KUALA LUMPUR, May 7 — Bukit Aman Criminal Investigation Department (CID) director Datuk Seri Mohd Shuhaily Mohd Zain has expressed concern over the reported rise in statutory rape cases nationwide since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
He said it was worrying because the perpetrators and victims in some of the cases were both minors and didn’t see the act as a crime as they claimed their sexual relations were by mutual consent, Utusan Malaysia reported today.
“Take for instance the gang rape involving a nine-year-old in Kelantan last year, no charges were levelled as they were underaged. and it was consensual.
“The suspects were all aged nine and 10 and it was ‘consensual’. But it’s still statutory rape,” he was quoted as telling reporters after the International Regulatory Conference here yesterday.
According to Shuhaily, the victim broke a suspect’s eraser but didn’t have the money to replace it and so offered sex as payment.
“No case was made as there's no criminal liability for those aged below 10. Regardless, we still opened an investigation paper into it,” he was quoted as saying.
Shuhaily said most cases of statutory rapes involved those from the low income demographic and lack of adult supervision.
He also said the ease of access to pornography also played a factor in the rising cases.
“Following Covid-19, a lot of people resorted to social media and once it ended cases were on the rise. We're worried about children being able to access pornography through social media,” he told reporters.
Shuhaily was previously reported to have said the incidence of reported statutory rapes involving children aged 16 and under has grown with an increase of 202 cases or 11.8 per cent last year, compared with 2022.
He said parents’ lack of knowledge and control over the content codes of the websites visited by their children has negative consequences, especially allowing children as young as five years old to access the internet under the guise of educational material.
Bukit Aman’s Sexual, Women and Child Investigation Division’s principal assistant director Assistant Commissioner of Police Siti Kamsiah Hassan previously disclosed in an interview with The Star last month that unsupervised access to the internet does not only make children victims of sexual crimes, but it may turn them into underaged sexual predators.
In the interview published on April 8, she said that there were 912 sexual crime cases reported last year involving underaged suspects — 601 rape cases, outrage of modesty (17), unnatural sex (18), sexual harassment (23) and three for distribution or possession of obscene materials.
