Molestation of males often ignored, says women’s group

 

A survivor of male sexual harassment says such cases are often taken as a joke.

PETALING JAYA: A women’s group is hoping that the Sexual Harassment Bill, which is in the works, will provide adequate protection not only to women and girls but to transgenders, boys and men as well.

“It has to be clear that the bill is not just to protect women,” All Women’s Action Society co-founder Betty Yeoh told FMT.

“It is not a bill to protect one particular group of people, but a bill to protect anyone from sexual harassment. That has to come across to the MPs.”

She said many people still believed that only women suffered sexual harassment and she attributed this to a lack of research on the harassment of males.

Betty Yeoh.

FMT spoke to a man who said he was sexually harassed by a trainee counsellor when he was 13 years old.

“When most of the counsellors had left the room, he asked me to look at something that he said would make me relaxed and calm,” he said.

“I expected him to show something like a video of religious sermons or a motivational talk.”

But he was shown a pornographic video instead.

“The video was extremely indecent,” he said. “Shocked, I ran away after a few seconds.”

When he raised the issue with administrators in his school, they brushed it away as a “small issue”, he added.

“Male sexual harassment is often overlooked and some men sometimes take it as a joke,” he said, adding that there was a stigma to it that made it hard for victims to speak out.

He called for support for victims in a variety of forms and suggested a dedicated emergency hotline to take distress calls.

In sports, it appears that males are more vulnerable than females to sexual harassment. A 2017 Kolej Universiti Poly-Tech Mara survey found that 19% of males and 11% of females had experienced sexual harassment in sports.

Out of the 422 athletes surveyed, half of whom have represented the country in international events, 15.9% were victims of sexual harassment.

Yeoh said she hoped the bill, which has been 20 years in the making, will be tabled in the Dewan Rakyat next month.

Prior to 2018, she said, the government lacked the interest to push for the bill, with the matter being handed back and forth to different ministries over the years.

It came close to being tabled in April, but the Covid-19 lockdown caused a postponement.

Daniella Zulkifili

Association of Women Lawyers exco member Daniella Zulkifili said although there were already laws covering sexual harassment, several gaps needed to be addressed.

She said civil cases for sexual harassment required victims to hire a lawyer and prepare court papers and this was expensive and time consuming.

For criminal cases, she said, the standard of proof required was a high “beyond reasonable doubt”, causing many police reports to end up without any action being taken on them.

“If someone touches you or says something to you, it would be difficult to provide physical proof unless the act was recorded or documented,” she said. “A lot of sexual harassment incidents happen in this kind of situation.”

She said the definition of sexual harassment in the new bill must be improved, with a wider range of protection provided for victims or would-be victims, regardless of their relationship with the perpetrators.

“We propose for a tribunal to be established to deal with complaints swiftly and privately, where you don’t need legal representation, where the standard of proof is on balance of probabilities and where complainants are given remedy options.

“We understand that the government is planning to table it at the end of the year. We look forward to assisting it and seeing this bill passed.” - FMT