Written by Amy Mifsud

The number of women serving time at Corradino Correctional Facility has spiked to the highest figure in over 15 years. As of February 2021, there were 58 female prisoners, making up 7.1% of the prison population, whilst back in 2005, there were merely 14 women in prison.

This increase in women prisoners has been seen all across Europe with many laying the blame on the mistaken perception of the courts that prison is a place where women can receive drug treatment and mental health services.

Unbalanced Opportunities

Women in prison are generally more stigmatised than male prisoners and often have reduced access to treatment, programmes, and activities. This was seen even in our own prison facility at Corradino, with one article in 2018 pointing out that women prisoners did not have the opportunity to work and study as the males did. There is, however, a logistical explanation for this, in that the female wing has never occupied more than 50 prisoners until recently, whilst the male wing has seen an occupancy level upward of 500 ever since 2009. Although it is strategically more appropriate to have more opportunities given to the section of the prison with larger occupancy, it is hardly justifiable.

A case which was finalised back in 2018, detailed that seven transgender inmates were given €5000 each in damages relating to their treatment while at Corradino. The prison is well known for being a derelict, hopeless place with this being confirmed by these inmates who had to use blood-stained mattresses and were placed in dirty cells which had previously been used as storage rooms. It seems however, that the situation at the prison drastically improved after the appointment of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Dalli as prison director in 2018.

Who are these ‘Imprisoned Women’?

Female prisoners mostly come from marginal groups with troubled backgrounds. When it comes to female prisoners, there is also the issue of their problematic backgrounds, with many women prisoners coming from marginal groups. This creates a complex history of abuse, self-harm, homelessness, poor physical and reproductive health, and problematic relationships. These factors would have had a large impact on their mental health, with the
situation often being intensified by drug and alcohol abuse. Many women also tend to worry a great deal about children. Studies have shown that 30% of female prisoners have previously been admitted to hospital for psychiatric needs whilst only 10% of male prisoners have had the same experience (Department of Health,2007).

Imprisoned, Isolated…

The isolation women face in prison may also be reminiscent of the isolation they felt during their abusive childhoods, therefore, making them relive that horrible situation. Furthermore, the inability to contact their loved ones outside, at any given time, can take a great toll on a person’s mental health. This combined with the lack of support they receive in prison can have detrimental consequences. Many women in prison perceive themselves as being below others
and tend to have a great lack of self-esteem and fear of failure. They also tend to blame themselves for the abuse they received either as a child or from their partner. Some have become so accustomed to abuse that they view it as a form of affection. These women portray a total lack of confidence and trust, as well as great difficulty to form appropriate, long-lasting relationships in their personal and professional lives.

The ‘Prison Environment’

The prison setting infantilizes offenders causing them to become dependent on prison staff. The prison environment forces women who previously had almost full control over their own lives, to be dependent on prison staff for even the most basic of needs as well as having to obey a higher authority which at times imposes arbitrary disciplinary rules. Whilst many women find the prison setting traumatising due to the lack of privacy and autonomy, others view it as some sort of reprieve from their home life which may have been abusive.

Many female prisoners are often subjected to increased stigmatisation than their male counterparts as well as bullying and/or sexual assault from other prisoners or even prison staff. Although it is justifiable that these prisoners should lose some form of control over their lives as part of their punishment, it is evident that there is an imbalance of power and a lack of equality in treatment between men and women. It is also inexcusable for women to be subject to emotional and physical harm by prison staff, no matter the crime they have been convicted for.

A positive turn for Corradino Correctional Facility?

Back in 2018, there were merely three mental health and healthcare professionals working within our prison facility. This number has radically increased to 23 as of September 2020 including professionals such as social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, care plan coordinators and doctors and nurses. These professionals noted that inmates find most difficulty with discovering coping mechanisms to handle the loss of freedom and anxiety they feel on admission into the prison. This is contrary to popularly suspected issues such as aggressive thoughts.

According to Malta’s Mental Health Strategy for 2020 to 2030, prisoners suffering from a serious mental illness and those who are in need of constant in-house support are currently all treated together at Mount Carmel Hospital’s Forensic Unit. This strategy has also acknowledged the gap in mental health services available for forensic patients and has determined that in order to move forward, the entire service needs to be addressed thus, a group of stakeholders from various sectors must be set up.

Positive Conclusions

To end on a positive note I must say, over the past few years Malta has taken incredible strides in bringing awareness and updating legislation regarding mental health, especially with the formation of a Mental Health Strategy for 2020-2030 which acknowledges mental health across various sectors. However, improvements still must be made in order to better facilitate the mental wellbeing of inmates during their time at prison as well as upon their release

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Written by Malcolm Camilleri

In March, MHSA is celebrating Endometriosis Awareness Month. This article gives insight into endometriosis and how exercise can improve its symptoms.

