Whither our sense of right and wrong?
If a recent newspaper article is an indication, we seem more worried about sexual orientations than sexual crimes.
One question that immediately crops up is whether the nation as a whole deserves derision for the apparent indiscretion of a newspaper published in the country.
But then again, the paper in question has a reputation for good editing, and one must therefore assume that the editors, being professionally adept, chose to publish the article because they believed Malaysians would be interested in knowing how to tell if someone was lesbian, gay, bisexual or transexual.
That should say a lot about our sense of right and wrong. Are we truly more concerned about sexual orientations than sexual crimes? The statistics on paedophilia, incest and conventional rape are scary enough to warrant a frenzy of media articles on how to spot potential offenders. And yet, all we have seen are occasional guides and statements of outrage from welfare organisations and other NGOs.
Reports about all kinds of rape appear so frequently that many of them have been relegated to the position of page fillers in our newspapers. This is not to say that a particularly horrendous rape has not sometimes made screaming headlines. An example is the recent case of a man being charged for having allegedly raped his niece 334 times since she was five years old.
And it is not just sex crimes that merit more attention to most decent people than the imagined need of the public to learn how to identify a gay or lesbian person.
Recently, we heard about a domestic maid who died from alleged mistreatment by her employers. In fact, this is another issue that merits much greater interest than it has been given by the media. It is well known that the abuse of maids has been going on for a long time in this country.
Can we really say that a foreign observer is wrong if he thinks Malaysian sensitivities are warped? We seem to constantly worry about the existence of homosexuals in our midst and to endlessly inquire about the halal status of medical devices, but we tend to ignore the neighbour who habitually beats his wife, the relative who assaults his maid, the parents who abuse our children’s classmates and the man who lives on our street who may be raping his daughter.
Knowing how politicised Malaysians have become, some would probably jump up and lay the blame on the rise of racial and religious politics. That may be too simplistic. More than likely, a myriad of factors are at play.
Nevertheless, it would be good if politicians in power as well as the religious authorities were to show more concern over the apparent weirdness in our sense of values.
Sheith Khidhir Bin Abu Bakar works at FMT.
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The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.