Girls are to blame for everything
Sunday, 27 Jan 2019
by marina mahathir
That seems to be the wrong-headed thinking in some circles. What we need to do instead is teach our children that sexual harassment and sexual violence arise from an environment that does not treat girls and boys equally.
IF it were not for one sharp-eyed mother, we would never have found out how deep the rot in our schools is. There it was, that page in a textbook blithely telling our Year Three girls what shame and horror await them if they forget to close the door while changing clothes.
Year Three, folks! Nine-year-olds being told that the entire weight of the honour of their families rests on their thin shoulders. And the not-so-subtle implication that if you don’t wear appropriate clothes, if you walk in dark alleys and don’t close room doors, you will suffer from emotional pain, have no friends, and your families will undoubtedly disown you for shaming them.
Who in their right mind tells children this? Only sick people.
If this is an official document from the Education Ministry, there must have been a process through which it was commissioned, vetted and approved. How does this process work? Did somebody say they need a document on sexual harassment, somebody writes any old rubbish that comes into their heads, and it gets approved and printed?
Notice that not the slightest bit of brain power went into this process. Nobody asked what the best approach for an undoubtedly serious and growing problem would be. Nobody thought to consult people who have some expertise on this issue. Women’s groups, perhaps, or psychologists or child rights advocates.
Imagine if we needed to curb the problem of rape and we simply commissioned an official publication that declared that all boys above the age of 12 should be locked up because of the likelihood that their burgeoning hormones would make them uncontrollable. Boy, would there be an uproar!
But when it comes to girls, no such uproar erupts. Whoever was in charge of producing this gem of a teaching aid was totally oblivious to the sheer wrongheadedness of the entire approach.
Of course, girls must protect their own honour and modesty! Of course, they will have to face dire consequences if something happens to them. Of course, they are the only people responsible for anything bad that happens to them.
To think that the Education Ministry, the entire education system, school principals, teachers and most parents did not pick up on this until this one parent pointed it out. All those women in our education system, did they think it was OK to talk to schoolgirls like this? To tell them that it’s so easy to lose their worth?
If this from the Education Ministry was bad, what issued forth from the Women, Family and Community Develop-ment Ministry is worse simply because it is the ministry with a focus on women and should know better.
In a series of Instagram memes, the ministry held forth on the dangers of premarital sex and pregnancy. The issues are real but how do pronouncements on social media along the lines of “Abandoning babies is a crime. Don’t start it.” help a teenager who finds herself pregnant and is terrified of what her parents will say? How do you tell teens that they can get pregnant even if they have sex only once when they can’t make the connection between copulation and conception?
I don’t know what it is about Malaysians but when something like this happens, we act as if it is the first time it’s ever happened. We live in such silos, ring-fenced by our own prejudices, that we learn nothing from anything outside these narrow confines.
Let me remind everyone of the story of a young woman called Noor Suzaily Mokhtar, a computer engineer who, in 2000, was raped and murdered by a bus driver while on her way to work. She was wearing very modest clothes, including a hijab, and was simply sitting in a bus in broad daylight.
In what way does Suzaily’s case relate to that page in the textbook we are showing our nine-year-olds or to those social media campaigns aimed at youth? Not at all. Because when girls are sexually harassed or worse, it has nothing to do with how they dress, where they are, or how they behave. It’s because a sick male, who’s often physically stronger, decides that this female can be taken advantage of. Or worse.
We need to teach our children that the wrongness of sexual harassment and sexual violence (and surely we agree they are wrong?) does not derive from the supposedly bad behaviour of the victim but from an environment that does not treat girls and boys equally.
If we think of girls as inferior, then it subliminally gives out the message to boys that they can treat girls badly. If we keep hammering into our boys that they are superior, both physically and mentally, then we are setting up a situation where the reality of their lives will simply not meet their expectations. And mayhem will ensue.
