Helena Dalli: The silence that protects no one, except the institution

“No comment” is a calculated choice, not silence out of shock, confusion or embarrassment. It denies the audience the material they need to form a judgement. In doing so, the institution retains control. It refuses to participate in a conversation it cannot win.

It is called impression management, a concept developed by the sociologist Erving Goffman: the control of information to protect a public image. When the image is threatened, the instinct is never transparency. It is containment. Say nothing. Wait for the storm to pass. Let time do the work.

And time, as this Nadur rape case shows us, is a powerful accomplice. The case dragged on for nearly two decades, only to end in acquittals grounded in legal loopholes that existed at the time. By then, evidence had weakened, witnesses had moved on, and public attention had drifted. 

The silence of institutions across those eighteen years was not passive. It was active protection.

But this silence has a name older than sociology. It is omertà.

We tend to think of omertà as a Mafia word, a Sicilian thing, belonging to crime films and dark rooms and men who know the rules. But omertà was never just a criminal phenomenon. It is a social one. And it thrives just as comfortably in suits and cassocks.

The anthropologist Anton Blok, who studied the Mafia in depth, argued that omertà is not primarily about criminality. It is about the regulation of loyalty within a community that does not trust external authority. You stay silent not because you are evil, but because you belong. Because the group comes first. Because outsiders - the state, the courts, the press - are seen as threats to the community rather than protections for its most vulnerable members.

Sounds familiar?

In the Nadur case, the family of an underage rape victim was approached the very day after filing a police complaint. Not by strangers. By people they knew: a priest, and the brothers of the accused. The message was not delivered with threats. It was delivered with money, with familiarity, with the social grammar of a small community: we are all from here, let us handle this among ourselves.

That is omertà in its purest form. Not coercion by force. Coercion by belonging.

The role of the priest deserves particular attention. 

In a small Gozitan village in 2007, a priest was not simply a religious figure. He was a central node in the community’s social network; a person of authority, trusted by families, present at births, deaths and marriages, embedded in the texture of daily life. 

When such a figure approaches a grieving, frightened family the day after they file a rape complaint, he does not need to issue threats. His presence alone carries the weight of the community’s expectations.

The implicit message is clear: this is not how we do things here. Think of what people will say. Think of the girl’s future. Take the money and let it go.

This is soft power — influence that operates not through force but through norms, relationships and the fear of social exclusion. It leaves no fingerprints. And it works.

The family, under pressure, signed. 

When the Church does not speak, it sends a signal: this how things are handled here.- Helena Dalli

The mother later said she felt she had “sold her daughter’s body.” That sentence is not just heartbreaking. It is a precise description of how omertà operates: it makes the victim’s family complicit in the cover-up, and then leaves them to carry that weight alone.

Years later, they signed again, this time for €120,000. Another sociologist,  Pierre Bourdieu,  would recognise this instantly: money being used to purchase silence and reproduce existing power structures.

The €120,000 was not compensation. It was the purchase of a particular social arrangement, one in which the truth would remain private, the accused would remain free, and the institution would remain untouched.

What makes religious institutions particularly corrosive in this regard is that they operate with an additional layer of legitimacy: sacred authority. 

When a secular organisation stonewalls, it risks looking corrupt. When a religious institution stonewalls, it can invoke a kind of untouchability, the implicit suggestion that its internal affairs are somehow beyond ordinary public scrutiny, governed by a higher order. 

The silence of the Gozo Curia draws on centuries of accumulated trust, deference and community embeddedness, and deploys that capital in the service of concealment.

When the Church does not speak, it sends a signal to every community, every family, every potential victim: this is how things are handled here. 

The message is absorbed, internalised, reproduced. 

Victims learn that speaking up leads nowhere. 

Families learn that the path of least resistance is the safest one. 

Communities learn to look away.

When an institution successfully manages its impression, it does so partly at the expense of those whose testimony would disrupt it. 

The victim’s account becomes a spoiled narrative, one that threatens the institutional performance and therefore must be contained, discredited, or simply drowned out by silence.

Thus, in small societies like Malta or Gozo, institutional silence carries enormous social weight. 

This is how omertà reproduces itself, not through explicit threats, but through the quiet normalisation of silence as the appropriate response to wrongdoing within the group.

The Church has invested considerable effort in recent years in building safeguarding structures. Those structures now face a simple test: will they act, or will they go silent again? 

Because a safeguarding commission that stays quiet when the case is public knowledge is not a safeguarding commission. It is a reputation management unit.

But, history shows that omertà is not unbreakable. 

It fractures when the cost of silence begins to exceed the cost of speaking; when external scrutiny becomes too intense to contain; when individuals within the system decide that conscience outweighs loyalty. 

In the Nadur case, it was journalism - the Times of Malta in 2008 and again now - that first broke the surface. It was the court process, however imperfect and delayed, that  named the priest in a judgment.

Journalism and courts create the opening. What fills it depends on whether institutions choose accountability or continued silence.

The Gozo Church has a choice. The Gozo seminary has a choice. The safeguarding commission has a choice.

Omertà is a decision, made or not made, every time someone in a position of authority decides whether to speak.

So far, they have chosen silence.

But silence speaks. We just need to be willing to hear what it is saying.

And silence is never neutral. It always protects someone. 

In this case, it is not protecting the victim.

Helena Dalli is a sociologist and former EU Commissioner.