We urgently need preemptive laws

The past few decades have seen a number of horrific crimes against women in Malaysia. Groups are pressing for crucial laws and SOP on public safety, saying that we should not have to wait for tragedy to occur.

FOURTEEN years after she was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered, the family of Nurin Jazlin Jazimin is still seeking closure on the tragedy that changed their lives.

The assailant(s) of the eight-year-old girl has yet to be caught despite a nationwide manhunt in August 2007. Her body was found in a gym bag that was left in front of a shop in Petaling Jaya almost a month after she went missing.

“We need to know what happened, ” says her uncle Jasni Abdul Jalil, the eldest brother of Nurin Jazlin’s father, Jazimin Abdul Jalil.

“It cannot be left hanging. We need to know because there is a change in Malaysian lifestyle. Back then, children were more free. They could go to the playground, to the surau, to school all by themselves. But now we are all fearful, ” Jasni says.

From the tragic death of Nurin Jazlin, however, came something that likely saved many other children from facing a similar fate.

Not only did the heinous crime arouse national outrage but it also eventually led to the creation of the NURIN (Nationwide Urgent Response Information Network) Alert in 2011, which has since been renamed NUR (National Urgent Response) Alert, or Talian Nur.

Click to enlarge

The NUR Alert emergency response system is modelled on the Amber Alert in the United States and brings together the authorities and members of the public to quickly spread information and locate missing children below 12 years old. When a child goes missing, the alert is sent out through various channels such as the news, hotels, bank ATMs, social media platforms, and phone apps.

“The Amber Alert is something that has been effective for quite a while in the United States but we had not taken heed of it until something bad happened here in Malaysia, ” says Jasni.

The creation of the NUR Alert was initiated by a collection of civil society groups and bloggers, including Jasni. They approached the Women, Family, and Community Develo-pment Ministry for support and the system was launched in 2011.

A decade later, the NUR Alert remains an important network for communities to rely on as new missing children cases crop up every day. On average four children go missing every day in the country according to 2017 data.

Jasni explains that we should take proactive steps by keeping up to date on laws, systems and SOPs relating to public safety that are used in other countries, and study their suitability and how they can be applied in the Malaysian context.

“We should implement good methods and policies straightaway and not wait for tragedy to happen.

“We proposed the introduction of the NUR Alert because there was no such mechanism in place at the time when Nurin was kidnapped. If happened back then, it was the parents themselves who had to spread the message about their missing child through posters and other means, ” says Jasni.

Although the police would start investigating missing child cases right away, before the introduction of the NUR Alert the public was not galvanised to help, so locating missing children was difficult.

In their effort to spread the news about her disappearance, Nurin Nurin Jazlin’s family was subjected to prank calls that they could not afford to ignore for fear that they could lead to her discovery.

This caused immense mental anguish. And adding to their pain, Nurin Jazlin’s parents were also criticised by insensitive members of the public, all while rushing against time to find their daughter.

“Often, parents of missing children are forced to go on wild goose chases every time they receive a fake ‘tip’ and it causes even more stress.

“With the NUR Alert, the duty to publicise information about the missing child has moved to the authorities and is carried out through many different channels, ” says Jasni.

“We are glad that whatever Nurin’s parents had to go through is no longer experienced by parents of missing children today. The important thing is we now have a mechanism in place to respond to these situations.”

More action needed

Unfortunately, despite the high number of horrific crimes against women in Malaysia in the past few decades, we still lack preemptive laws to protect women and children from gender-based violence.

For one, as the Women’s Aid Orgnasation (WAO) points out, almost 20 years have passed since IT analyst Canny Ong was abducted from a shopping complex in Kuala Lumpur and raped and murdered but there still has not been any significant change to make public spaces safer for women.

Following Ong’s death, many shopping malls in the Klang Valley introduced women’s only parking bays located close to mall exits. While this is a positive step, more needs to be done, says WAO Head of Campaigns Natasha Dandavati.

Unfortunately, there is not only a lack of oversight and enforcement but also a substantial amount of public resistance to women’s parking bays and other women’s-only facilities aimed at ensuring safety and minimising the risk of gender-based violence, notes Dandavati.

“Women’s parking bays are still very much a necessity in Malaysia, and they must have a security guard close by and be equipped with functioning CCTV cameras to ensure they are monitored, ” she says.

“There must be an ongoing public awareness campaign to continue to highlight the issue of gender-based violence and the need for special measures to ensure women’s safety in certain contexts.”