Withdraw textbook pinning blame on girls deemed to have failed in protecting their modesty

It is simply unbelievable and defies logic that the Year 3 textbook on Pendidikan Jasmani dan Kesihatan could actually pass through the Education Ministry’s department in charge of national school textbooks. The contents and infographic on “Selamatkan Maruah” or “Protecting Modesty” are absolutely wrong in all aspects.  

The textbook makes the erroneous assumption that pre-teen girls (thereby all females) are to be singularly blamed for society’s ill actions on them and their mental state of mind simply based on the outfits they wear.

The textbook completely ignores that fully clothed girls and women too have been victims of rape and murder, most notably Noor Suzaily Mukhtar who in 2000, was raped and murdered by the bus driver of the public bus she had travelled on despite attired in a tudung and wearing a loose baju kurung. The textbook author should provide empirical evidence as to how women’s apparels carry links with school bullying, sexual molest or assault or a victim’s mental frame.

If babies and toddlers are sexually violated and battered, is it their fault too? It is the rapist’s inability to control his sexual lust and aggression that causes them to sexually attack any fully clothed woman or child.

This textbook completely overlooks that pre-teen boys and adolescent males too have been victims of school bullying and paedophiles. It is plain Emperor’s clothes mentality to assume that not a single adult male throughout the millenniums has ever been raped by other fellow males or even women using physical objects.

Rather than modernising with times, this textbook retains and even reinforces an obsolete mindset that a family’s honour will be violated, and that the pre-teen female child would be isolated by her friends if she is perceived to not have appropriately defended her sexual modesty. What rubbish is this? Why this public shaming? Why nothing on assisting victims to recover from their ordeal?

On the contrary, the textbook should inculcate that strong family and peer support is most needed immediately and in the long term for victims of school bullying, harassment and rape rather than exhorting the larger community to ostracise them.

If sex education was the main intent, the textbook should teach that the community and state and federal legislators, the government, educators, religious leaders, everyone have important roles to undertake in not only safeguarding children but adults as well irrespective of gender and against sexual assaults or bullying by anyone.

Nothing in the infographics or the accompanying caption teach perpetrators to accept responsibility. Paradoxically, it protects and emboldens the culprits.

Not only should this textbook be revised, MCA Youth implores that this textbook be withdrawn completely, and all its other contents and pages must be reviewed thoroughly.

Nicole Wong Siaw Ting
MCA Youth Chairperson

-MCA online-