Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 11 May 2015 issue)

Dear Kam,
Is it my imagination or is there a lot of news going on these days? I just can’t keep up.
Exhausted Malaysian

So, what’s happened in the last week? A Malaysian student in London was caught with 30,000 videos of child pornography, a family was killed on a highway by drivers racing their Myvis, leaving two girls as orphans, some “world-class” university in Pahang has created an “anti-hysteria kit”, yet more people have been arrested for attending a rally (I wonder if there is a lock-up equivalent of air-miles), Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad continues on his warpath but is now being asked the embarrassing question of how come his own family is so wealthy, 1Malaysia Development Bhd continues to fester, the Goods and Services Tax is unpopular and there have been two by-elections. Normally, by-elections would be grabbing all the headlines, but last week, they were hardly noticed. This is especially strange because the Rompin by-election saw Barisan Nasional returned with a much reduced majority, but I guess that like Chelsea FC or Floyd Mayweather, it doesn’t matter how you win as long as you win.

New news stories keep coming at us like a never-ending avalanche, instantly distracting us from the previous story that had been gripping us. How many of us have forgotten to send that cheque for the victims of the Nepal earthquake because something else came along? The news avalanche keeps coming and overwhelming us with layer upon layer of anxiety. What can we do, how do we react? My concern is that the avalanche simply reminds us of our helplessness and our inability to affect anything about anything. So, in order to grab for ourselves some control in a country where we clearly don’t matter, we react by letting the news stories reinforce our prejudices and we say typical Malay/Chinese/Indian/lain lain. If people are always true to their stereotypes, then their actions will be predictable and we regain some control over our lives.

Next week, we will be hit by a completely different bunch of stories and maybe the only thing we can do is to try to maintain a sense of balance and ask ourselves, who gains from our anxiety?

Dear Kam,
A Malaysian student was found with 30,000 videos of child pornography?! What?!
Disgusted Malaysian

The story of the maths genius (and how much of a genius is open for debate) being caught with a gigantic amount of child pornography has taken everybody by surprise. This is not the news story we have come to expect. We’re not happy about the national drift and the stories of immense corruption, but they are now part of the landscape. We might not be happy with it, but we’re used to it. The fact that Mara has come out to offer this “asset to the nation” a second chance sadly reinforces prejudices and is not a surprise, but the possibility of paedophile predators among us is a surprise. Today’s parents are aware of the dangers their children face, but the danger has been abstract. Now, we have a face. A young man, a good student. He doesn’t fit the profile handed down to us by Hollywood of the older social misfit, an obvious weirdo with an evil glare. Sadly, today’s parents must always be looking out for dangers. Who is that man? Can he be trusted? But this relatively new story of paedophile predation isn’t just about an individual parent’s responsibility, it’s also about the institutions that are supposed to be protecting us. What are their priorities?

When I was growing up in England in the 1970s, we weren’t worried about sexual predators. We children were left to our own devices until the sun went down and in retrospect, it’s amazing that any of us survived because we did some truly dangerous things. When we got home, we watched children’s TV shows and among the most favourite was Jim’ll Fix It where the zany Jimmy Savile would make children’s dreams come true. What we could not know was that Savile was probably the most horrifying sexual predator ever. He sexually abused hundreds of children, many of whom were in care homes, for which he was the patron. He even had sex with corpses. When he died in 2011, he was Sir Jimmy Savile, a beloved media personality and charity fundraiser. He got away with it even though some of his last words were, “They’re going to hate me when I’m gone.”

Within a year of his death, the accusations started to emerge. His victims started coming forward, and with British tabloids baying for justice, the police belatedly opened an investigation called Operation Yewtree, which has not only looked into the full extent of Savile’s crimes but also netted other media personalities from the 1970s. Some of these names are known in Malaysia (Rolf Harris), but most are not known outside Britain. But my childhood memories have been broken. Were they all perverts?

We can applaud the police investigations and the tabloid campaigns because sexual predation of children is bad. It’s the one thing we can all agree upon. Any name on a sex offender’s registry is the worst person in the world and any newspaper that hunts them down must surely be the people’s champion to be rewarded with higher and yet higher sales. And yet, this new-found zeal by the newspapers, the police and politicians is disingenuous at best or plain hypocrisy because they colluded in these crimes for decades. It is impossible to believe that the police did not know about Savile’s predation, and stories are emerging that they deliberately quashed any potential investigations. The British tabloids are rightly regarded as being simply despicable bullies who consider themselves to be above the law because their power to blackmail is so strong. For British “journalists”, the standard operating procedure is to literally and metaphorically rummage through people’s garbage and to happily hack into people’s phones. They know everybody’s dirt and it is impossible to believe that the tabloids did not know the truth about Savile when they were giving him acres of publicity. The tabloids (mostly owned by Rupert Murdoch) have never apologised for their failure to protect their readers and, instead now, take the opportunity to portray themselves as righteous moral guardians and to point the finger of blame at the BBC (Savile’s employer). And it is impossible to believe that senior politicians did not know, especially home ministers. But stories are constantly emerging of senior politicians (and a now dead home minister) being involved in the most awful and systematic abuse, including strangling a young boy to death.

The British public has a right to feel that they have been let down by the institutions that were supposed to be protecting them and instead, were abusing their trust and abusing vulnerable young people. Savile is dead and can never be prosecuted, and yet now, there is an official and patently desperate campaign to hunt down other similar media personalities from his time, the 1970s and 1980s. These people committed crimes and they should be punished, but it is curious that no newspaper editors, journalists, policemen or politicians have been netted. Was sexual predation a disease only afflicting TV presenters? Or is the public supposed to believe that genuinely untouchably powerful men running powerful institutions never abused their positions of trust to prey upon the vulnerable?

Reprinted with the kind permission of