Endometrium overview

The endometrium is the inner lining of the uterus. It thickens and renews itself every month, in preparation for pregnancy. Therefore, if conception takes place, the endometrium thickens and the embryo sticks to it. Alternatively, it sheds through menstruation if pregnancy does not occur.

Endometriosis is a gynaecological condition where the endometrium-like tissue grows outside of the uterus, most commonly in other parts of the pelvis. This condition often causes pain, pelvic inflammation, and a forward-leaning posture, amongst others. These, to some extent, can all be limited through exercise.

Decreasing inflammation

Regular physical activity has protective effects against inflammation as it increases the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant cytokines in the blood. It also controls oestrogen levels, which are usually high in endometriosis. Research shows that moderate-intensity physical activity, such as brisk walking and swimming, for 20 to 30 minutes daily, can produce said anti-inflammatory effects.

It is important to note that decreasing inflammation will often decrease the severity of other symptoms.

Breaking the pain cycle

Similar to other pain-inducing medical conditions, eliminating one of the factors in the pain cycle will decrease pain itself.

Physical activity has been shown to release endorphins. These hormones work similarly to opioid drugs, relieving stress, and pain. Deep breathing exercises and visualisation follow a similar system by also producing endorphins.

Pain, discomfort, and cramping in the front part of the pelvis usually cause muscle tension in the pelvic floor, abdominal wall, and hip flexors. Stretching can reduce the muscle tension in said tight muscles, breaking the pain cycle, and ultimately decreasing pain.

Improving posture

The previously mentioned cramping contributes to a forward leaning posture, which is often assumed to protect oneself from the corresponding pain. Repeated and prolonged time in said position will cause anterior pelvic muscle shortening and weakness of the muscles at the back.

Stretching of the tight areas and concurrent strengthening of the weak areas will improve the body’s kinetic chain, providing a harmonious balance of forces at the body’s core.

High-intensity exercises such as circuit training and High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), together with high impact exercises such as burpees and plyometrics, may aggravate the inflammation and increase pain perception. This, however, does not mean that one can never perform such tasks. It is suggested to see a physiotherapist for guidance on how to best balance endometriosis and exercise.

Check out MHSA’s previous article!

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Written by Kaz Louise Stoner

As many of you know, March is a month dedicated to women’s history. It is an important month as women have endured many hardships throughout history that should we should constantly be exposed to. Of course, women cannot all be put under one category, and one month is simply not enough to celebrate the achievements and accomplishments of such a powerful gender.

However, UM Futsal sees this as good an opportunity as any to shed light on some female athletes, past and present, revolutionizing the world of sports.

Through all of their actions, women are almost always scrutinized. The world of sports is no different. These outstanding athletes are all but some who have overcome more obstacles than the track and field portion of the Olympic games yet continue to excel in their sport. 

Simone Biles

4-time gold medalist and 1 time bronze from the Olympic Games, 19 World Championships, and many more titles to her name, Biles is THE gymnast of our generation. She is an American artistic gymnast holding the title of the most decorated American gymnast. She also set an America record for the most gold medals won in women’s gymnastics in a single Games. Biles continues to break records, push her technique and routines to the extreme, and time and time again, prove her excellence.

 “A successful competition for me is always going out there and putting 100 percent into whatever I’m doing.”

Serena Williams

For most of us, a household name when growing up. Holding 23 Grand Slam singles titles and being the former number 1 women’s single tennis player between 2002-2017, Williams is widely regarded as the greatest female tennis player of all times. With an endless list of wins and accomplishments, Williams has been an extremely popular name in the tennis community and an advocate for female athletes of all shapes, sizes, and colours!

‘Think of all the girls who could become top athletes but quit sports because they’re afraid of having too many defined muscles and being made fun of or called unattractive.’

Sue Bird

Bird is an Israeli-American basketball player holding the record for most assists in league history.  Another athlete with an endless resume of accomplishments, notably four WNBA championships with her team Seattle Storm and four Olympic gold medals.

‘The only thing that I’ve really noticed in my own experience is just people kind of saying that a woman, when they react to something exciting, ‘Oh, that’s a masculine way of reacting’. And to me, that’s absurd. It’s like, that’s how humans – they get excited, and you yell and you jump and you flex. That’s what you do’

Alex Morgan

American soccer player, playing for the highest division in the United States of America soccer league besides having co-captained her team. Besides a long list of wins and accomplishments, Morgan is a two-time world cup winner and also an Olympic gold medalist from the London 2012 games. Morgan is also an advocate in bridging the wage gap in US soccer.

