The human rights commission, Suhakam, should preoccupy itself with more important issues rather than making a call to punish those who frequent prostitutes . Studies have shown that people who frequent prostitutes have an underlying sexual problem or have the need to vent their sexual frustration vis-a vis prostitutes.

The oldest profession in the world invariably has a role to play in every age and in every society. There are people in our society who have difficulty in forging a meaningful relationship with the opposite sex and the availability of prostitutes provides an avenue for these psychologically handicapped people to have a 'service'.

In the absence of prostitutes, these people would have no alternative but to target innocent women who could be your sister, wife or even your mother.

In the context of our Malaysian society, we also have over a million of foreign workers in our work force. Most of these foreign workers left their wives and family to seek work here. These foreign workers are also human beings who have sexual urges like every normal human being has.

Over a duration of two to three years while they are here, where do we expect them to release their pent-up sexual frustrations? Would we prefer a situation where these foreigners resort to raping our sisters, wives or loved ones?

There are certainly many such cases already in our midst and the surest way to aggravate the situation is to take away the outlet for them to visit prostitutes.

In fact, many Western countries have now seen the merit of legalising prostitution and strangely enough, statistics have shown that the incidence of sexual crimes has reduced in such countries. Our southern neighbour, Singapore has also joined the ranks of countries legalising prostitution.

So before hastily calling for punishment for those visiting prostitutes and the following extreme measure of eradicating prostitution, I suggest Suhakam make an in-depth study of the situation first before embarking on any such a course to support such measures.