Roamer's column

Last June, the Health Behaviour of School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey carried out in 2006 among 41 countries claimed that Malta had the highest rate of secondary schoolchildren who live with one biological parent - 37.6 per cent as opposed to some 8.7 per cent four years before that; a 400 per cent increase. The principal investigator of the survey in Malta, Marianne Massa, remarked that "Malta's figures were staggeringly high... because" and here she uttered a howler of a non sequitur, "separated couples could not remarry".

That massive percentage increase was accepted without question by Dolores Cristina and John Dalli, the ministers responsible, respectively, for education and social policy. It was, however, very seriously challenged by Fr Anton Gouder, who concluded that as far as he could see, the HBSC survey results were 'far removed from reality'. This was a provocative but, I imagine, correct conclusion.

Demands for the survey to be published have met with a stony silence, in stark contrast with the publicity given it by the report. Neither Cristina nor Dalli seems to have asked for publication, or if they have, they kept any request a closely guarded secret.

We are still in the position of not knowing whether that survey was flawed or, indeed, correct. Perhaps the Prime Minister could intervene.

Also in June, we learned from the same HBSC survey that, to quote a newspaper report, "Maltese 13- and 15-year-olds drink their European and north American counterparts under the table..." The article was headlined 'Children are heavy drinkers, but not drunks'.

In my book if, after some serious drinking I end up under a table - which I have never done but there have been occasions when I have walked home with a stagger I tried to pass off as a swagger - it is a sure sign for me and all those around me that I am well and truly plastered. Anyway, 51 per cent of 15-year-old boys and 39 per cent of girls that age 'indulge in weekly consumption', whatever that amounts to in volume.

There's a third statistic - it appeared the day after our heavy drinkers but not drunks - that Maltese girls report high stress from schoolwork. I am not surprised.

Assuming that the survey was correct, our boys and girls have a one-in-three chance of living with one biological parent, a spirited ability to drink their European and American counterparts under the table and, according to a genito-urinary clinic report, 50 per cent of the clinic's underage patients describing their last partner as 'casual', some of them unaware of the person's name.

If all this is indeed the case, it would be extraordinary if a fair number were not highly stressed at school - and not by their schoolwork, which they must regard, in the context of their lives, as a bizarre form of occupation.

We were also informed, this month, that a report on underage sex among patients attending the GU clinic in 2006 showed that 60 of the 1,374 (4.4 per cent) new patients were under 18. That report, too, remains unpublished as far as I can tell, but I stand to be corrected.

The buzzword is sex education

I am somewhat reluctant to bring in the GU clinic consultant who, I have been given to understand, has been placed under some form of interview embargo, but I must pick up a quote of his in The Times earlier this month: (The kids)...have acquired the lifestyle - both the good and the bad - of the rest of Europe without the necessary education. There are certain youngsters who are having rampant sex, dabbling in drugs and getting drunk without a clue as to the consequences of their actions." Mmm.

Well, let us see what sex education has achieved in Britain. Last thing I read was that 11 MPs and the Family Planning Association (FPA) were agitating for this subject to be introduced to four-year-old boys and girls.

In July, The Daily Mail reported that a "culture of promiscuity" had led to just under 400,000 new cases of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) in the UK. The 16 to 24 age group accounted for 65 per cent of all Chlamydia, 50 per cent of genital warts, which are known to cause cervical cancer and which are themselves caused by the human papillomavirus, and 50 per cent of gonorrhoea infections diagnosed in STD clinics across the UK in 2007.

Undeterred by these figures, the FPA deemed the solution to be ever more sex education, more accessible services and widespread STI testing. For its part, the government-sponsored Sex Education Forum published a study in which it was revealed that the school system was already saturated with sex education - so the FPA called for the introduction of sex education to children as young as four. Whom the gods destroy...

One-third of secondary schools in the UK offer condoms to students through 'sexual health' clinics (to all intents and purposes, sexual health means condom use). Pregnancy tests and morning-after pills are offered in schools to hundreds of thousands of children, some as young as 11.

Parents are not informed, another example of education being taken out of their hands and placed in those of the State.

Meanwhile the abortion rate continued to rise - 21 per cent among young mothers, by 10 per cent among those under 16. For it is cruelly the case that if the condom fails, and it is known to fail, a contraceptive mentality has seen to it that recourse to abortion provides the ultimate contraceptive.

Last March in the US, after nearly 40 years of federally funded 'safe sex' education, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced that one in four American teen girls and half of all black girls have at least one sexually transmitted disease.

The ugly truth is that a war has been waged, and continues to be waged, on abstinence and responsibility - openly by some, guardedly by others who give it some form of lip-service and argue that it is only one front against the STD. If you mention fidelity they go along with you, slightly amused as they point you in the direction of the battlefield where a war of casual sex is in progress. It is the condom that they regard as the ultimate weapon; but there is growing evidence that it is not, and for more reasons than one.

This is not sweet music to the trillion-dollar rubber and abortion industries. Nowhere is it more true to say that where Big Business thrives, there also thrives Big Influence.

TEU? Phew!

I may have got this wrong, so I will ask. Was a remark made that we should field an EU Olympics team at the next Olympiad? If so, it raises the question of Integrative Brussels at its worst. I can hear, if I try hard enough, the growl, or what's left of it, of the British bulldog. Grrr...we didn't perform better than we have done in 100 years to allow TGB to be subsumed into TEU. Grrr...

The 29th Olympiad will long be remembered not so much because of its opening and closing ceremonies, which were truly spectacular, but for the number of world records that were broken, the awesome sight of Michael Phelps doing his thing, the extraordinary grace and power of Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, the gravity-defying pole-vaulting - I entertain an unlikely vision of myself trotting up with that pole and vaulting ever upwards, 15 metres, 16 metres, 16.5 - and then I wake up.

They will be remembered for the Chinese gymnasts and China winning the most gold medals, the American female relay runner who pipped her Russian opponent at the post after starting a good four metres behind at the last baton change - a huge gap in a short sprint; and not least for a born-again Olympic Britain and the three gold medalist Chris Hoy.

As for weightlifting, why is it that I am threatened with hernia if I lift a file cover while those corpulent, muscle-covered, eye-bulging specimens heave 250 kilogrammes from ground level to the shoulder and then over their heads?

And now it's London 2012. For the hand-over ceremony Britain was given all of eight minutes to advertise itself. So a London double-decker bus was duly trotted out, David Beckham, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, and men in pin-stripes.

Here, surely was an overstatement of the British understatement. And what was that blow-up of Myra Hindley doing in China? Advertising child murder British style?

Which leaves me space to ask our sports parliamentary secretary how he intends to upgrade Malta's performance between now and 2012?

A country with a population of 400,000 cannot expect to make a clean sweep of much but we do wish to know why we baulk at creating enough funds to employ seriously professional coaches in the disciplines we take part in.

We are also curious as to just how much time our athletes give to their training? Anything less than four to eight hours a day, supervised, is a waste of time. And, once our next lot is chosen to represent us, we certainly want to be kept informed of their progress in relation to world standards before they are selected.

The Olympics Committee should set benchmarks for our potential participants; if they under-perform they should not be asked to represent Malta in London.