P Sundramoorthy, an associate professor at Universiti Sains Malaysia, said the “oppression of sexuality” could result in the heightening of sexual lust and this could in turn prompt some people to prey on children.
“Because of the amount of censorship and repression in regard to sexuality in this culture, it does not surprise me that we have those who are turned on by child pornography,” he told FMT.
He was commenting on a Sin Chew Daily report that Malaysia had the highest number of IP addresses in Southeast Asia from where child pornographic materials were uploaded and downloaded.
The report cited Asst Comm Ong Chin Lan of Bukit Aman’s Sexual, Women and Child Investigation Division as telling a seminar that authorities had detected 17,338 such IP addresses in Malaysia.
She said the finding was based on data furnished by a Dutch police team that did a study in Malaysia in 2015.
The data for years prior to 2014 showed that an average of 60 children a year were sexually assaulted by people they had befriended through the internet. The figure increased to 184 in 2015 and 183 in 2016. The figure for January to May last year was 117.
Sundramoorthy said sexual desire came in a wide variety of forms. “There are those who are attracted to the disabled, those attracted to supermodels, those attracted to senior citizens. You even have people who are attracted to babies.”
He said the victimisers of children could hail from a variety of demographic groups.
Security expert Khen Han Ming said one problem in dealing with paedophilia cases was that people were sometimes afraid to report suspicious individuals due to supposed lack of evidence.
He said there shouldn’t be any such fear because the authorities would have to comply with procedures in investigating every case.
“These people must report to the authorities even if they just feel something is amiss or suspicious,” he added.
Khen, who is the principal consultant at JK Associates, said paedophilia thrived precisely because people would not report suspected cases.
“People want to have proof or evidence that a suspect is a paedophile, but that is ridiculous because that would require a child to be sexually abused and the case recorded first,” he said.
“We don’t wait for a child to become a victim in order to prove that someone is a paedophile. This is why we have child protection laws. It’s in order to keep these monsters away from them.”
Khen pointed out that any person failing to inform the authorities of sexual offences against children would be committing an offence under Section 19 of the Sexual Offences Against Children Act.
He also noted that Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 prohibits the uploading and sharing of contents that are obscene, indecent, false, menacing or offensive.
“Those sharing such information are also committing a crime under Section 15 of the Child Act 2001,” he added.