From Tehmina Kaoosji

Each new story of violence, neglect, or exploitation in Malaysia’s national schools is not an anomaly – it is a warning. Before we talk about education reform, we must first confront the truth – our children are not safe.

It is time for a national, independent school safety audit – and the courage to act on its findings.

We send our children to school expecting more than lessons. We expect sanctuary.

We believe that once the gates close behind them, they are protected – from violence, neglect, and the dangers of a world that too often preys on the small and the voiceless.

But that covenant – the quiet social contract between parents, teachers and the state – is breaking.

Below are a few key cases since July this year:

•  A 10-year-old boy dies in a school toilet due to a neck pressure injury.
• A nine-year-old boy falls to his death in an uncovered sewage pit at school.
• A 13-year-old girl was gagged and tied in a school toilet by two female classmates.
• Twelve-year-old girls – who should be in class – are trapped in a WhatsApp exploitation ring, selling photos of their body parts to hundreds online.
• Another 15-year-old girl, a rape victim, is sexually exploited by men via Telegram – her trauma weaponised, while she is away from school.

These three cases occurred in the last 5 days alone:

• Two Form 5 boys gang-rape a 15-year-old girl in a classroom, while two others film the crime and shared the footage online.
• A 16-year-old girl is fatally stabbed by a 14-year-old boy at school.
• A school security guard and her boyfriend were charged with sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl at a school in Rembau.

Meanwhile, almost five years have passed since period spot checks at school were first reported as a form of intimidation, with no indication of transparency or accountability.

These are not “isolated incidents” but symptoms of a system collapsing from within.

Every headline is a child’s life reduced to a statistic. Every silence that follows is a decision – by adults, by institutions, by us.

The mirror we refuse to face

Malaysia needs a school safety audit – not as bureaucracy, but as a reckoning.

A safety audit is not a checklist of locks and CCTV cameras. It is a map of vulnerability, a blueprint for protection. It asks the hard questions we’ve avoided for too long:

• How and why did a student bring knives into school?
• Why didn’t a school report gang rape when video footage was being circulated?
• How are school guards and staff screened before hiring?
• How many counsellors exist per school – and how many children can one trained human being reasonably watch over?
• What safety protocols exist for bullying, sexual harassment, or violent incidents?
• Are classrooms and toilets monitored at all hours or left as blind spots where violence thrives?
• When a student drops out or displays behavioural difficulties – who notices, who cares enough to ask why and what protocol comes next?
• Post-Covid-19 behavioural impacts; including heightened anxiety, aggression, social withdrawal and trauma-linked classroom disruption, must be factored into the safety audit to ensure schools are equipped to recognise and respond to the emotional fallout children still carry.

Because every tragedy affecting our children begins with an unanswered question.

Without the discipline of data, we will continue drifting between outrage and amnesia.

Safety is not a luxury, it is infrastructure

A national school safety audit must be independent, transparent and unflinching. It must expose every layer of risk – physical, emotional, procedural, digital, and cultural:

•  Institutional readiness: Are anti-bullying and abuse policies real or decorative?
• Staff vetting and training: Are guards, janitors and teachers screened and retrained on child safeguarding?
• Student support: What is the counsellor-to-student ratio?
• Physical safety: Are schools structurally sound and hazard-free?
• Digital protection: Are children taught to recognise online grooming, coercion, awareness about pornography consumption and harmful misogynistic tropes?
• Crisis response: Are emergency drills practised – what do they entail?
• Reporting mechanisms: Are there safe, anonymous channels for students and staff to speak up?
• Accountability: finite timelines for audit results to be published – and acted upon.

This is how we begin – we measure, we name, we repair.

When media, politics and policy collide, change becomes possible

The media’s job does not end at the headline. It begins there.

For too long, journalists have broken stories of harm and sexual violence against children in school only for public outrage to fade by the next news cycle.

Every story must now lead to a single question: What changed after?

Politicians must move beyond sympathy to legislate solutions – mandatory audits, better counsellor ratios, strict staff screening. Policy must turn that legislation into lived safety – training, infrastructure, oversight.

This is not about blame. It is about clarity – and the courage to rebuild what we have neglected.

The measure of a nation

We cannot call ourselves a nation that protects its future, if our children fear the very places that shape them.

A school safety audit will not bring back those we have lost or minimise the trauma of the ones harmed via systemic neglect.

But it can honour all the survivors – by ensuring no child suffers in vain.

When a child is harmed at school or by not being at school, the first question should no longer be “What happened?” but “What structural conditions allowed this?”

No parent should have to bury a child who died at school. And no child should have to walk through a schoolgate with fear.

Let these painful cases be the beginning of our national awakening.

Tehmina Kaoosji is an independent broadcast journalist, partner and communications director at The Big Picture Communications, a gender equity advocate, and head of the secretariat for the Malaysia Women & Girls Forum.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.