When silence is not golden
Minister warns that those who fail to report incest can be prosecuted
KUCHING: Those who know of any case of incest are bound by the law to report to the nearest police station immediately or face prosecution.
Minister of Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah warned that failure to give information on the commission of the crime or the intention of any person to commit sexual offences against children is breaking the law under the Sexual Offences Against Children Act, 2017.
She noted that under Section 19 of the Act, any person who fails to give information on the commission of or the intent of any other person to commit any offence under the Act, or any offence specified in the Schedule where the victim is a child, to the police, is committing an offence and shall on conviction be liable to a fi ne not exceeding RM5,000.
“I call on any person who has information about the heinous act to come forward and report the matter to the police immediately.
“The cooperat ion of the community, including parents, is very much needed to reduce the number of incest cases in the state.
I call on any person who has information about the heinous act to come forward and report the matter to the police immediately. Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah, Minister of Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development
“On top of that, we do not want to see the victim suffering alone if there is no action taken against the culprit,” she told reporters after chairing the Women and Family Council meeting here yesterday.
Fatimah lamented that the number of incest cases in Sarawak this year had increased to 15 up to this month from 13 cases recorded last year. She said nine of the cases had been solved while the rest are in the legal process.
“We must take cognition of the fact that the cases that are reported have been acted on swiftly by the police. We congratulate the police who had succeeded in making arrests on the day itself when the report was lodged.
“In most cases, charges were made against the accused person even before the remand period ended,” she said.
KUCHING: The state will come up with a well structured and well coordinated plan of action that will have an extensive reach to every community in the effort to tackle the issue of incest.
In stating this, Welfare, Community Well Being, Women, Family and Childhood Development Minister Dato Sri Fatimah Abdullah said incest needed to be tackled seriously in a strategic and holistic manner at the inter-agency level.
She said the action plan must also involve the community and the public at large.
“So we have agreed to have an inter-agency lab, whereby we will discuss and deliberate on the strategic and holistic ways to deal with the issue of incest and how to have an extensive reach.
“Because if we look at where the cases occurred, they not only occurred in the urban but also in the rural areas.
“So, the coverage is very wide and for that, we have to come up with a very well coordinated, well structured, holistic and strategic plan of action, for short term as well for long term to tackle the issue of sexual offences against children,” she said after chairing the Women and Family Council meeting here yesterday.
She said the agencies that would be involved in the lab are the police, Prisons Department, Health Department, Education Department (counsellors), nongovernmental organisations ( NGOs), village security and development committees (JKKKs), elected representatives, politicians and departments under her ministry.
“We will include Prisons Department because there was a case in Sibu where the person who had served 12 years’ imprisonment because of incest was alleged to have raped his own granddaughter after he was released last year.
“So, we will also invite Prisons Department to take part in the lab so that together we can handle the loopholes in our justice system,” she said.
Asked if castration should be introduced as a form of punishment for rapists, she said that might be discussed in the inter- agency workshop.
She said she had highlighted the issue of incest on her Facebook page and she had received a lot of feedback with some even suggesting castration for the perpetrators.
“But the suggestion for castration is not from me. Anyway, I must thank the netizens for their very constructive comments, suggestions and so on. That will help us actually.
“Let us discuss and deliberate on the castration suggestion in our lab because there are implications to it,” she said.
Fatimah said prior to the lab, the Social Development Council (SDC) and One Stop Crisis Centre ( OSCC) would try to profile the perpetrators so that they could understand the root causes of the problem – whether it is the individual’s problem or the environment such as the place they live in.
She said the profiling exercise might be completed by end of November, adding that the inter- agency lab could only be held upon the completion of profiling.
In order to reach out to more people especially the high risk group, Fatimah said the training of trainers would be done based on the module prepared by the Sarawak Women for Women Society ( SWWS) and National Population and Family Board ( LPPKN).
“The modules are already there. Now is to train the trainers so that we have more people to reach out to the various parts of Sarawak to create awareness, provide skills for our children to enable them to recognise self touch and so on.
“Our target group will be, of course, our own children, pupils or students, mothers and school counsellors so that they can have the skills to recognise the change in behaviour of the children,” she said.
Also present was Sarawak Criminal Investigation Department chief Datuk Dev Kumar and Women and Family Department director Noriah Ahmad.