Imagine telling a boy that he is the best, top of the heap, just because he is a boy. And then he finds that he doesn’t automatically come out top in class. In fact, a girl (or several girls) has beaten him to the top. How does this make sense to him? He’s been told repeatedly that girls are not as good as him, how come they’re ahead of him?
We see this scenario repeated over and over again as girls keep their heads down and work hard while boys, and later on men, walk around cocksure that their place in the world is secure. And then they find out it’s not. Those “inferior” women are achieving more and earning more. Life is not as it should be.
How else do they keep women in their place but to go back to the drawing board? Start in school where they are most easily influenced. Tell girls they are not equal, that they are responsible for everything bad in the world from those young years and they will bow down and obey.
And the powers in charge of our schools and in our government departments facilitate this by publishing and distributing the type of trash that we saw recently.
Perhaps people are simply not aware of what they are doing. Perhaps they thought this is the normal way to teach children about how to protect themselves. Some-one has convinced them that social media is the only medium that young people read so let’s just bung in some aphorisms on morals. I don’t buy that excuse, unless we accept that ignorance is the normal condition of the civil service.
It’s weird, isn’t it, that the same people who would condemn girls who have been sexually harassed or raped to a lifetime of shame are also the ones who think it’s OK for them to redeem themselves by marrying their rapists? I’m curious, though, how helpful these messages are if the harasser is within your own family? Is that why there is the admonition to always close the door when you’re changing clothes? In case your father or brother sees you and gets ideas?
As adults, we are here to protect our children. We can only do that through a genuine concern for their wellbeing, both physically and emotionally, by ensuring that every space they are in, whether it is the home, school or any public place is a safe one for them. If we hold them responsible for what happens to them, then we are abrogating our responsibilities as parents, guardians and teachers.
The Education Ministry is revising that page. The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry has not yet taken down those Instagram messages. How many young people have seen them by now? Imagine a young girl reading them and thinking that not a single adult will ever stand up for her. How securely will she grow up?
Sunday, 27 Jan 2019
by marina mahathir
That seems to be the wrong-headed thinking in some circles. What we need to do instead is teach our children that sexual harassment and sexual violence arise from an environment that does not treat girls and boys equally.
IF it were not for one sharp-eyed mother, we would never have found out how deep the rot in our schools is. There it was, that page in a textbook blithely telling our Year Three girls what shame and horror await them if they forget to close the door while changing clothes.
Year Three, folks! Nine-year-olds being told that the entire weight of the honour of their families rests on their thin shoulders. And the not-so-subtle implication that if you don’t wear appropriate clothes, if you walk in dark alleys and don’t close room doors, you will suffer from emotional pain, have no friends, and your families will undoubtedly disown you for shaming them.
Who in their right mind tells children this? Only sick people.
If this is an official document from the Education Ministry, there must have been a process through which it was commissioned, vetted and approved. How does this process work? Did somebody say they need a document on sexual harassment, somebody writes any old rubbish that comes into their heads, and it gets approved and printed?
Notice that not the slightest bit of brain power went into this process. Nobody asked what the best approach for an undoubtedly serious and growing problem would be. Nobody thought to consult people who have some expertise on this issue. Women’s groups, perhaps, or psychologists or child rights advocates.
Imagine if we needed to curb the problem of rape and we simply commissioned an official publication that declared that all boys above the age of 12 should be locked up because of the likelihood that their burgeoning hormones would make them uncontrollable. Boy, would there be an uproar!
But when it comes to girls, no such uproar erupts. Whoever was in charge of producing this gem of a teaching aid was totally oblivious to the sheer wrongheadedness of the entire approach.
Of course, girls must protect their own honour and modesty! Of course, they will have to face dire consequences if something happens to them. Of course, they are the only people responsible for anything bad that happens to them.
To think that the Education Ministry, the entire education system, school principals, teachers and most parents did not pick up on this until this one parent pointed it out. All those women in our education system, did they think it was OK to talk to schoolgirls like this? To tell them that it’s so easy to lose their worth?
