"We sent our father to jail"

On the court steps, minutes after the sentence was handed down, we referred to the sexual abuse victims of Charles Pulis and Godwin Scerri as "survivors". Because absent from those steps were many victims who could not be there. Some committed suicide, others died of a drug overdose and others are languishing in jail for a variety of crimes.

Many of the survivors themselves are still traumatised in one shape or another. One of them (not shown in this picture) still can't get a grip on his life and was accused of raping his girfriend only last week.

The abuse of teenagers in what used to be called orphanages is uniquely traumatising because it is total. The sexual dimension is only part of the crime, its stomach churning outward manifestation. The evil root is the advantage that the abuser takes of the complete powerlessness of the young victim.

The survivors on the court steps, in silent graves and squalid jail cells depended on these priests for food, shelter, love, and all the other key ingredients of normal life. The priests were their family. With this absolute power in hand, the abusers had no limits on their power over the kids. They exercised it directly, instilled fear, threatened and rewarded silence about their unspeakable acts. It is not an accident that the victims who had the least contact with their family outside the orphanage were the most abused. Those who had no contact whatsoever, like Lawrece Grech, were utterly powerless and thereby treated like pieces of flesh in the service of sick pleasure. For teenagers like Lawrence Grech, St Joseph Home was the personal equivalent of living in a totalitarian state.

Survivors deal with their trauma in a variety of ways. They find different ways of handling their confused emotions towards themselves and their place in society, their loved ones, their families, the church. It took me years, for instance, to get used to them being rational one moment, breaking down crying the next and cracking really black jokes about their abuse after that.

Even as we walked towards the court steps, the scars of the trauma reared their ugly head. At that moment, minutes after the sentence was handed down, after a legal ordeal which lasted eight years, one of the victims took a pause from his tears of joy and said, "We sent our father to jail".

It was a chilling moment which symbolised the cruelty perpetrated by Charles Pulis and Godwin Scerri.