Women failed by a nation: Bernice the symbol of Malta’s domestic violence crisis

From the police, to the law courts, and the lawmakers and the media: the nation’s shortcomings laid bare, only too definitively, by the cold-blooded murder of Bernice Cassar

Murder victim and mother of two, Bernice Cassar
Murder victim and mother of two, Bernice Cassar

Malta’s third femicide in 2022 has shaken a nation only too used to complacency and an unwillingness to act without a harrowing crisis taking it by storm.

Bernice Cassar, the mother of two shot in cold blood out in the streets by her estranged husband, is yet again, a martyr to a system breakdown in judicial and legal protection. It is a breakdown that effectively leaves women easier to kill.

Malta’s shortcomings – the unwillingness to take the GREVIO report’s recommendations on board with the urgency they deserve; the understaffed police force that should be protecting women threatened by their aggressors; the entire judiciary beset by unforgiveable delays, postponed jury trials and a criminal lack of manpower; and the inability of the press to fully understand – not today, but ages ago – that women have been staring death in the face each time a useless protection order is issued.

Bernice was not the first. But the inability of the nation – the State apparatus and the people who were meant to protect her – to fully understand the gravity of the lack of safety for Maltese women in her situation, is a shocking truth.

This is a national crisis.

Maybe the fourth estate might have been understanding of the plight of domestic violence sufferers; maybe it did give a voice to the survivors and the activists; maybe it did understand that the patriarchy and a cultural problem of anger and aggression was something it needed to talk about.

But it did not truly wake up to the reality that Malta’s utter shortcomings in legal and judicial protection, means that each time a woman is assaulted, and each time somebody suffers some form of domestic violence, women are more likely to be killed than men.

This is the simple fact. This is what Bernice represents: Maltese women face a threat to their lives each time they seek out help from a system that frustrates them, that is unable to give them real protection, that is not even capable of mustering the power to urgently answer to these threats from the men who – like Cassar’s husband – are free to ignore requests for police ‘interviews’; or like the murderer of Chantelle Chetcuti, who can be guaranteed the freedom of a holiday while out on bail thanks to a judicial system whose sluggish pace seems to be of no consequence.

And there is no doubt that Malta’s inept minister for home affairs, Byron Camilleri, has much to answer for. He has been unable to read the shortcomings of the system he presides over.
And with him, Commissioner of Police Angelo Gafà, who despite having clear knowledge of the handicaps of the Domestic Violence Unit, which his wife-police inspector is also part of, has been unable to fully rise to the challenge before us.