The law does indeed criminalise wilful bodily harm, defined as the act of deliberately harming another person without the intent to kill them, and envisages different penalties depending on whether the injuries were grievous or slight.

Judging by the video alone, the only bodily harm which could have come to the stripper that night was cuts in her skin caused by the eggshells, which would be defined as slight injuries.

However, the only way the police can assert the nature of a victim’s injuries is if a doctor examines that person and informs them exactly what injuries were suffered. The stripper herself has said she had no problem with the egg pelting and it is highly unlikely she had gone to a doctor afterwards.

https://www.facebook.com/xarabank/videos/2518103438257127/?v=2518103438257127

Even if she had, the police would be faced with another problem. Since several people threw eggs at the stripper, police would have to find out exactly whose egg-pelt had caused the injuries, an extremely difficult task seeing as the stripper was facing the wall and the revellers didn’t exactly seem as though they were analysing the outcome of each shot.

2. Yes, the stripper gave consent, but did she have the mental capacity to do so?

The stripper and the party organisers alike have both said they agreed on the nature of the activity before it took place, so on the face of it, it clearly doesn’t seem she was forced to do something against her will.

So the question is no longer about consent but about whether the stripper was mentally fit to make such a decision by herself.

Malta’s Mental Health Act clearly states that “a person suffering from a mental disorder shall be deemed able and competent to make decisions unless certified by a specialist as lacking mental capacity to do so”.

A court can indeed interdict a person if a mental health specialist agrees, a decision that will render her legally unfit to make decisions, from buying property to voting.

Interdiction exists in the law to protect people with serious mental health problems from abuse, but it is only applied in extreme cases and a very small minority of Mount Carmel patients end up interdicted. Unless the stripper is one of those few interdicted people, she had every right to consent to getting eggs thrown at her. 

Without being privy to the specifics of the stripper’s case, Daniela Calleja Bitar, Chief Operations Officer of the Richmond Foundation, urged for caution in comments about her perceived lack of a right to consent. 

“Suffering from a mental illness doesn’t mean you cannot take a decision, there are instances when this is the case but it’s for responsible professionals in the field, and not the public, to decide,” she said. “When the public says this, it’s doing so from a very uninformed and stigmatised point of view because of the ignorance that exists on mental illnesses. Many people think that people with mental illnesses cannot take decisions for themselves and that the element of choice is gone.”

3. But a young boy was throwing eggs too…

This aspect of the video certainly disturbed many people. However, while it’s illegal to smoke in a car with a child or to give a child alcohol or cigarettes, it isn’t illegal to take a child to a bachelor party where a half-naked stripper is getting pelted with eggs, unless an argument can be made that this is tantamount to defilement or the corruption of a child. 

4.  What about the video itself? Could this be a case of revenge porn?

Malta criminalised revenge porn a few years ago, making it illegal to disclose private sexual photos or videos of other people without their consent. However, while the stripper may have been very scantily clad, no sexual act took place, so the video cannot qualify as revenge porn.

At most, the stripper can try and seek legal redress for the way the video was shared without her consent, but so far she has stood up for the people present at the event.

5. Can police take action against people who shared the video on WhatsApp?

This case is the latest example of how WhatsApp and other messaging apps can be used to spread sensitive content around the nation without anyone shouldering the legal and moral responsibility that publishing it would entail. It’s an extremely powerful form of gossip that Maltese society is just starting to get used to.

It is possible that the police will investigate the video on the grounds of computer misuse, a broad law which covers the misuse of electronic equipment. However, seeing as the stripper herself gave her consent to the act and isn’t likely to report it to the police and seeing as the video was privately shared by so many people, it is hard to imagine such an investigation taking place. Certainly the cybercrime police have bigger fish to fry.

6. So is everything fine and dandy?

From a purely legal perspective, it would appear so. The Equality Commission condemned the incident itself but notably said it wasn’t conducting an investigation and hadn’t reported the video to the police. Equality Minister Edward Zammit Lewis said the act was “totally reprehensible” but that “this is not a matter of what is legal or not, but of what is acceptable or not”.

This is not a matter of what is legal or not, but of what is acceptable or not. Such behaviour, filmed and then publicly circulated, against a human being is totally reprehensible.https://t.co/OLu3VYSpAL

— Edward Zammit-Lewis (@ZammitLewisEdw) August 11, 2019

Discussion should therefore be held on a social and psychological dimension. What life circumstances would convince a person to agree to such humiliation? What psychological impact would such humiliating acts have on the stripper? Why, for that matter, would anyone want to pelt a woman with eggs in the first place?

The dark underbelly of the human psyche has been laid out for all of Malta to see and, as uncomfortable as it is, it is something we must all come to terms with.

READ NEXT: Yes Consent Is An Important Issue And All, But The Real Question Is: Why Would You Want To Pelt A Woman With Eggs?