual morality has to be dumped in favour of one form of hedonism or another.

The idea that man had a duty to honour women, that women needed to be hesitant unless they were certain that Mr Rights had landed on their doorstep, both have to give way to a more lax approach and, once more lax, capable of further laxity. Kicking the institution in the face must be the objective and if having children out of wedlock can help, then kick it and let them have kids any which way they wish. The state looks after them, doesn't it, while sexually marketable men gather rosebuds where they may. The children, of course, have no say in any of this but one day papa's there, the next day he is gone; or mama for that matter. What Roger Scruton in a different context labelled as "our sexual supermarket" has arrived.

What about the state, then?

It picks up the tag, of course, or a big part of it.

Two and a half years ago, Cormac Murphy O'Connor, Archbishop of Westminster, said in an interview: "The health of the nation depends on the health of the family". He called for recognition of marriage in the tax and benefit system.

A good government that professes its belief in marriage must reward this institution that has for centuries been the bulwark of society with a small and capital 'S'. If there is a tag to pick up, it should do everything possible to collect the equivalent from the partner who has absconded and who is likely to bring another child into the world before passing on to the next flowerbed.

It is absurd that a man shares a bed with a woman, summons forth an innocent child, leaves (straightaway or after a judicial pause) for more honey elsewhere and does not lift a financial finger to help the woman who must now bring up their child on her own. If this does not cry out for some form of justice, I do no know what does. The state, for its own selfish reasons because it does not want to be involved in further welfare expenditure and for the good of a society being slowly fractured, has a very direct and special interest in disabusing our growing number of Lotharios.

The state, as I stated earlier, cannot legislate a happy family. It can, and must, however, do all it can to lay down parameters in which the orthodox family can not merely exist, but thrive. This it does by rewarding families and creating education and fiscal systems that promote the family and encourage probity. If sex education there has to be, let it be centred not on the use of the condom so much as on sexual integrity and a respect for sexuality.

This is not made easy by a 24-hour system of TV viewing during which children of 12 and younger are subjected to programmes on cable television that often does not take into account the presence of this vulnerable audience. 'Adult entertainment', a euphemism for soft porn and not so soft, is now available. In the morning, lessons on sexual integrity, in the afternoon and evening, violence and sex and as much integrity as can be retained by a sieve.

Life is not made more comfortable by the culture of trash that has insinuated itself into our lives. Look around and see sex brandished and so little femininity. Whatever happened to this mysterious element? Mary Kenny wrote a decade ago: "I long for the sublime and the beautiful, but I feel increasingly surrounded by... trashy values and trashy commodities, aspirations to trashy standards, people whose minds are filled with trashy books and trashy music and trashy art".

Take a quick look at celebrities - Madonna a role model for young girls, and the poshy model hanging on to Beckham's arms as if she were made of innocence and all the while consumed, as he is, by narcissism. As for male role models, the mind boggles.

The Synod has a culture to roll back, a media to educate, the family to bring back into the centre of Maltese life; and homilies resonant with relevance to promote among the clergy. Hey! We have a tough job ahead. The State, the Church, the Family, the Children. The media; perhaps above all, the media.