Star Hobson bled to death on September 22, 2020, after months of catastrophic neglect, cruelty and abuse at the hands of two women – yes, women – her mother and her mother’s girlfriend. Star didn’t just die, she was murdered.

Thousands of children are abused and murdered daily. Faced with such terrible things, we go through the immediate motions of shock and profound sorrow but self-preservation soon kicks in. Yet, this time was different. I literally came undone, a reaction which still surprises me.

I had never known such pain, not even in deep family mourning. And Star wasn’t family. Just a poor mite of 16 months whose troubled life came to an abrupt and painful end at her home in West Yorkshire. I wept and grieved for several weeks after.

Tragedies affect us in different ways. We turn a blind eye to some and are hard hit by others. Mass suffering is usually easier to ignore because it’s harder for people to empathise with thousands. Which explains why refugees are often forgotten. And this ‘numbing’ can be extended to other tragedies. The fact that domestic violence and child abuse occur frequently and ‘domestically’ makes us pay less attention. Our emotional engagement seems proportionate to our sense of individual victimhood. 

Rarely something happens that unites us (or most of us) in grief. So, when a Polish woman, Paulina Dembska, was raped and brutally murdered in Malta on January 2, I was devastated. This was the first of its kind for Malta – a ‘stranger’ murder (and by that I don’t mean ‘foreigner’ and suggest, as some have, that a Maltese women would have attracted less public interest). It was a thrill kill, the sort we’d expect overseas, not on our small island, and not to be confused with the racial (and random) murder of Lassana Cisse.

Thrill killers are not jealous boyfriends or husbands; nor are they stalkers, racists or thieves. They are on a mission but do not have any apparent motive, except for the killer’s self-gratification – power and control at their most abstract and impersonal. That was how Paulina was raped and her life snuffed out. In what order we are still not sure.

When news of the murder broke, even before the investigation was underway, most had already made up our minds, correctly, that this was a random act. The victim had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And the arbitrariness made everything more alarming. Small wonder I found myself believing that my own son – or someone else’s – would have met the same fate in the same garden that same morning (hopefully he might have been better able to resist).

Here, you will appreciate that I’m not suggesting that women are more likely to be involved in random violence; rather that they (and indeed young boys and less robust men) are more likely to succumb to it. Statistically, men are more frequently caught up as victims, just as the majority of murderers and rapists are also men.

This did not stop those focused (exclusively?) on gender violence and femicide from assuming that Paulina had been killed solely because she was a woman. They argued that this crime was really about the culture of violence against women, insisting that casual sexism had contributed to the tragedy. 

Let us try to leave gender politics out of it- Michela Spiteri

I worry about these assumptions. Which is not to suggest that such things can’t lead to violent assault. But as far as I am aware, there is no evidence that supports the view that random cases of rape (and murder) have any direct link to sexist remarks made by a man who feels entitled to comment on a woman’s sexuality or physical appearance. To argue, therefore, that casual sexism, no matter how gratuitous or unpleasant, led to this murder is misleading and irresponsible.

Some things are far too serious to be seized upon as evidence of a ‘narrative’ which is ultimately one-sided and skewed. And doing so detracts from far more important issues we need to address. We depend on what has so far been published, but it seems that suspect Abner Aquilina’s psycho-social issues are far more deep-seated than gender-based culture wars and generalisations. 

Had a man or a boy been found dead in the garden that day, would we have drawn the same conclusions? Would we have dragged gender into the equation and argued that he was raped and murdered because he was a man? Probably not. 

In June 2016, Stephen Port went on a six-month killing spree. He lured four young men to his East London flat, plied them with drugs, and afterwards raped and murdered them. And there have been others who also specifically targeted men – a point I made when I discussed Paulina’s murder. Pre-empting the police investigation, I argued that Aquilina probably had a history of harassing men as well, only this would have been far less known. Men, it seems, do not share or report as much. Blame cultural taboos and, of course, the stigma still associated with homosexuality.

As with baby Star, I was truly heartbroken when I heard about Paulina’s murder. Such a terrible waste, and she was so far from her parents and family. And all this ‘on the sunny side’ of Tower Road – my childhood playground. A most painful extra dimension, as was her love of Malta and cats, and her choosing my country as her home. That a girl like that, who woke up early every morning to feed cats in the garden, should have met such an awful end was just too much to bear. 

We now wait for our justice system to ‘step up’. In the meantime, we would do well to address certain root causes properly and acknowledge that some people are scarred, damaged and very dangerous – like the women in Star’s life. Sometimes it’s the mindset of the perpetrator which is the problem, and not the gender of the victim.

This is not something we will ever forget. Only let us try to leave gender politics out of it. 

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