Anna Mallia | Wednesday, 21 January 2009

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In this day and age we seem to lack think-tanks that can anticipate what this country will go through in the years ahead: we have witnessed this in the financial crisis we are facing today, irrespectively of the economic gurus paid good money by government for their advice, and all the others not in the government’s pay.
Malta seems to act on impulse. We have always seemed to be lucky in this regard, always seeking to make an opportunity out other countries’ crises. We have witnessed this in tourism where turmoil in other neighbouring countries was a blessing to our tourism industry. We lacked the opportunity we had in the financial sector when civil war broke out in Lebanon, and we tried to patch that up in recent years.
Nowadays there are new realities that Malta is facing and will be facing, but of which nobody seems to want to bring this to the attention of the authorities and the Maltese people. This lack of enthusiasm or indifference from our think-tanks (if there are any) obviously leads to lack of strategy. I have always opined that the government must seriously think of dedicating one day in the year, even from the existing public holidays to the family – a Family Day.
There is no doubt that the family is going through a period of turmoil in Maltese society, the reason principally being that the couple is not ready to share its responsibilities equally. Men think that by marrying they still expect their wife to treat them as their mother, with the meal ready, the house in order when they come home from work; while the wife expects the husband to share in the family chores once she is working the same hours away from home as the husband.
We are finding many childless couples going through separation, having planned not to have children until they pay their house loans; and once the debts are paid, their marriage goes into crisis and they opt for separation rather than have children. We are also finding separations have become rampant. Until 15 January of this year, there were more than 40 separations authorised by the Family Court, bringing this to more than two a day.
A new reality today is when a Maltese woman becomes a Muslim for the purposes of marriage. In the Muslim religion, women cannot marry non-Muslim men although this does not apply to men. But there is a new dimension in the case of separated women who become Muslims to remarry. As Muslims it is a sin for them to stay married or receive maintenance from a Catholic man, if they marry a Muslim.
How is the State facing this new reality? We never hear anything of the sort, not even from the so-called Family Commission which never dares to summon any of us or the members of the judiciary who work at the Family Court, which is the barometer of the health of the family in Malta.
These Muslim women are now urged by their Muslim imams to remedy the situation because they cannot continue to live in sin any longer. They have to relinquish their right to maintenance from their Catholic husbands, and seek ways and means how to annul their marriage, because their religion does not allow them to stay married (or separated) to Catholics.
We cannot have good statistics about separations in Malta and the reason is that separations are not registered in the Public Registry by law as annulments are. So that the statistics are those provided by the Family Court. I feel that it should become mandatory for separations to be registered in the Public Registry, after all, the saga of a marriage which starts at the Public Registry must continue to be followed by the same department.
The public has the right to know if the persons they are dealing with are separated or not when doing a transaction, and ensure that the signature of the other spouse is not necessary. It has a right to get this information from the Public Registry.
The role of the mother is never given any value. Maintenance to mothers is calculate in actual expenses, but no account is taken of the time and career sacrificed by the mother to bring up the children. This brings a lot of strain on the mothers, and reflected on the children especially when confronted with a house loan which the husband is threatening to stop if the wife doesn’t agree on the amount of maintenance.
Adultery is no longer a criminal offence, but we now we have gone to the other extreme: in adultery it is the woman who pays the highest price, since she is threatened with the deprivation of care and custody of her children, whereas the husband still has the right to his share of the community of expenses, until the day that he is caught committing adultery. The law has to change if we really have marriage at heart: adultery is adultery, and the adulterous has to pay a higher price, especially if he is a habitual one.
What I wish for: a Malta where we start commemorating Family Day as in other EU countries like Italy, and that on this day think-tanks come to work and tell us the situation at present, in the near future, and what is needed! Until then we continue to bury our heads in the sand.

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