This silence is not golden

The editorial of September 24 stirred me to write for the third time about the same subject - HBSC survey 2005.

On June 18, The Times gave us the upsetting account that 37.6 per cent of our children do not live with their two biological parents.

Quite a number of people gulped down this figure without discussion. Among the most eloquent of these were Dolores Cristina, Minister of Education (June 27), and John Dalli, minister responsible for health and social policy (The Sunday Times, July 13). As a consequence, Minister Cristina, among other things, exhorted us "to shed some of our traditional perceptions and face the reality full front".

Minister Dalli, when prom-pted, accepted that in view of such statistics "a discussion on divorce should start". I challenged the HBSC result twice (July 28 and August 2) and in my opinion I have seriously questioned the credibility of the survey.

Silence was the reaction both from the organisers abroad and from the Health Promotion Unit, the principal investigator of the HBSC survey in Malta.

Roamer twice (The Sunday Times August 3 and 17) drew attention to this fact but to no avail.

I ask Minister Cristina, responsible for the schools where the survey was conducted, and Minister Dalli, responsible for the Health Promotion Unit, to provide the Maltese citizens with the possibility of "facing the reality full front".

I also expected The Times to follow this thread and press for an explanation once it published the original much-doubted results.