Participants of the #SayaSayangSaya programme posing for a group photo.
KUCHING: An estimated 80 per cent of rape victims in the country over the past two years are minors, according to statistics from the Royal Malaysia Police (PDRM).
The statistics showed that from the over 150 rapes cases recorded each year by police in 2015 and 2016, roughly 80 per cent involved underage victims.
Sarawak is not spared from the startling statistics, as about 80 per cent of the 68 rape cases reported to the police so far this year involved victims who are minors.
Realising this, four organisations, namely Digi Telecommunication Sdn Bhd, R.AGE, WOMEN:girls, and Unicef, and supported by the Federation of Reproductive Health Associations, Malaysia (FRHAM) as well as PDRM, jointly organised a programme called #SayaSayangSaya to raise awareness and spark conversation on the issue of online sexual grooming and Internet safety among the Malaysian public, especially schoolchildren and adolescents.
Digi CyberSAFE programme manager Philip Ling said #SayaSayangSaya is a platform for teenagers to gain awareness on cyber-grooming and on how to protect themselves from sexual predators.
“Our objective is to give information and to get their opinion on matters concerning health and proper sex education.”
“They need to learn how to protect themselves from predators and also what actions to take if they find themselves in that situation,” he said during a press conference yesterday after attending a forum with students from 38 schools in the city which participated in the #SayaSayangSaya programme.
A total of 144 secondary students took part in yesterday’s #SayaSayangSaya programme here, the fifth in a series of sessions held previously in Sabah, Terengganu and Pahang targeting 170 schools nationwide.
Ling also disclosed that statistics from PDRM’s Sexual, Women and Children Investigation Division, along with findings of the ‘National Survey 2015: CyberSAFE in Schools’ report showed that one out of 10 children had been asked to upload intimate photos or videos of themselves onto the Internet.
“Almost 80 per cent of rape cases reported in Malaysia over the past two years involved someone the victim had befriended online, with the majority of victims below the age of 18,” he said.
Meanwhile, FRHAM programme services senior officer Rabiathul Badariah said the lack of sexual education exposure among children and teenagers is currently a problem.
She said society’s mindset of feeling embarrassed when confronted with sex-related matters should be discarded because a majority of teenage victims admitted to having little or no knowledge about sex, and had experimented out of curiosity.
“We should be frank with them when talking about sex because what they are exposed to in the education module is not enough.”
“This doesn’t mean that we are encouraging them, instead we are teaching them that it is important for them to protect themselves,” she said, adding the assumption that exposure to sex education will lead to children involving themselves in sex-related activities needs to be discarded.