IN news that seemed to have gobsmacked a lot of people, the Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri announced that in the last four years, a total of 16,951 unmarried teenagers below the age of 19 were recorded as pregnant at government healthcare facilities. If we also count the married ones, there have been 41,842 pregnant teenagers in the same period.
Firstly, we should be happy that the unmarried teens go to government healthcare facilities. It’s a lot better than hiding away somewhere and not having access to any information, care or help.
I don’t know what happens to the babies that they give birth to, however. Do they even go to full term? Where do they deliver these babies? Do they keep them or do they give them up for adoption? Or worse, do they abandon them somewhere and just hope someone will pick them up and care for them?
A 41-year-old man who had been found as a baby by a trashcan at Chow Kit Market has only just obtained his Malaysian citizenship. He was lucky to have been cared for by an individual and by the Welfare Department until adulthood. But how many other foundlings have been as lucky, if you can call a forty-year wait for citizenship, “lucky”. This, despite the fact that the Federal Constitution regards foundlings and abandoned children as citizens by operation of law under Article 14(1)(b) and Section 1(a) in the Second Schedule.
It’s obvious we need more qualitative information, instead of just statistics.
Next, going by these figures, there have been some 24,891 teenage girls who are married. How many of these are under-aged, that is, below sixteen? How many were forced to get married because they were pregnant?
We have been trying to raise the legal age of marriage to 18 and reduce the phenomenon of girls who are too young and immature getting married and having babies. Clearly, we are not doing a great job of this.
We know, however, that teen marriages can be problematic. If both partners are teenagers, they are hardly equipped to handle all the adult issues that come up in the marriage including money issues, childcare, jobs etc. We have no statistics on how long these marriages last, only that divorces decreased by 8.7% between 2022 and 2023. Yes, it is frustrating that our statistics do not line up neatly with each other so that we get a full picture of the same time periods.
What had people jumping up and down even more was the breakdown by race of these teen pregnancies. Of the three main ethnic groups, around half of these cases involved Malays while only 5% and 3% were Chinese and Indian girls respectively.
We should ask the obvious question: why is this so? Is it because Malay girls have less access to reproductive health information including birth control than everyone else? What are the barriers to this access? Is the main obstacle the judgmental attitudes of healthcare workers when approached by unmarried teens?
We cannot hope to solve this problem if we do not answer these questions. Another question we should ask is how many of these pregnancies are the result of rape, statutory or otherwise?
While we are focusing on pregnant teenage girls, we seem to forget the other side of the equation, which is the impregnating boys or men.
There have been calls by some people not to punish the boys or men in “suka sama suka” relationships. In other words, the girls should also be blamed for getting pregnant. But the point of the statutory rape law is that the girls are regarded as still children, no matter how physically developed they may seem. It’s their maturity that matters, their ability to understand the consequences of their actions.
If the boys involved are also underage, then they too cannot be wholly blamed for a system that does too little to get them to understand that letting their hormones run wild can get them into serious lifelong trouble.
It is too easy to blame porn or social media for all these troubles. Where else are they supposed to get information about sex if adults refuse to provide it?
We also forget that online information about sex tends to be salacious and unrealistic and most of all, does not promote respect for partners. Nor do they talk about responsibility.
Lately there has been a lot of talk about young boys being violent towards others, whether it’s their schoolmates, siblings or even parents. These boys seem to be unable to deal with conflict or the emotions when they don’t get what they want. We should be more curious about why this is.
One theory is that boys nowadays lack positive male role models to emulate. Some live in homes with absent or negligent fathers. In school, their teachers are mostly female. They have nobody that they feel they can talk to about their problems safely, no one who is able to tell them how to deal with the many stressors that they encounter, whether at school or in relationships.
Boys struggle under the pressure to be men without fully knowing what that entails. Is it any wonder that they would search for answers online? Lurking there waiting for exactly such boys to preach to are all the Andrew Tates and their local versions. These “role models” tell them that the world has wronged them, that they should be dominant and that it is the fault of the female sex for not giving them their “rightful” place in life. That place is apparently where they are kings, and all females are slaves.
In other words, there is no way of solving these problems without a holistic approach. It is not enough to ban social media for kids under sixteen as has been proposed, because Pandora has long opened that box. How do you even ensure that ban when the internet has to remain open?
Ban handphones from schools, but also provide sound reproductive health education, promote open discussions between adults and children about these issues and highlight positive role models for boys who emphasise good relationships and responsibilities. Then perhaps we can start to make some headway on this issue.
Marina Mahathir is sick and tired of talking about the same thing repeatedly and seeing nothing changing beyond more gasps of horror. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
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