KUALA LUMPUR: Employers may not be aware that a provision in the Sexual Offences Against Children Act has placed the burden on senior managements to take action against their employees who access, download and share child pornography.
“Chief executive officers, directors and secretaries who are responsible for their companies can be held criminally liable if their employees use computers or any gadget for such activities in their work place,” lawyer Ajeet Kaur said.
She said section 23 of the law stated that employers could be jailed up to five years or fined a maximum RM10,000 or both if found guilty for not reporting the matter to the police.
“Such employees must also be sacked as there must be zero tolerance,” she said at the International Malaysia Law Conference currently being held at a hotel here.
Ajeet, who is Bar Council Child Rights Committee co-chairman, said this in a talk on “Child Sexual Abuse: The Impact on Corporations.”
However, she said, it was unlikely that any employer had been prosecuted since the law came into effect in July last year.
She said this provision was included to also place responsibility on employers to check on employees who could be involved in sexual crimes involving minors.
Ajeet said the internet and digital technology had made it seamless, easy and inexpensive for child sexual offenders to produce and share illegal images of child sexual abuse with like-minded people.
She said the role of internet service providers (ISPs) was also crucial in stemming activities of child sexual exploitation online.
“Our neighbour Indonesia has just implemented the permanent ‘safe search’ feature in the Google search engine to ban porn. This will filter any pornographic content in the image category, including key words,” she said.
She said ISPs that failed to curb child pornography on the web should be also be criminalised.
“They too have corporate social responsibility in day-to-day business operations,” she said.