*Kelantan And Sexual Crimes Against Children - No Solution In Sight.*
-Norman Fernandez-
In the 1950’s Kota Baru, Kelantan was infamously dubbed the "Paris of Malaya". The moniker stemmed not from romance or fashion, but from a booming, widespread prostitution industry, just as Paris then was globally notorious for red-light districts.
PAS has been ruling Kelantan continuously for 36 years, maintaining an unbroken hold on the state government since they won the state election in October 1990. While Kota Baru has very much been cleaned up of transactional commercial prostitution, Kelantan is now synonymous with sexual crimes against children.
Today Kelantan is facing a sexual crimes pandemic. Some of the vilest sexual crimes against children happened in Kelantan. A 15-year old schoolgirl gang raped by 38 men, which included a father and his two sons and in another case a father (and his two sons) raped his two daughters. If these are not shocking enough, there was the case of an 11-year-old boy who impregnated his 15-year-old cousin and another girl, while in another case a 13 yr old girl and a 14 yr old girl alleged that they were raped by their fathers with one alleging that she was also raped by two of her uncles.
Hardly a week passes by without (yet another) molest, rape, incest, or sodomy case in the news. Children as young as 10 years old have been molested, raped or sodomised in schools, tahfiz schools and hostels, homes, flood relief centres and even in toilets and storerooms of mosques. The predators have been teachers, wardens, immediate family members and very often ustazs. No place seems to be safe and the predator can be anyone. In any context, what we are witnessing is a pattern; a very shocking and troubling pattern.
PAS takes the high moral ground, its policies infused with religiosity, as such it is difficult to fathom how after 36 years of PAS Islamic governance, there is an implosion of sexual crimes against children.
Not that such crimes do not happen elsewhere but surely one does not expect so many cases of sexual crimes from a state that takes pride in calling itself the Corridor of Mecca (Serambi Mekah). As the Home Minister Saifuddin Nasution once said, Kelantan’s population is 98% Malay Muslim and has its own Syariah Criminal Code, yet it has the highest number of sexual crimes.
The (then ) Chief Justice Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat voiced her concerns over the high number of sexual abuse cases involving children, while Kelantan CPO Dato Mohd Yusoff Mamat highlighted that rape and incest cases had been surging and in some cases have resulted in pregnancies.
When faced with statistical reports, the PAS government and its leaders instead of admitting that sexual crimes have become a serious problem simply evade accountability by deflecting blame or minimizing the severity of these offences, blaming parents for failing to monitor and supervise the movements and associations of their children, the influence of social media and internet access for the spread of pornographic material that is easily accessible through smartphones among teenagers, and the state’s proximity to Thailand.
That is an easy way out and very little is done to address the problem. Just hear the feeble response by Kelantan Menteri Besar, Dato Mohd Nassuddin Daud, saying not to blame the Kelantan state government for the surge in sexual crimes and claiming that the state government has made every effort to address the problem including organising Islamic based programmes in schools and suraus. To digress, why is there a higher incidence of sexual crimes against children among the Malay-Muslims? Within the Indian-Muslims or the mualaf community sexual crimes against children rarely happens while among the non Muslims in Malaysia it is almost unheard.
So despite ruling Kelantan for 36 years PAS cannot do much to eradicate this growing problem. For the time being, the courts are the last bastion for the victims, at least for the brave who report their cases to the authorities, while others choose to suffer in silence and shame.
In a recent case, Judicial Commissioner S Kalyana Kumar said the court “considered the rampant number of sexual offences committed against young children by ruthless men, which has been reported almost daily in the newspapers. This cannot be ignored.” And that “rape profoundly shakes the very foundation of a victim’s life, and that public interest demands that such offences be treated as among the gravest crimes against human dignity”. As such, “sentences should reflect public abhorrence of such offences and serve to protect minors”.
“Society, as the ultimate guardian of decency, expects the courts to take a firm stance and avoid imposing unduly lenient sentences for such despicable crimes".
The judge stressed that “rape is a grave offence – especially when the victim is a child – and warrants no leniency, even if the offender pleads guilty”.
Until PAS acknowledges the problem and finds a solution, in Kelantan every child could be in harms way,
*Norman Fernandez*
MY COMMENTS:
Society, as the ultimate guardian of decency,
Indeed where is the society's sense of decency? If a father can rape his daughter or a religious teacher can rape his students (male or female) the question is what has happened to the society's sense of decency?
I recall dozens of years ago a friend of mine who is Kelantanese telling me about one of his young female workers (also Kelantanese) who casually shared the fact that she had been gang raped by a group of boys back in her kampong. She did not report the matter and she took it as just something bad that had happened to her.
Can religion really help out with this problem?
I want to digress a little and leave Kelantan behind. Lets talk about something else. I have listened to podcasts and videos which discuss the abuse and rape of Yazidi and Kurdish women by the ISIS terrorists operating in Syria and Iraq.
- Multiple United Nations bodies and agencies have explicitly condemned the rape, sexual slavery, and abuse of Yazidi women and girls by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
- In 2016, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Syria concluded that ISIS was committing genocide against the Yazidis, including through “sexual slavery,” rape, torture, and enslavement of women and girls.
- The UN report stated that thousands of Yazidi women and girls were being held captive in Syria and abused as sex slaves by ISIS fighters.
- The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) also documented “systematic and widespread killings, sexual violence and sexual slavery” against Yazidis and other minorities.
The ISIS has justified their sex slavery through weird interpretations of religious texts.
ISIS published a pamphlet titled “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves” in 2014 ( سؤال وجواب في السبي والرقاب : Suʾāl wa-Jawāb fī al-Sabī wa-al-Riqāb) which attempted to provide religious justification for slavery and rape of non-Muslim captives. The group specifically argued that Yazidis were polytheists and therefore could legally be enslaved under their interpretation of religion. They treated sexual slavery as revival of what they called an abandoned institution of early Islam.
Again it depends on what is the level of decency and morality of a society? Do their moral compasses point to the true North?
It is not difficult to train the young to be decent and moral people. A society's morality and sense of decency can be improved. Just like if you tell young children to eat with their mouth closed and not chew their food sloppily they will develop better table manners and social etiquette.
But if a community feels that there is nothing wrong with eating with their mouth open or there is nothing wrong with chewing their food sloppily and noisily well then that is a different value system.
Perhaps what is needed is a more universal understanding of what is decency and decent behaviour.
