By Laych Koh
Laych Koh is the publisher of makchic.com, currently based in the UK. She is a teacher and volunteer there who has been subjected to repeated and regular background checks and says the topic of safeguarding is a non-negotiable for any and every individual dealing with children.
‘Any society, any nation, is judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members – the last, the least, the littlest.’
Many quotes about the most vulnerable in society, like the one above, are often misattributed to Gandhi. This particular quote, however, was written by Cardinal Roger Mahony, a former Los Angeles Archbishop, in 1998.
This is bitterly ironic, because Mahony was a powerful church figure accused of covering up decades of sexual abuse by priests in the United States.
When Authority Figures Abuse or Allow Abuse
This great tragedy is key to the rage many Malaysians felt when police announced 402 children had been rescued from 20 welfare homes recently. We see figures meant to protect the vulnerable and innocent, but end up hurting them or let them be hurt instead.
Police said the children were victims of physical abuse, sexual abuse and abandonment. Those arrested included religious teachers and caretakers of the homes.
Let us be clear: child sex abuse (CSA) cases in orphanages, religious schools and welfare homes are not new and the cases reported may just be the tip of the iceberg. This is not a problem of religion per se; this is a problem of unregulated and unchecked care institutions, where power and authority are deeply hierarchical, and the culture of silence pervasive.
Trust Must Be Earned and Substantiated
As a teacher and volunteer in the United Kingdom, I have been subjected to repeated and regular background checks, and the topic of safeguarding is a bread-and-butter reminder for any and every individual dealing with children. It is non-negotiable.
The Out of the Shadows Index 2022, which looks at how countries prevent and respond to child sexual exploitation and abuse, ranked Malaysia 28th out of 60 countries. We fall behind Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.
The UK was first place in the Index. But make no mistake: it did not become the best at protecting children from abuse overnight. After numerous efforts and child abuse inquiries failed to halt cases like the murder of Victoria Climbié – an 8-year-old who died from horrific torture and abuse in 2000, and whose tragic death could have been prevented – a major public inquiry took place, eventually resulting in major changes to child protection policies in the UK.
Source: The Victoria Climbié Foundation UK
In 2003, the UK government launched the ambitious and seminal ‘Every Child Matters’ Green Paper and initiative. This Green Paper stated that the UK had “poor coordination between services; a failure to share information between agencies; the absence of anyone with a strong sense of accountability; and the numbers of front-line workers trying to cope with staff vacancies, poor management and inadequate training.”
These were some of the harsh truths acknowledged in the early noughties. Now in 2024, safeguarding policies are now deeply embedded at every level of education and social welfare in the UK as the result of the changes after ‘Every Child Matters’.
It hardly means that no children are abused in the UK or there are no safeguarding failures. It just means that the country is doing well to tighten all relevant safeguards related to child protection, including its justice process, policies, programmes and protective legislation.
Are our problems the same as England’s or Ireland’s or Thailand’s, and what is unique to us? Do we even know the width and breadth of our problem?
Our Nation and Children’s Rights
The onus is on our government to take the lead and institute reforms because unfortunately, we are still largely a nation that does not fully understand topics like consent, abuse, privacy and children’s rights.
This is sadly evident by Malaysians pooling together money and resources to defend ‘Abang Bas’, a school bus driver in Johor who blatantly admitted to ‘crushes’ on young children. He filmed them as though they were ‘romantic’ and entertaining fodder and social media content for his life.
If there are huge swathes of ordinary Malaysians who felt the bus driver did nothing wrong, what hope do young children around the country have when it comes to their safety or rights?
We also cannot afford to look away because other predators are eyeing our country and its failings, as their own countries’ measures to protect children improve. Consider the horrific case of child abuser and paedophile Richard Huckle from the UK. He posed as an English teacher and philanthropist in poor Christian communities and orphanages in Kuala Lumpur from 2006 to 2014.
He admitted to 71 offences, including rapes, against young children aged between six months and 12 years. Huckle did this undetected for 8 years. Heinously, he even wrote an unpublished paedophile manual called ‘Paedophiles and Poverty: Child Lover Guide.’
Imagine what else goes on in the gaps within vulnerable communities, informal education institutions and welfare homes across our country? What will happen if we find ourselves faced again with cases such as that of Alladin Lanim or Nur Fitri Azmeer Nordin in the future?
And that is not all Malaysians have to worry about. Reuters reported that the Australian detective unit that found Huckle in the dark web made a startling discovery: the “unusual number of internet addresses in the Kuala Lumpur area transmitting child sexual abuse material from the dark web.”
Kuala Lumpur was a high concern location for the distribution of child sexual abuse materials, Snow White Smelser, a programme officer in the UN child sex offences team, said at the time.
If we do not prioritise this problem, we may end up being the enticing hive for predators around the world – with our lack of monitoring, the deference to authority, and no checks, no registrations, no safeguards.
What Can We Learn from Research on CSA?
There have been countless recommendations over the years from Malaysian child activists and organisations as to what our country should do to protect children from abuse, and I will not go into that long list here.
