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The school bus driver who filmed schoolkids without their consent for a Tiktok account with 600,000 followers has now been arrested and charged in court. However, the incident raises many alarming questions about the safety of children in Malaysia.
Last week, a TikTok account run by a man known as ‘Abang Bas’, a school bus driver, was discovered to have been posting content involving school children paired with unsettling captions.
The TikTok account, which has amassed over 600,000 followers, was highlighted by practising lawyer @JatIkhwan who said, “The captions don’t sit right with me. You don’t post someone’s daughter who’s still in primary school with such a caption.”
The public outrage spurred Women, Family, and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Nancy Shukri to respond with calls for his arrest, and the school bus driver was apprehended and charged in court with two counts of sexual assault.
This behaviour is not accepted and shouldn’t be normalised.
I have instructed the officers from Jabatan Pembangunan Kanak-Kanak (JPKK) to file a police report immediately and we are ready to cooperate with D11 IPK Johor. https://t.co/kj22seEv6K
— Nancy Shukri (@NancyShukri) September 5, 2024
On 9th September, the school bus driver was charged with two counts of sexual assault in the Sessions Court. The 24-year-old accused, who was seen crying from the dock, pleaded not guilty after the charges were read to him before Judge Sayani Mohd Nor.
But what about the 600,000 followers on the Tiktok channel?
The fact remains that this Tiktok page has amassed such a huge follower base, and no report was made until awareness was raised on X, means that all 600,000 followers are complicit in the man’s actions.
Even if we assume that not everyone who follows the Tiktok is Malaysian, it is bone-chilling to realise that when you consider Malaysia’s broader population statistics, the 600,000 figure is actually within realistic numbers.
Malaysia’s total population is 31.5 million. With a male population of 15 million, and given the average percentage of reported pedophiles is between 3-5%, those 600,000 followers are realistically the average number of Malaysians who are actually pedophiles.
There is no choice but to accept the fact that child sexual abuse is much more common in Malaysia than we would like to believe.
How do we protect our children from being victimised?
So how many child sexual abuse cases occur in Malaysia? In 2023, there has been a total of 35 child abuse cases. This might seem low to some, but interpreting this statistical data is tricky.
Are numbers low because there are fewer people sexually abusing children? Or is it because some cases were not reported to the Malaysian authorities?
Malaysia’s top police officer heading the fight against sexual crimes against children, Assistant Commissioner of Police Siti Kamsiah Hassan, said key challenges for the D11 division’s work include both under-reporting and lack of cooperation by some victims in police investigations.
“When we ask a victim to step forward to lodge a report, sometimes they say, ‘Oh, I did not suffer losses.’
Some parents may see no need to lodge a report if their child had only suffered psychological harm. Such parents would only lodge reports when their child had already suffered physical harm from the sexual offender. They hold the “presumption” that there is no point in doing so if there is no evidence of injury.
Another reason such cases go unreported is that the public may consider such sexual abuse cases against children to be a “personal matter that happened privately”.
Choosing not to report leads to bigger sexual crimes
Siti Kamsiah cautioned that such thinking or attitude would instead give room for perpetrators to commit bigger and more sexual crimes against children and could result in even more victims.
For example, the family may find out about the sexual abuse after the suspect has spread the child’s explicit photograph online, and the child would then reveal the incident upon being asked, she said.
“Parents usually do not know. Only when the photo is already viral, or the suspect has already sexually assaulted the child, then only they lodge a report,” she said.
“So, we want to transform society to step forward, so that they participate in eradicating such crimes. If they do not lodge reports, then it becomes difficult for us to fight these crimes comprehensively,” she added.
Under Section 19 of the Sexual Offences Against Children Act 2017, there is a maximum RM5,000 fine penalty for those who fail to lodge a police report about any person’s intention to commit sexual crimes against children or fail to make police reports on such sexual crimes.
While it is not 100% possible to stop predatory men attempting to access children – either in person, or more frequently online – we can put safeguards in place to ensure they are not victimised.
These include improving safety of online dating sites, reducing the likelihood of predators targeting single parents to access children, and most importantly, to take every report seriously, and not sweep issues under the rug for the sake of saving face.
Let’s be proactive as a society to protect our children.
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Also read: This Missing 14-year-old Girl From Petaling Jaya Was Last Seen in a Nightclub
This Missing 14-year-old Girl From Petaling Jaya Was Last Seen in a Nightclub, Have You Seen Her?
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