For the British naval personnel, Malta was a much coveted stop: with welcoming inhabitants and a blissful nightlife that included a small but very active red-light district, Malta was the ideal stop for young men travelling the high seas. For the British, Malta was also a sex tourism-destination.
Nowadays, there are writers with no historiographic acumen or training who are presenting Malta’s nightlife history as something glamorous without the necessary context it deserves. For example, George Cini, has done a lot of great work to recover old photos of Strait Street, but George Cini has presented his photos without the necessary historical context and the right historical references to explain the economic context and the actual realities of the people he was showcasing.
Straight Street was not just a red-light district were fun and games took place: it was also a major sex-trafficking-hub in the Mediterranean Sea. Women trafficked to work in Straight Street in the 1930s included women from Ukraine, Romania and England. These women were lodged together in living-quarters and made to work in bars and as prostitutes with their services officially listed as “dancers” or as “hostesses”. An organised cartel which run the sex industry in Malta sought to consistently cover up these trafficking operations, coerced women to lie about their job, and had ample power to openly conduct their illicit operations in Malta despite the overtly-religious setting and legal restrictions.
Historians are becoming ever ore aware about the trappings and the exploitation of the sex industry in Malta, but for now, women have been the focus of these studies. Only recently has the history of young Maltese boys begun to be unraveled. Several Maltese documentary-makers in Australia, have recently begun making documentaries about the Maltese boy immigrants to Australia who ended up sexually abused by their handlers and Catholic priests. Unfortunately, we are very late to uncover these stories because many of the victims are passing away but it is important to scrape every information we have about these stories because it is the only way that some justice can be restored to these victims.
Being a boy in colonial Malta was a very hard endeavor. Boys were made to work at a very young age, often selling agricultural products in Valletta or other areas frequented by many people. They were also made to work in factories, on boats, ships, bars and construction sites. They had to survive in very difficult conditions and with little to no resources. Often hungry and desperate, they turned to crime to subsist themselves and in those dire conditions they were also vulnerable to extreme exploitation – even for sexual purposes, and unfortunately, historians have glossed over their traumatic history out of taboo.
I don’t think that it is a coincidence that journalist Chris Moore says that Louis Mountbatten liked Black and Brown boys. Louis Mountbatten preyed on boys who had no voice: the broken boys at Kincora and the boys in the colonies who had no voice and no one to speak up for them. Louis Mountbatten viewed Malta as a sex-destination from where he could easily and freely procure his boy-toys with no law or higher authority in place to restrain his behaviour. Yet Louis Mountbatten wasn’t just an evil pervert – and exceptionally bad person among the British elite. The political views of the British elite enabled the rationalisation of Louis Mountbatten’s pedophilia because for the elite, the lower-classes are just disposable tools to be exploited and used – this is the same perception the helped shape the network of Jeffrey Epstein with Ghislaine Maxwell, the co-head of this network and a member of the British elite, admitting that she considered her trafficked victims as nothing more than “trash”.
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