Smashing the culture of silence around underage sexual harassment

WHEN teenager Ain Husniza Saiful Nizam released a TikTok video about inappropriate sexual comments she heard in her school, the floodgates opened.

Her immensely courageous decision to speak out inspired countless other Malaysians to share their stories of what they themselves have experienced.

Puteri Nuraaina Balqis of SaveTheSchoolsMy decided to create an anonymous Google Form to collect these stories, and the response she got was overwhelming.

At the time of writing, she has collected some 670 stories, 270 of which have now been published on Instagram.

On Tuesday (May 18), a group of Malaysian civil society organisations and individuals from all backgrounds, ethnicities, and religions came together to read out 25 of these stories online.

The session was moderated by Puteri Nuraaina Balqis, and Fatin Nur Majdina Nordin of Angkatan Belia Islam Malaysia (Abim).

Reading these stories was bad enough, but hearing them read out loud added another layer of horror to the experience.

These hundreds of collected stories point to a clear and present danger: a culture of sexual harassment and consistent patterns of intolerable behaviour that seem to run rampant in our schools - the place where our students should feel the safest.

The All Women’s Action Society (Awam) did a more systematic study of similar reports, which is worth perusing.

The types of cases covered in the reading ran a harrowing gamut of individuals that abused and harassed both male and female students.

Some cases involved verbal abuse and harassment, some involved highly inappropriate touching, and yet others involved rape and violence.

It is hard to summarise or use other words to replace the words of the survivors themselves. I only hope more Malaysians will take just a minute or two to read what they themselves have said here.

It is hard to overestimate the amount of damage done by these experiences.

Many survivors spoke of long-lasting trauma, and suffering from the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with one individual who survived being molested by a fellow student when she was 14, reporting that she still had to take medication to help her deal with the after-effects of the experience.

In the reflections session, many of the readers also pointed out how these experiences during such formative years cast such a long shadow into the future.

Survivors often live with an almost lifelong phobia of certain triggering situations and find themselves constantly looking over their shoulder in fear. It’s hard to accurately describe how transgressive these long-lasting traumas are, and how big of a mental and emotional scar they leave behind.

Perpetrators, however - especially those who are never sufficiently punished - are very likely to grow up to perpetuate their habits and behaviour well after they have left our schools.

As pointed out by the readers, unchecked sexual harassment in our institutions of learning will invariably morph into sexual harassment in workplaces and in our community - all the way up to Parliament even, as we have unfortunately seen.

A pattern of this culture of permissiveness is one of the most jarring things we noticed amidst all the sharings.

Too rarely is there an adult to help these children, believe their stories, and give a clear and unmistakable signal that what has happened to them was not okay.

Too rarely do perpetrators face justice - swift, proportional justice that communicates to one and all that such behaviour will not be condoned or tolerated.

Sometimes, we turn a blind eye because we are just too lazy.

We don’t want to bother with the extra work of formal reports, and the discomfort of dealing with certain situations. Or we don’t want to “destroy the future” of the perpetrator.

What we don’t always realise however is that by “not destroying” that future, we are in fact destroying the future not only of the people that they have hurt, but the future of people they will continue to hurt in the years to come.

The third layer of damage in this scenario is that failing to punish a perpetrator will embolden not only that one perpetrator, but countless others who will take inaction to mean that they too can go on to abuse, harass, and molest others. After all, the logic encourages them to think: if my friend didn’t get punished for doing it, why should I have anything to fear?

How many hundreds of thousands of Malaysians have suffered due to this culture of silence? How many have felt the burning shame that caused them to retreat further and further into their shells until there is barely any sense of themselves left?

How much longer will we fail to let them know that “Yes, what happened to you was wrong, ” and “Yes, the people who did this to you deserve to face justice.”

How much longer will they have to wait to hear the words: “You are not alone, ” and “We believe you, and we are here for you.”

If survivors don’t hear those words from the rest of us, we are condemning them to a tortured, emotionally hollow life.

As another reader reflected, we simply cannot normalise these gross transgressions any longer.

The line must be drawn here. Thus far, no further.

Our response must be on multiple levels.

The first is we must treat all reports of sexual harassment by our children with the utmost fierceness and gravity, and we must demand that all our school administrators do the same.

We must remain committed to ascertaining objective truths, but we cannot use that as an excuse to simply dismiss claims, which cannot be immediately substantiated. If thorough digging is required to get at the truth, then we must not spare any effort. We must never, ever accept apathy, allergy to discomfort, and plain laziness as an excuse for inaction by the authorities.

At the other end of the spectrum, akin to the broken windows theory, if we allow “jokes” and “harmless” equivalents of “locker room talk”, then we are again enabling and emboldening future perpetrators.

We need to send a signal that is clear as possible, as early as possible regarding the need to respect the sanctity of our children, and to vigorously nip in the bud any tendency to compromise that sanctity.

NATHANIEL TAN works with Projek Wawasan Rakyat (POWR). He would like to thank event co-organisers SaveTheSchoolsMy, ABIM, WAO, Lean In, and GAP. Special thanks to FAME, AWAM, and SAWO! #BangsaMalaysia #NextGenDemocracy.