inhershoes
12 the insiter • Special Edition
When fiction is too close for comfort
Full-time law student and former editor of The Insiter, Anna Abela, shares her ideas in a monthly column
O
ne balmy, summer evening, an acquaintance of mine was at a popular Paceville haunt, when she spied a teenage girl strewn unconscious across the bar. An all too familiar sordid sight, she thought. Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw next. A swarm of boys began to molest the girl in full view of the entire club. Not a single person so much as batted an eyelid, less still intervened. At one point, a bouncer emerged from the throng. ”About time,” she murmured. Clearly, she had spoken too soon. The bouncer promptly joined the boys in their sport. If you are a parent or lecturer reading this, you may be (understandably) shocked. My peers won’t be. We are the generation for whom it is now acceptable to place bets on who will bed an unwitting girl over the weekend, a practice that is becoming increasingly common among University students. These appalling incidents are but extreme manifestations of a much wider malaise. Only a few weeks ago, a woman who had the temerity to drag her work colleague before an Industrial Tribunal for sexual harassment became the subject of national ridicule. Our selfappointed pundits decreed that being told to sit between your male boss’s legs in front of an entire boardroom was not sexual harassment. It was just bullying, that’s all. Filing a lawsuit was a bit like crying for mummy when the big boys shoved you out of the sandpit, they bayed. According to one online oracle, victims of sexual harassment should simply engage in thrust-and-parry repartee with their harassers for as long as it takes to get them to run off squealing, tail between legs, preferably mortified by a dry one-liner about the size of their equipment. Now I, for one, would love to face down dirty old men with the wit and poise of Boston Legal’s Shirley Schmidt. After being propositioned by (perpetually randy) bumbling lawyer Denny Crane, the ice blonde litigator retorts: ‘Denny, get yourself a subscription to National Geographic. Make a list of all the places you will never visit. Add to that list: Shirley Schmidt.’ But Shirley Schmidt is not a real person. Shirley Schmidt is the product of an army of scriptwriters. Sadly, the rest
of us don’t get to go through life with a script and cue cards. And let’s be honest here, coming up with witty retort after witty retort to quell your boss’s running commentary is, quite frankly, exhausting. The Industrial Tribunal’s decision brought to mind an assignment about gender equality law that I had to write in my second year. At the time, I was surprised to find out that there exists next to no domestic jurisprudence on the topic. This is not because we inhabit some Scandinavian utopia. Rather, Maltese women, unlike their European counterparts, simply do not resort to their rights at law. The case that was splashed all over the newspapers a few weeks ago was a landmark judgment precisely because no one has ever had the gumption to bring a case of verbal sexual harassment before the Maltese courts. The fact that the lawsuit was successful is just the cherry on the cake. Try telling a British barrister that Malta has only had one verbal sexual harassment lawsuit throughout its entire legal history. Just this summer, a British employment tribunal ordered the Sussex police force to pay a record €273,000 in damages (over a hundred times more than the compensation awarded to the Maltese victim) in a case that was uncannily similar. Like the Maltese case, the victim, a female police officer, was subjected to cumulative abuse which led to psychological distress. The tribunal judgment specifically mentions an incident where the police officer’s superior, in a room full of her colleagues, told her: “Come sit at the front. I promise not to look at your chest.” Familiar much? Our flippant attitude to harassment (of any kind) says a lot about our culture. To think that we are the nation that collectively reached for the smelling salts when an obscure student newspaper published a character study of a chauvinist. To borrow a hackneyed cliché, the now infamous Vella Gera story held up a mirror to society. It sent shockwaves through the country precisely because our own reflection was too ugly for us to bear. photograph yentl spiteri