Home Minister and Women Development Minister have both failed their duty to protect our children

Documentary by Al Jazeera which shows that babies become commodities breaks the hearts of many ordinary Malaysians.

However, this issue is not entirely “new”. In April this year, I have already raised up this issue in Parliament after reading a series of articles by The Sun.

Before the documentary of Al Jazeera caught the eyeballs of many, our local media The Sun has done a rather comprehensive reporting on the same issue in end of March and early April this year.

Their articles “Babies for sale on Facebook”[1] and “Sex workers used as baby factory”[2] have prompted the Welfare Department’s director-general to instruct the head of its children’s division to investigate links to Facebook pages that offer babies for sale.

According to the department’s Public Relations Officer Laila Zulkifli, the matter had been highlighted for the division “to take action and provide a response (and) report to the director-general”.

Meanwhile, the Police Cyber Investigations Response Centre in Bukit Aman has promised to follow up on the case after links to the Facebook pages were provided to them.

And now, 6 months after the exposure by The Sun, what was the result of investigation by the various enforcement departments?

Children are gifts from heaven. And yet, they are suffering in many aspects due to different reasons in Malaysia.

Malaysia has adopted a United Nations resolution to end child marriage at the Human Rights Council in October 2013, but girls are still allowed to marry before they attain the age of majority, sometimes to the rapists.

Malaysia has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in 1995 to uphold its commitment to the protection and welfare of her children, but hundreds of thousands of children of Malaysians were denied citizenship and became stateless children simply because the father did not register the marriage with his foreign spouse.[3] They share the same fate of Zara, the little girl shown in the documentary, a non-citizen has no access to public education and hospital.

In Malacca Hospital, at least three children are treated for sexual abuse at the facility every week. Paedophile Richard Huckle was in our backyard committing hideous crime against children aged between 6 months to 12 years unnoticed, until he was arrested in UK. Only then, our government starts talking about drafting anti-sexual grooming laws.

Home Minister and Women Development Minister have both failed their duty to protect our children. Is it because children are not voters and therefore their predicament is never the priority concern of our Government?

Do we always need to wait till an issue become the headline of international media only then our ministers will wake up and do what should have been done a long time ago?

[1] http://www.thesundaily.my/news/1742083

[3] In between 2011 and April 2016, 131,810 children born in Malaysia were registered as “Non-Citizen” “Bukan Warganegara”.