But here are some consequential notes and research we could also be mindful of:
1. We must examine our care institutions closely
There have been too many reports of children being sexually abused in religious schools, residential homes, welfare/care homes and orphanages over the past decades. As author and former University Malaysia Perlis lecturer Murray Hunter points out, molestation and sexual abuse in Malaysia’s religious schools, known as pondoks or tahfiz schools, are a serious problem. The recently-raided welfare homes were meant to care for orphans but based on police investigations, the children rescued had families.
According to OrphanCare, an organisation that has often highlighted the problem of institutionalisation in Malaysia, an estimated 64,000 children live in child-care institutions, in registered and unregistered government and private orphanages.
Violence is common in institutions, OrphanCare says, because “poor staff-to-children ratios often result in neglect and sometimes abuse; many children risk being physically and sexually abused by older children or staff; (and) there’s the risk of child abusers gaining access to children through employment and institutional oversight.”
We need to look at this murky universe: the entire framework of the institutionalisation of vulnerable or neglected children. Many are from families who are unable to care for them or choose to leave them in unregistered homes. Who has eyes on them?
2. The implications of abuse in institutions
Why should we care about gender-specific research child sexual abuse? To put it simply, hurt people hurt people, and we do not want our hurt children to end up possibly hurting others.
Research has shown that the risk of child sexual abuse is lower for males than females, but not necessarily in institutions. A 2020 research paper noted that the abuse occurring within institutional settings generally saw higher rates of boys being victims of abuse than girls.
Girls are predominantly the victims in many individual or family-level environments all over the world, but institutionalised settings are where groomers and perpetrators take advantage of many young boys. This is because in institutions like religious schools and orphanages, there are clear hierarchies, power dynamics and often patriarchal traditions.
We have seen this clearly in decades-long scandal and shame of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests in countries like the US, Canada, Ireland, Chile, Australia and many others since the 1990s and earlier. The life-long effects of CSA on males have been widely researched, one reason being that there are fears of a cycle of abuse, since most adult child sexual offenders are male.
This has implications for how we look at what happens to victims of child sex abuse and offenders, some of whom are young. What are the treatments or rehabilitative programmes we need to end these cycles of abuse and to prevent its impact and traumas from extending to adulthood?
3. Many researchers have suggested that the best way to prevent child sexual abuse is through population-level prevention initiatives
You have seen examples of population-level initiatives without knowing they are population-level initiatives. The photos of black lungs on cigarette boxes, the school campaigns on anti-smoking, the banning of smoking in public spaces? Those are part of population-level initiatives that target smoking cessation and the tobacco industry. It is clear this has garnered progress on the anti-smoking front in many countries through the decades.
In short, a population-based approach basically intervenes at all possible levels of practice, from changing systems like laws, policies and power structures, to changing the knowledge, norms and behaviours within communities and families.
Can we do the same for child protection?
The Good and Hopeful News
We have things to be hopeful for, despite the enormity of the problem. Malaysia actually has a dedicated Women, Family and Community Development Ministry, something many countries do not have.
Last year, Minister Datuk Sri Nancy Shukri also announced the establishment of the Children’s Development Department, previously just a division under the Social Welfare Department. She said it would focus on the well-being of children in Malaysia, and urgently address issues related to child neglect and abuse.
There is no shortage of organisations, activists and advocates for children in our country, with a wealth of experience and qualified practitioners who understand what is most urgent.
There are longtime child advocates like Madeleine Yong (who founded CSA-focused group PS The Children) and experienced child activists like Dr Hartini Zainudin. Or James Nayagam from the child advocacy NGO Suriana Welfare Society, who recently said he had previously raised the problem of welfare homes run by religious organisations that are exempted from formal registration processes.
On more popular social fronts, we have longstanding advocates for children such as actress Lisa Surihani and media personality Daphne Iking, both using their platforms for many years to highlight children’s rights. We currently have our first female Education Minister Fadhlina Sidek, who has passionately stated her commitment of safety for our children in schools. We have able and ardent advocates in the legal sphere, not least our Law and Institutional Reform Minister Datuk Seri Azalina Othman Said, who I will argue is currently the best chance we have at targeting legal reforms to do with the protection of children in our country.
And we know there’s a hunger for more child protection education within the public. When makchic published our own children’s book on safety and body boundaries ‘What if?’, it was based on feedback from our readers and community of mothers who had disclosed their own experiences of sexual harassment or assault.
Our community was clear on what they wanted – more education for our children on what body boundaries are, what consent is, and how to understand and stand for their own rights as children. We see our book as part of the long game – educating children and families about what it means to protect one’s own body and what we can and must do when boundaries are breached.
There is no better time
‘I just can’t.’ ‘It’s unimaginable, I just cannot.’ This was the most frequent reaction my own circle had to the news of these 402 children.
As parents and as human beings, wanting to look away is a visceral reaction to the possibility of children being attacked or wronged in the cruellest of ways. But make no mistake, children in Malaysia will continue to be harmed, mistreated and abused for years and decades to come until and unless we take concrete steps and pressure our government to make this an absolute priority.
Malaysia could work on mitigating risk factors like screening mechanisms and our poor adult-child supervision ratios whilst coming up with a population-based initiative that decisively looks at putting our children’s safety first, once and for all.
With all our resources, ministers, advocates and a renewed will to prevent child abuse, there is no better time for us to put children’s safety as a national priority. We must not look away. The time is now.
Comments or queries about this article can be directed to laych@makchic.com or hello@makchic.com.
