The police have a working theory about the gruesome murder of Paulina Dembska. Part of its horror is that it’s a meaningless murder, totally random, unrelated to gender.
The various activist groups protesting before the police headquarters, on Saturday, claim this theory shows how the police are insensitive to the dangers faced by women in Maltese society, an insensitivity that exacerbates those dangers.
Who’s right? Should the activists wait to hear the evidence in court before they decide the police are wrong? Or is the necessary evidence already public?
The issue isn’t simple because, in one sense, the police and the activists are talking past each other. The latter are focused on Dembska. The police are focused on the man they’ve charged with rape and murder, Abner Aquilina (who denies he’s guilty).
The activists say that Dembska is the victim not just of a single killer but also of a Maltese cultural context of systemic misogyny.
It was a unique woman who was attacked and horrifically killed, there at that early hour in Independence Gardens because of her kindness and love of cats. But she was also killed because she was a woman. Her gender made her a target.
Medieval political theory held that the king was two bodies: his personal flesh and the ‘body politic’, the representative of the whole polity.
You could say the activists are saying that Dembska, at least in death, was two bodies: her unique self and a symbolic embodiment of the political state of women in Malta, facing male aggressions and dangers that aren’t even recognised by the authorities.
If the medieval king’s two bodies tell us something salient about the medieval state, then Dembska’s two bodies tell us something significant about the 21st-century Maltese state.
Justice for Dembska must be about more than punishing her killer; it must detoxify the environment that nurtured him.
The police response has been, essentially, that Dembska can’t have been Everywoman because Aquilina isn’t Everyman. This murder had nothing to do with the environment. It was completely driven by what was going on in Aquilina’s head. This is a case of someone going berserk, it is alleged.
It might easily have been a man who was killed instead and the evidence in court will show this. The Dembska case says nothing about the predicament of women in general. It’s the wrong case on which to protest.
Once more, who’s right? We need to split the issue into two.
First, have the police been showing culpable insensitivity to women’s issues? Yes, if only because, in their press conference, they generalised from the Dembska case: the fact that the murder was random (according to their theory) means that Malta is safe.
Rape always has a point. Unlike murder, it is caused by its meaning: the desecration of someone’s body and gender identity- Ranier Fsadni
Obviously, that doesn’t follow logically. At best, if it’s correct, the police theory means that no conclusions can be drawn about Malta’s general safety for women.
But there’s a mass of evidence about the difficulties, prejudice and aggressions that women face in everyday life. They include how women and their complaints are treated by the police. Their reality doesn’t hang on the Dembska case.
The murder investigators can’t be blamed for the sins of society or even of the rest of the police force. But they can be blamed for being ignorant of, or discounting, women’s claims of systemic dangers. It would be a grim irony if the Dembska case serves to reinforce an unfounded complacency.
Second, is this insensitivity also affecting the substantive analysis of the case? The activists say the police are wrong to conclude that, just because two men were attacked by the same assailant before the murder, therefore, the attack on Dembska was logically unrelated to gender.
The activists are right. It’s true that murder can be senseless; but rape is never meaningless.
The meaning of murder is given by its cause (material gain, hate, madness, etc.) and it can be pointless. But rape always has a point. Unlike murder, it is caused by its meaning: the desecration of someone’s body and gender identity.
The point of rape is always ideological, even if the victim is random, and the ideology is always about gender. Among other permutations, men are raped to be ‘feminised’; women are raped to be put in ‘their place’.
So the fact that Dembska might have been raped after being murdered doesn’t mean it can’t logically have had to do with the murder. The rape shows that the fury that killed her was, in her case, gendered.
There’s enough research about murder to know that it’s difficult to carry through to the end, sometimes even for hardened killers. A rage against the victim often needs to be whipped up. The circumstances in which Dembska was attacked may have been random but misogynistic rage may have permitted the murder to be accomplished.
We can’t draw conclusions about the character of the murder only from the previous attacks. The mad may rave but the ravings tap a culture. Their victims may be individuals chosen at random but their target has two bodies: one flesh, the other symbolic.
Dispensing justice means doing justice to both bodies, recognising the uniqueness of one and the shared unity in the other.