Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye
KUALA LUMPUR: Bullying and violence among students and teenagers should be kept in check as the culture is gaining a foothold in the local society, said Malaysia Crime Prevention Foundation (MCPF) senior vice-chairman Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye.
He said that in general, hardly a day passed without some form of violence committed, be it at home, school or elsewhere.
Thus, the government, along with other stakeholders, must find the reasons why Malaysian juveniles were behaving in this way and why they were disobeying and not respecting the law, he said.
“I believe that we must tackle the ‘culture of violence’ which appears to me to be gaining a foothold in our educational institutions,” he said in a statement today.
Lee was commenting on the incident last Saturday when an 18-year-old boy was allegedly assaulted, sodomised and burned by a group of teenagers around midnight at a field in Jalan Kaki Bukit, Bukit Gelugor, Penang.
Lee said the incident happened less than two weeks after Universiti Pertahanan Nasional Malaysia (UPNM) student Zulfarhan Osman Zulkarnain, 21, died at the Serdang Hospital on June 1 after he was allegedly assaulted by a group of university students in Serdang.
Lee also stressed that the government must intervene to help tackle the problem with support from all stakeholders, including parents, psychologists and non-governmental organisations.
Among others, he said, they should focus on the mental health aspect as it could also be one of the main reasons for such violence.
“More troubling, the problem also involves students as the ratio of those facing mental problems has increased from one in 10 people in 2011 to one in five individuals in 2016,” he said, adding that experts had cited anxiety and depression as the main causes of mental health problems among students.
He said it was imperative that the Education Ministry, with the assistance of teachers and counsellors, identify students prone to violence and begin an intensive counselling programme that aims to help such individuals before they destroy someone in the future, including their own lives. – Bernama