There will still be victims as long as we remain callous

Have we moved from being caring to being callous and having a “couldn’t-care-less” attitude?

How many of us would actually stop to help a person in need? When an accident happens, you can bet your annual salary that there will be a large number of people pulling over by the side of the road.

But just how many of these people are actually there to see if they can render some sort of assistance and how many are there to gawk, take videos and pictures, or just take down the registration numbers of the vehicles involved for the next trip to the local 4D outlet?

How many of us, knowing that something bad is happening to someone in a neighbour’s home, would report it to the authorities? Do we do that, or do we not want to get involved in someone else’s problems?

The past few weeks or so have seen so many reports of children being abused, some fatally, and the death of Indonesian maid Adelina Lisao, purportedly at the hands of her employer.

In the wake of her death, another video went viral with the claims that this was of her being abused. If indeed this was a clip of her being stomped on and hit, why was this abuse not reported?

For that matter, surely neighbours must have heard or noticed something.

And this goes for little Nur Aina Nabihah, the 9-year-old who lived in Port Dickson whose soldier father was charged with her murder recently as well.

Adelina Lisao and Nur Aina were, of course, not the first maid and child to have died from injuries sustained due to physical abuse.

Sadly, they are likely to not be the last. Nor will the septuagenarian woman in Taman Limau Manis be the last victim of a snatch theft to be injured or killed.

For as long as we continue to have a callous attitude towards our fellow Malaysians, our fellow human beings (and animals), there will still be victims. For us to prosper as a nation, we need to move back to being a caring society, as a whole.

We need to drop this jangan jaga tepi kain orang attitude. We The writer has more than two decades of experience, much of which has been spent writing about crime and the military. A die-hard Red Devil, he can usually be found wearing a Manchester United jersey when outside of work