‘Always work hard, never give up, and fight until the end because it’s never really over until the whistle blows.’

Katie Ledecky

Swimming her way to 5 Olympic medals and 14 world championship gold medals, Ledecky is a popular name in the athletic community. Having attended her first Olympic games at just 15 years old and initiating her journey with a gold medal in the 800-meter freestyle, she really did set the tone for a career full of accomplishments.

‘I don’t really compare myself to others. For me, it’s about not being afraid to set scary goals – goals that most people never even dream of – and then going out and chasing them.’

Local corner

Malta is no stranger to producing female athletes of high-esteem. Our local teams of football, rugby, handball, basketball, and many other sports are often involved in international competitions and leagues displaying their passion and talent and performing exceptionally. This is also true for individual sports like karate, track and field, gymnastics and many, many more.   Local news outlets have recently been offering more exposure to these female athletes, well deservedly. We urge you to do your part by sharing our local athlete’s accomplishments and supporting these budding athletes.

Check out UoM Futsal’s previous article here!

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Written by Stephanie Buttigieg

International Women’s Day is once again upon us and what better way to celebrate it than looking back at influential women in science?

On the 11^th of February, the scientific world celebrated its females through The International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Are these two days necessary in today’s modern world, in which supposedly feminism is obsolete and we have reached perfect gender equality?

Let’s shed some light on the role of women in science and you can come up with your own conclusions.

Statistics show that the number of women in research is drastically low compared to male researchers. According to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, the average percentage of women employed in research and experimental development is merely 29.3% globally. Nationally, this percentage is even less. With 28.7%, Malta is in Europe’s bottom five countries.

Are we making any progress?

Studies show that it will take another 16 years for women and men to publish the same amount of papers globally. This is an average taken over all the different fields in science.

Granted, there are a handful of fields, including nursing and midwifery, in which the papers published by women outnumber those published by men. However, in 87 out of 115 fields in this particular study, women are still lagging behind. A particular field, physics, might be the worst out of all, with another 258 years needed for the gap to close off completely.

Are women good enough to be scientists?

Women have shown through and through that they are just as capable as men to be a great scientist. A pioneering figure to further strengthen this statement is Marie Curie – one of the only two people to win a Nobel Prize in two different fields.

It is society’s stereotypes that serve as a major obstacle for women pursuing careers in science, not to mention the workplace environment.

“Suppose you came across a woman lying on the street with an elephant sitting on her chest. You notice she is short of breath. Shortness of breath can be a symptom of heart problems. In her case, the much more likely cause is the elephant on her chest. For a long time, society put obstacles in the way of women who wanted to enter the sciences. That is the elephant.”

Sally Ride, first American women in space

The effect of science on society

Science affects everyone. However, what science decides to solve and design depends a lot on who is doing the scientific inquiry.

Countless women with heart disease have been misdiagnosed in hospitals because symptoms in females can be different than those in males. The research that had been done in that time was purely based on males, most probably because the majority of the scientists involved in this field were male. No one expected the symptoms to vary from one sex to the other.

And if this did not prove to you that women are vital in science, here is another reason. Historically, we have proof that when women are involved in fields of study which were previously dominated by men, the general knowledge in that field tends to expand. Science is no exception. Women look at problems from a different angle than men thus enriching the creativity of the team in which women are a part of.

As a young women in science, here is my two cents…

For this problem to be solved a shift in mentality needs to occur and everyone needs to pull at the same rope. In order to change society’s behaviour, we need to change our own.

Men, don’t undermine women, see their potentiality as scientists. Make them feel comfortable in the workplace, especially if they form part of the minority.

Women, don’t doubt your intelligence because of your gender, you are as capable as anyone else. Support your female colleague, women empowering women is essential. Don’t fall into society’s trap and let them make you believe that she is your enemy. Stereotypes need to change. We need to become role models for all the aspiring female scientists.

This is why S-Cubed was very happy to collaborate with the Faculty of Science in organising an event for Junior College students in which many female scientists spoke about their experience and encouraged girls to join the field.

Credit: Image

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‘The MHSA Women’s Health Campaign’ was launched earlier this month leading up to women’s day with three main targets in mind. These targets being the protection of women, awareness on health conditions specific to women, and athleticism in women.

The campaign pushes for a multi-faceted insight into women’s health. For instance, rather than just informing on how women may suffer from dysmenorrhea (pain on menstruation), we aim to delve further into; how debilitating this is and whether it affects an athlete when they perform or train.

This, along with many other issues and challenges that they face, will be discussed with an upcoming Q&A panel of female athletes – ‘Public Cervix Announcement’. Some of these other issues shall include women not being taken seriously enough in the sport, reproductive pressure from society, the development of what is deemed as a ‘masculine’ figure’ and many more.

