Combating child sexual crimes is a long road

PARENTS in Malaysia have been waiting for this for a long time.

The Sexual Offences Against Children Bill, which includes tough new laws to combat the child sexual crimes epidemic in Malaysia, is set to be tabled for second reading in the Dewan Rakyat this week.

The Star has successfully lobbied over 115 Members of Parliament to pledge their support for new laws against child sexual crimes. For Malaysia, having this important Bill tabled in the august House is just the beginning.

It has been almost a year of campaigning by The Star’s R.AGE, starting with our Predator In My Phone undercover investigations (fb.com/ragepmp) of child sex predators, all the way to our efforts in lobbying the MPs.

The investigations alone lasted six difficult months. Every sting operation was painstakingly planned out to protect undercover journalists, posing as 15-year-olds.

The team would spend hours with hidden cameras on standby in various positions. But most painful of all were the conversations they had with the predators, which were just ... traumatising.

The predators would boast about the children they had raped, even offering to show photos of their victims.

That’s how emboldened they were, because chances are, they’ve done it before, and they know they probably won’t get caught.

Naturally, the top question a senior editor gets asked frequently is whether the project has made him paranoid that his son would someday become a victim of these vile predators.

But his reply is always the same: the only thing that horrifies him more than the thought of his son becoming a victim, is having his son grow up to become a predator who would harm a child.

The truth is, the new law, comprehensive as it is, serves mainly to punish child sex predators who have already committed a crime. It won’t stop our society from producing these predators in the first place.

And that’s the root of the problem – have we, as a society, failed in some way? Have we created an environment – from our homes, to our neighbourhoods and our schools – where sexual abuse is al­most tolerated? We have been complicit in our silence and inaction.

So, having the Bill tabled at the august House is just the beginning.

Yes, it will allow us to take predators and paedophiles off the streets, and maybe deter some of them from acting on their urges. Many of the NGOs, child advocates, lawyers and police officers the team worked with on Predator will finally have some of their shackles removed.

But ultimately, Malaysia needs to figure out how to change her people’s collective mindset on issues of sex, respect and plain human decency. Our children need to learn to respect their fellow human beings enough to not treat them as sexual objects.

As Sir Thomas More wrote in Utopia: “For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”

And that’s where R.AGE hopes to take up the fight next – education. Not just for our children, but more importantly for our parents, teachers, lawyers, judges, social workers, police officers – everyone.

The NGOs and child advocates have spent decades waiting for this moment. Organisations like P.S. The Children, Women’s Centre for Change, Voice of the Children, the Royal Malaysian Police’s D11 unit, and even the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Develop­ment and Ministry of Education are all ready to help educate. We just need to support them and keep an open mind.

Even then, it will be far from easy. If it were, the people at these NGOs, many of whom have dedicated their lives to protecting children, would have already done it.

Rest well, everybody, ’cos we’ve got a long road ahead of us.