MENTAL health education in Malaysia remains largely focused on awareness rather than providing practical support for teenagers facing exploitation, abuse or grooming.
This, child activist and Yayasan Chow Kit founder Datuk Dr Hartini Zainudin says, demonstrates why child safety reforms must extend beyond schools and involve stronger collaboration between education authorities, welfare agencies, law enforcement and community organisations.
“The current mental health frameworks have not kept pace with the realities facing young people today.
“Our mental health education is still awareness-level: it is okay to not be okay. That is a beginning, not a system,” she said.
She added that among the changes needed are faster inter-agency responses when children go missing, stronger community-based support systems and expanded protection measures for teenagers.
She also called for the Nur Alert system, which currently applies only to children aged 12 and below, to be expanded to cover all children under 18.
“In 2012, a colleague and I reviewed the system and submitted recommendations asking what would happen to a 15-year-old who disappeared with an older man.
“Thirteen years later, nothing has changed and 91% of missing children are teenagers who never trigger it.
“Speed is everything. It takes 40 minutes to get from Kuala Lumpur to Klang, six hours by boat to reach international waters, and even less time to be halfway to Thailand,” she said.
Hartini also raised concerns over parental or legal guardian kidnapping cases, which she said are frequently treated as civil disputes rather than child protection matters.
“Police routinely classify them as family matters and decline to respond even when a custody order exists. Without one, Section 3(1) of the Kidnapping Act 1961 does not apply at all,” she said.
She expressed hope that reforms include criminalising parental kidnapping regardless of whether a custody order exists, and reviewing the classification of runaway cases.
“Be honest about the trafficking pipeline: missing children and trafficked children are often the same children at different points in the same story.
“Bring community advocates into the response – their trust with families is a resource, not interference.
“Build a permanent missing children function that tracks patterns and reports on outcomes, not just recovery rates,” she said.
