Applying the rule of law

ON NOV 7, I recognised a childhood colleague from the 1990s, in a post that had “gone viral” on social media.

The allegation of the post was that John Doe had developed a career of harassment, targeting children who volunteered in religious societies and charities.

Firstly, I’m looking at it from a public health point of view. What are the appropriate channels that the government needs to put in place, such that the right multi-track support programmes can be administered to the accused and the victims?

There is a view that there are two parts to dealing with crime in society.

(a) Punitively, by simply punishing those who engage in behaviours deemed illegal, and hope that this acts as a deterrent to future crimes.

(b) As a public health issue, with multiple simultaneous tracks of social, medical, legal, and perhaps including punitive support.

Secondly, even when we have non-punitive tracks to deal with perpetrators, the law cannot take effect without the initiation of a formal process. For someone to receive formal clinical diagnosis and treatment, they have to first either:

(c) Be charged under a law, whereby the courts can thereafter assign them to a social worker or medical personnel for evaluation, or

(d) They must voluntarily seek out diagnosis and treatment.

The formal method for initiating proceedings for anyone who isn’t John Doe himself, is to file a police report. Meanwhile, as the behaviour of the accused has been neither diagnosed by a professional, or formally charged in court, it receives trial by social media, which is not efficient in helping us to determine the whole truth about the issue.

John Doe has already responded to media interviews. I don’t think it’s appropriate to speculate on his specific philosophical positions: neither his views on how he engages with society, nor his views on whether his behaviour is ethical or not. Those are his opinions; they will be taken into consideration by clinical professionals in the event of clinical diagnosis. We can only review what he has actually done, and it returns to the courts to properly convict an individual if he is guilty.

Finally, in my experience of socialising with him in weekly activities over a period of years, it was known that he was never very well-adjusted to society. He was often bullied for being inept at fitting in with the crowd. I know this for a fact because I participated in the bullying at that time – it wasn’t spectacularly violent, bloody stuff, but I do believe that teasing between children, social castigation and verbal abuse are all forms of bullying which may have longterm effects on individuals.

Bullying is easy to spot and deal with. But is it even possible for gov- ernments to put in place mechanisms where we can go a step further, where all members of society are familiar with spotting, tagging, and assigning professional social workers to cases of other forms of deviance in children from a young age? Do we want our society to become robust enough to accommodate such facilities?

The relationship between what counts as social norm, and what counts as crime, is often more complex than we may want to admit. Thinking deeply about this issue often reveals that we arbitrarily decide what is good and bad based on what is convenient. For some people, it may seem easier to refer to God; and for others, the truth is more mundane – we all have different intuitions, and can only agree on a social contract which must be explicitly defined, and enforced with checks and balances. That is the rule of law.

HWA YANG JERNG Kuala Lumpur