However much make-up the justice minister and other key players on the official side try to apply to the justice system through “important measures” to combat domestic and gender-based violence, the situation on the ground remains almost tragic. In some cases, literally.
In a set of proposals marking International Women’s Day earlier this week, the Malta Women’s Lobby says the number of pending cases exceeds 1,000 with only one magistrate dealing with them.
“Women victims of violence have to wait years before they are allocated a date for their hearing and justice is hard to come by with such delays… This is putting women victims of violence more at risk and leaving them unprotected,” it said.
The message can hardly be louder. The danger for the victims cannot be any more clear or present. And the victims go beyond the person being abused as the trauma extends to their children, parents, siblings, relatives, friends and society itself. For all of them, justice is certainly not being done.
Notwithstanding widespread information and educational campaigns, persuading victims to speak up is already quite a feat.
The commissioner on gender-based violence and domestic violence says that, apart from their many fears, women in abusive relationships continue hoping things will get better. “But things never ‘fix themselves’,” she rightly cautions.
When they do report the violence, the victims realise their worries are far from over as then it dawns on them that the system is ill-equipped to address their problem in a timely and effective way.
The situation is evidently getting worse and the COVID-19 pandemic was, no doubt, a major contributor. Indeed, while just under 1,000 cases of domestic violence were reported between 2017 and 2020, the figure shot up to 1,151 cases in just eight months last year. It takes about a year from the date a report is made until a case of domestic violence starts being heard in court, not to mention the duration of the proceedings that follow.
Available statistics and reports that make it to the media on the outcome of such cases paint an even more macabre picture.
Only 42 of the 989 or so cases reported in the four-year period to 2020 ended in a guilty verdict. More than 800 of them were registered as having been ‘exhausted’, which could include the victim refusing to testify or even withdrawing the criminal complaint.
Only the other day, a man who admitted to violent incidents involving his mother and sister was let off the hook because of a mistake in the date of the incident. Of course, we are all prone to make mistakes but one would expect more attention to be given to such delicate cases.
At the end of 2020, a Council of Europe report noted that, although Malta had shown resolve to stem violence against women through various legal, policy and awareness measures, lack of adequate police training, insensitive judges and delays in collecting evidence were behind low domestic violence conviction rates.
Here we are, almost a year and a half later, and the Malta Women’s Lobby felt it should urge the political parties to take specific action to improve the situation.
Harriet Wistrich, founder and director of the UK’s Centre for Women’s Justice, said it all when she declared in an interview with Times of Malta: “The big issue for us is not so much that we need new laws but that we need more effective implementation.”
Cosmetics may well help to hide the black eyes and the bruises but the pain will remain – and the more tragic cases will end in an obituary not a judgment.