If this from the Education Ministry was bad, what issued forth from the Women, Family and Community Develop-ment Ministry is worse simply because it is the ministry with a focus on women and should know better.
In a series of Instagram memes, the ministry held forth on the dangers of premarital sex and pregnancy. The issues are real but how do pronouncements on social media along the lines of “Abandoning babies is a crime. Don’t start it.” help a teenager who finds herself pregnant and is terrified of what her parents will say? How do you tell teens that they can get pregnant even if they have sex only once when they can’t make the connection between copulation and conception?
I don’t know what it is about Malaysians but when something like this happens, we act as if it is the first time it’s ever happened. We live in such silos, ring-fenced by our own prejudices, that we learn nothing from anything outside these narrow confines.
Let me remind everyone of the story of a young woman called Noor Suzaily Mokhtar, a computer engineer who, in 2000, was raped and murdered by a bus driver while on her way to work. She was wearing very modest clothes, including a hijab, and was simply sitting in a bus in broad daylight.
In what way does Suzaily’s case relate to that page in the textbook we are showing our nine-year-olds or to those social media campaigns aimed at youth? Not at all. Because when girls are sexually harassed or worse, it has nothing to do with how they dress, where they are, or how they behave. It’s because a sick male, who’s often physically stronger, decides that this female can be taken advantage of. Or worse.
We need to teach our children that the wrongness of sexual harassment and sexual violence (and surely we agree they are wrong?) does not derive from the supposedly bad behaviour of the victim but from an environment that does not treat girls and boys equally.
If we think of girls as inferior, then it subliminally gives out the message to boys that they can treat girls badly. If we keep hammering into our boys that they are superior, both physically and mentally, then we are setting up a situation where the reality of their lives will simply not meet their expectations. And mayhem will ensue.
Imagine telling a boy that he is the best, top of the heap, just because he is a boy. And then he finds that he doesn’t automatically come out top in class. In fact, a girl (or several girls) has beaten him to the top. How does this make sense to him? He’s been told repeatedly that girls are not as good as him, how come they’re ahead of him?
We see this scenario repeated over and over again as girls keep their heads down and work hard while boys, and later on men, walk around cocksure that their place in the world is secure. And then they find out it’s not. Those “inferior” women are achieving more and earning more. Life is not as it should be.
How else do they keep women in their place but to go back to the drawing board? Start in school where they are most easily influenced. Tell girls they are not equal, that they are responsible for everything bad in the world from those young years and they will bow down and obey.
And the powers in charge of our schools and in our government departments facilitate this by publishing and distributing the type of trash that we saw recently.
Perhaps people are simply not aware of what they are doing. Perhaps they thought this is the normal way to teach children about how to protect themselves. Some-one has convinced them that social media is the only medium that young people read so let’s just bung in some aphorisms on morals. I don’t buy that excuse, unless we accept that ignorance is the normal condition of the civil service.
It’s weird, isn’t it, that the same people who would condemn girls who have been sexually harassed or raped to a lifetime of shame are also the ones who think it’s OK for them to redeem themselves by marrying their rapists? I’m curious, though, how helpful these messages are if the harasser is within your own family? Is that why there is the admonition to always close the door when you’re changing clothes? In case your father or brother sees you and gets ideas?
As adults, we are here to protect our children. We can only do that through a genuine concern for their wellbeing, both physically and emotionally, by ensuring that every space they are in, whether it is the home, school or any public place is a safe one for them. If we hold them responsible for what happens to them, then we are abrogating our responsibilities as parents, guardians and teachers.
The Education Ministry is revising that page. The Women, Family and Community Development Ministry has not yet taken down those Instagram messages. How many young people have seen them by now? Imagine a young girl reading them and thinking that not a single adult will ever stand up for her. How securely will she grow up?