With incidents of attack on the rise, our self-defence class, ‘Fight Like a Girl’, was aimed to teach individuals how to defend themselves should the need arise. Evidence shows that HIV, abortion and depression rates are higher in women who have experienced physical or sexual violence.

Besides teaching defence, this campaign is also important for aspiring health care professionals. The class prepared students to be well-informed in their future profession when faced with patients that will have undergone some form of abuse or attack. MHSA believes that this is essential in creating a more understanding society in the future and lessening the stigma around abuse.

Of course, every event is open to any gender albeit ultimately targeted at women due to the title and aim of the campaign.

Our third event, ‘Cycle for your Cycle’, is a bike ride that will take place in Mġarr. This event is aimed to raise awareness about conditions that are not so commonly heard – conditions that are not popularised as much as say, breast cancer that has worldwide campaigns in ‘Pink October’.

Along the route of the bike ride, information points will be set up with more details and facts about the conditions. The two conditions that will be focused on are gynaecological; endometriosis and PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome). Endometriosis affects on average one in ten women of reproductive age. PCOS is one of the most common endocrine disorders in women in the same criteria with a prevalence of 4-16%.

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The movie industry started to take shape in the early 19th century from technological innovations and a series of developments. Cinema does not have a precise starting point since many inventors created motion picture cameras and other techniques at around the same time.

We’re all familiar with the big names such as Georges Méliès, Thomas Edison, Sergei Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, D. W. Griffith, François Truffaut etc… But what about Alice Guy-Blaché, Louis Weber, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, Maya Deren, Germaine Dulac and Margarethe von Trotta (amongst many others, I would list them here, but I would skip my word limit.)

In the early years of the film industry, women were known to have held positions of high-regard, such as directors, producers, actresses, writers, editors, technicians, camera crew and even had their own production companies! Perhaps the reason why these women go unnoticed is that the work of women has been devalued over time. Also, the shift of the film industry to Hollywood resulted in an isolation of power to a select few studios, run by monopolistic men.

“There is nothing connected with the staging of a motion picture that a woman cannot do as easily as a man, and there is no reason why she cannot completely master every technicality of the art.”

From The Memoirs of Alice Guy-Blaché.

Alice Guy-Blaché was the first female directors in the history of film. In 1896 she produced ‘La Fée aux Choux’, one of the earliest narrative films to be created. Alice had initially worked as a secretary to Leon Gaumont, founder of the Gaumont film studios. Some time later, she started to produce films and she became the head of production for the studio up until 1906. In 1907, Alice set up a film company, Solax Studios, and throughout her career, she directed 1000 films, 22 (feature length films), however, only 350 survive. She was an innovator in synchronised sound, early use of colour and is thought to have invented the concept of filming on location and produced one of the first close-ups. When she had returned to the US after some time in France, she could not recover all her films and could not get the Gaumont company to acknowledge her work. Soon after, she started giving public talks and also wrote her memoirs about her work.

Dorothy Arzner, one of the only major female directors in Hollywood during the “Golden Age” of the 20s and 30s, previously worked as a stenographer and worked as a film director. She is also the first editor to be named in a film’s credits and director. She produced 2 films, 14 talkies and is attributed to have invested the boom microphone.

Margaret Booth had started her working at D. W. Griffith’s studio in 1915 as a film joiner and negative cutter. Florence Osborne wrote a 1925 Motion Picture Magazine article: “Among the greatest ‘cutters’ and film editors are women. They are quick and resourceful. They are also ingenious in their work and usually have a strong sense of what the public wants to see. They can sit in a stuffy cutting-room and see themselves looking at the picture before an audience.”

There were many well-known female colourists at the time. The Edison company employed Mrs Kuhn to hand colour prints from their films. Madame Elisabeth Thuiller’s Company managed over 200 female colourists!

“I coloured all of Méliès’ films, and this work was carried out entirely by hand. I employed two hundred and twenty workers in my workshop. I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colours, and during the day; the workers applied the colour according to my instructions. Each specialised worker applied only one colour, and we often exceeded twenty colours on a film.”

MMe Thuiller in an interview, Mazeline, 74n1, 1929.

The cinema industry had changed with the Hays Code in the 1930s (A Code To Govern The Making Of Motion Pictures). The early silent films had featured complex women as protagonists and dealt with contemporary issues such as birth control, sex, crime, divorce and mental illness). The Code erased these ideas, sexism grew, and changed the audience’s perception, giving rise to the headless women of Hollywood.

Women still fail to be treated as equals and it is unfortunate that these women who were responsible for many innovations are still waiting to come out from the shadows.

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