Greed: a convenient scapegoat

Another house adjacent to a building site collapsed this week. This time there were fatal consequences as a woman silently tending her family’s home and not bothering anyone ended up dead in the most horrible way.

On social media, the general reaction was to ascribe the accident to the greed of developers. Greed is an easy scapegoat, of course. Most people understand the concept of greed while most people do not understand the physical laws that govern the stability of buildings.

This is not to say that there are no greedy developers. Of course there are. But greed is not a monopoly of some particular section of the population. There are greedy persons everywhere. You find them in all professions and jobs. There are greedy developers and there are greedy lawyers, doctors, accountants, newspaper columnists, editors, activists, and ordinary workers. People meet with greedy people all the time. That is why it is so easy for everyone to understand what greed is and why it is therefore a convenient scapegoat.

To any technically-minded person, the latest incident is one that is easier to explain than in the case of other incidents. The amount of irrelevant information being dished out on the media is incredible. Normally there is more than one factor that causes collapse of structures; and accidents happen when simple glitches occur concurrently – problems that on their own would not lead to the failure of the stability of a building. Together they make up the conditions for an accident to happen.

Many serious accidents – from airplane crashes to traffic collisions – occur this way. Apart from human errors and inadequacies, other factors would include malfunction or failure of machines, deficient maintenance and risky environment problems involving weather. All could contribute to an accident. A combination of such factors could prove deadly.

In this case, I believe there was no combination of factors. There is one reason and it is for all to see. Someone decided to remove a structure that was buttressing the existing building: meaning that the stability of the existing building was considered suspect years ago, to the point of needing buttressing.

Ignoring this obvious fact was crazy. The decision to remove the buttressing structure without any precautions or plans to replace its function was irresponsibly stupid – to the extent that whoever did take this decision was criminally negligent. There are no two ways about it. It is for the police to investigate who took the decision and to proceed in the law courts.

I do not write this with a smirk.

I write it with the sadness of knowing that in Malta, people owning a dog must have it tagged but people acting as demolition and excavation contractors do not need to have a licence. They do not need to follow a course leading to a licence. This glaring anomaly has existed for donkey’s years. It is a failure of the state and not of the developers’ lobby.

Paying for sex

The other night, I was watching the film Pretty Woman on an Italian television station. It is a popular Hollywood romanticisation of the relationship between a prostitute and her client. Apart from the story-line, actors Richard Gere and Julia Roberts made it even more popular.

Imagine, I thought, if the police were to arrest the character played by Richard Gere for seeking the services of the character played by Julia Roberts. How’s that for being a spoilsport?

In Malta, prostitution – as in the notion of paying for sex – is not itself illegal, but certain activities connected with prostitution, such as earning money off a prostitute’s income, running a brothel and loitering, are illegal.

There has been an outcry by certain NGOs and institutions because a proposed law to decriminalise prostitution in Malta will not include the criminalisation of sex clients.

These are insisting that buying sex should become a criminal offence with the argument that buying human beings for sex is exploitative and harmful – and so it cannot be normalised or legitimised. They are also referring to what is now being referred to as the ‘Nordic model’ that has been adopted by Sweden, Norway and Iceland – the decision taken by some Scandinavian countries to criminalise the ‘buyer’ rather than the provider.

Up to a few years ago, providing sex services to the handicapped and the aged was considered a social service in some of these countries. Now they have gone full circle to the other extreme.

I tend to agree with parliamentary secretary for equality and reforms, Rosianne Cutajar, who was recently quoted as saying: “I believe that we need to build on the experiences of other countries but develop our piece of legislation, rather than copying one model or the other.”

I do not agree that ‘loitering with intent’ should be decriminalised – not because it involves prostitution, but because it is tantamount to harassment of innocent passers-by.

Yet Cutajar is correct again in asserting that prostitution is a reality for some individuals, either out of choice or because they have no other alternative. How to allow for this while not tolerating human trafficking and exploitation is really the problem.

Prime Minister Robert Abela says the State has failed when it sent prostitutes to jail instead of helping them with their serious social problems. Will the proposed decriminalisation of ‘prostitution’ help to address this injustice?

Prohibition has never worked. A law that criminalises people who pay for sex – whether men or women – will not eradicate prostitution. It will simply drive it underground.

Will the people pushing for the criminalisation of paying for sex then start a crusade pushing the police to investigate and prosecute all those who allegedly paid for sexual services?

And where would this stop? Is it only the money that counts? Would anyone paying ‘in kind’ for sexual services be breaking the law? Would giving jewellery to someone with whom one has an affair be classified as ‘paying for sex’? Would a person marrying another simply for the money be breaking the law?

The nonsense one can think of in these circumstances is infinite.