Behind GISBH scandal lie years of inaction over child sexual abuse

 

Sexual crimes often get swept under the carpet. If these involve a religious home, the community has great difficulty in accepting the backlash and shock that men of the cloth had committed these crimes.

Moreover, the tendency in most Asian families is to hide these crimes from the public, ostensibly to protect the families or the victim itself, from public shame and humiliation.

Communities try their best to protect their public persona, when it is the child victim who should be helped first and protected.

When enforcement is weak, paedophile wardens operating in state-run orphanages, or homes for disadvantaged children which are run by private companies, get away with abuse of the children, never to be punished.

Allegations of sodomy in religious or state-run boarding schools or ‘residential homes for children’ have arisen for decades. The recent scandal involving homes linked to Global Ikhwan Services and Business Holdings (GISBH) is not the first, nor will it be the last.

The truth does not sell when foxes guard the hen house. All governments want to maintain a clean image of themselves and of their enforcement agencies as being in control. They’re not!

Many officers are not held accountable. Newspapers cower in fear of being shut down. Religious leaders pretend that all is well under their control, hiding behind the mask of religion. The issue is not religion. The issue lies with the religious people in charge, but who use religion as a mask for their crimes

The rakyat lurches from one scandal to the next, with initial investigations being conducted seemingly swiftly, but then left to gather dust on the shelves.

Previously, some perpetrators were punished but many were not. Many cases of sodomy, rape or sexual abuse of children have gone unrecorded.

Many of these children’s homes are cesspools of evil where paedophiles operate, instead of being a place of protection for children, especially those who are illegitimate, or babies who were dumped, or children abandoned by their parents.

With inadequate supervision, no one is held accountable and no one takes responsibility for wrongdoings. The warden acts like a fox in a henhouse, or as the Malay saying goes, 

musang disuruh jaga reban ayam

.

The abuses to which the young children are subjected to are horrific. Crimes like sodomy, rape, and inappropriate touching are accompanied by mental and physical torture, like beating a child’s hand with a rotan, amidst severe scoldings.

In some cases, the child is sworn to secrecy with the words, ‘God will punish you if you dare tell anyone’. The children are threatened with more severe beatings if they were to complain to another adult about the sexual abuse.

A former social worker said acts of sodomy are committed on girls who have started puberty because they will not then get pregnant.

The GISBH scandal occurred because previous perpetrators of sodomy, rape and child abuse in such homes were never really punished. The men – the crimes were mostly perpetrated by men – were able to escape scot free, which other offenders took to be a sign of weakness of the authorities.

The most that the perpetrators received was the equivalent of a rap on the knuckles. What is a few years jail and fine, with whipping, when the lives and futures of children are destroyed and they suffer mental and physical health issues for the rest of their lives.

The true reason is more likely that the management of the home is trying to avoid being charged for negligence or for failing in their duty of care towards their charges.

It is of no help, when in the past, the method commonly used when dealing with the sexual abusers, was merely to transfer the perpetrators, or by denying promotions. This is not dealing with the problem, but merely transferring it.

Our children deserve better. Stop failing them. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.