Child sexual abuse cases on the rise

THE Government is taking a serious view on sexual abuse involving children as 5,052 cases were reported in the past five years with almost 80% of the offenders being close to the victims, including parents and guardians.

Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Rohani Abdul Karim said the reason why the government views the problem as serious is because it’s closely related to paedophilia.

“Paedophilia is related to sexual abuse (on children).”

Statistics for the past five years have shown an increase of such cases, except in 2014 and 2015 when a slight decrease was recorded.

“Although not all of the cases involve paedophiles, sexual abuse cases show that the threat of paedophilia needs to be given serious attention,” she said during the question and answer session.

She was responding to a question by Datuk Noraini Ahmad (BN-Parit Sulong) who wished to know the latest statistics on the number of children reported missing since 2016.

Rohani said based on police statistics, 824 missing cases involving children below 18 years were recorded in 2016. From the figure, only 11 cases were recorded through the NurAlert, a hotline established by the government to track cases of missing children below the age of 12.

She added there were also instances of sexual abuse cases involving children which went unreported as they involved family members of the victims.