Disclaimer: In Real Life is a platform for everyday people to share their experiences and voices. All articles are personal stories and do not necessarily echo In Real Life’s sentiments.
Every country has its seedy underbelly, did you know that ours has to do with children?
Something all Malaysians have heard about by now: child marriage is still practised.
1. Case of Ayu: The 11-year-old who married a 41-year-old man
Picture is for illustration purposes only
We’ve all heard about the case of Ayu, an 11 year old who married her 14 year old best friend’s father. Che Abdul Karim was 41 years old.
He had wanted to marry her since she was seven years old.
Little Ayu was his third wife.
Besides the indignity of having to marry a man 30 years older than her, Ayu was even taken for a virginity test at a hospital.
A 2000 census showed that child marriage actually happens amongst all races, including Malay, Chinese, Indian and other communities.
Unfortunately, due to lack of sufficient information, the true scale of child marriage in Malaysia is hard to gauge. Marital unions that occur through religious or ceremonial weddings are also not recorded legally.
Che Abdul Karim framed his marriage to Ayu as a noble and just cause. He cited the poverty of her family as the reason he married her, saying that he wanted to give her a good life and a way out of poverty.
He also said that he would not “touch her” until she turned 16.
One would think that there are other ways to aid a child financially besides marrying them.
However, the point still stands – how is the marriage of a child a legitimate option in any scenario?
Predation on children doesn’t just happen with adult men – adult women are also guilty of this.
2. The teacher who married her student
A TikTok video had recently gone viral. It was a compilation of pictures of a student with his former secondary school teacher. The pictures spanned years: from the time she was his teacher to their eventual marriage.
Although he was likely above 18 at the time of their marriage, it does not erase the fact that she was his teacher, and 25 years older than him – she had watched him grow from adolescence to adulthood.
The couple said that they had experienced an outpouring of positive comments on their video by netizens. She was initially his Sports Science teacher and the coach for the softball team. They met when he was in his fifth form in secondary school.
The video also courted controversy, and discussions were raised on the ethics of a teacher dating a student as well as the possibility of child grooming.
The practise of child grooming occurs when a predatory adult manipulates a child, creating a strong emotional bond between them, with the aim of gaining the child’s trust in order to sexually abuse them later.
That this happens with men and women is worrying: why do so many adults feel attraction towards children?
And why do so many other adults think this is okay?
3. Recently, one of the world’s most wanted pedophiles was found in a small town in Sarawak.
Four children, from the ages of nine to 14, were rescued from him upon his arrest.
Alladdin Lanim had sexually abused children as young as two years old, boasting about his actions on the darkweb since 2007 with images and videos of his exploits.
His victims number in the dozens and were from the same neighbourhood that he resided in.
His arrest came about due to collaboration between Australian and Malaysian police. He was under investigation by the Australian police for two years before the arrest, as the number of children he sexually abused made him a high priority case.
Although an extreme case, it is not an isolated incident.
4. In 2015, a Malaysian pedophile was convicted in the UK.
Who can forget about Nur Fitri Azmeer Nordin, the “maths genius” who had over 30, 000 images and videos of child porn in his possession? The UK police said that the child porn they found on him was “the most extreme material” they had unearthed.
After serving a reduced sentence of only nine months, he returned to Malaysia discreetly and enrolled in UKM, where he was promoted to a PhD while studying for his Master’s.
According to an interview with one of his lecturers at UKM, Nur Fitri opined that he did no wrong.
However, this case became a controversial one on social media. Many people stepped in to defend him, delineating child porn and the sexual abuse of children as separate actions. Others believed that he should be given a second chance as he had already served a sentence.
Beyond that, some still see him as evidence that one could be a convicted pedophile, yet as long as one happened to be a genius or gifted in some way, one could still thrive in this country.
5. In 2016, an activist exposed a pedophile Telegram group.
Syed Azmi had received a screenshot taken from the chat of a Telegram group which consisted of over 700 members. In the chat, the members were making sexual remarks about a young girl in a swimsuit.
He posted the screenshots on his Facebook after the sender of the screenshots received a disappointing response from a police friend while attempting to file a report.
The event was a reminder to parents to be careful about uploading pictures of their children on social media, as such posts will become fodder for pedophiles.
Despite the exposure of this Telegram group, it does bring to mind a curiosity on whether more of these groups exist.
6. But we have more concerning news: Malaysia has also become a holiday destination for pedophiles.
The trafficking of children for sex with pedophiles was a practice that Malaysians are blissfully unaware of, as it mostly happened to children from rural areas or low income urban families.
Victim of child grooming shares her experience
I spoke with Catherine, a victim of child grooming here in Malaysia, and she shared her experience with me.
Catherine told me that she is now one year younger than the age he was when he dated her (he was 24 when she was 17). At the time, she was not aware of child grooming or how it happens.
Nevertheless, the adults in her life had failed her in more ways than one.
One might be tempted to read these cases as extreme outliers, rather than symptoms of a much greater issue.
Some say that this is a multifaceted issue. They condemn the thought of child sex trafficking, but not that of child marriage. The consent of parents to the union of a child is seen as adequate protection, and that waiting till a child is older to have sex is commendable.
Taking into account all of the above points, it’s clear that the country has failed in protecting its children.
Children are already a part of the community that is barely listened to, as adults don’t take them seriously when they advocate for their own rights.
But when pedophilia is validated, children lose not just their right to their childhood, but the rights to their own future.
For more stories like this, read 3 Disturbing Times Malaysian Students Were Sexually Harassed In School
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