Stephanie anak Langka, a 15-year-old from Sarawak, is the second Malaysian girl this year to be rescued from Indonesia by Umno Youth.

In February, Salsabila Yunan, another 15-year-old, was reunited with her sick 73-year-old father. Both teenagers were pregnant and had married older men from Lombok.

The problem of Malaysian women eloping with foreign workers and then being abandoned by their so-called boyfriends and ‘husbands’ is huge. There are 40 runaway Malaysian girls reportedly in and around Lombok, so the two girls rescued are only the tip of the iceberg.

 

These two were lucky. They only spent six months in Lombok. Last year another girl, Norzuliyani Alias, returned to Malaysia after 11 years of suffering in Indonesia. She too, had run off with her Indonesian lover to Lombok when she was 17. When interviewed, she spoke about her extreme hardship.

 

The girls said they regretted their actions. They claimed that life in Lombok was difficult compared with that in Malaysia.

Stephanie had to walk miles to collect clean water. Salsabila who had enjoyed the glamour of being a part-time actress when in Malaysia was forced to work in the padi fields. Norzuliyani was an ojet (three-wheeled motorcycle) driver with a take-home pay equivalent to RM15.

 

Many theories have been proposed for the elopements. Some said that Lombok men entice girls to prove their masculinity. Are we to believe that Lombok men treat women with respect, unlike Malaysian men?

 

Or is there a loss of parental control? Salsabila’s mother died when she was very young and her old and ailing father struggled to raise her on his own. The attention of being both the youngest child and an actress, but without her mother’s discipline, was a bad combination.

 

Did the girls elope to escape poverty? Stephanie found worse living conditions in Lombok than in her longhouse in Mukah. She believed her boyfriend’s empty promises of a better life and his boasts of a good job as an excavator driver also deceived her relatives in the longhouse.

 

islam and judiciary judgement A few have suggested that Malaysia’s stringent marriage laws had driven the lovers to Lombok. But these marriage laws supposedly protect the children.

 

Bejalai is the Iban custom of going on a journey. It is when the men leave their longhouses and rivers to go out into the wider world to seek work and adventure. It is possible that Stephanie was only fulfilling an important ritual.

 

Another reason cited was that the Malaysian border with Indonesia is porous and that immigration procedures were not followed. Otherwise, Stephanie’s absence could have been detected earlier. The fact that she did not have a MyKad shows that there are problems getting identity papers in the longhouses.

Serious inconsistencies

 

Several questions remain unanswered. The two pregnant girls, Stephanie and Salsabila, are underaged. Their husbands, who are in their twenties, therefore had sex with minors. Even if it was consensual sex, it is still statutory rape.

 

Recently, three Malaysian women were jailed and whipped for illicit sex. The youngest was 17 years old. Should Stephanie and Salsabila undergo the same punishment as they too had illicit sex? Or will they escape this violence because of the involvement of Umno Youth?

 

If the girls escape the whipping, people will say that double standards are used in the application of Syariah law.

 

These marriages were illegal as the girls should have been given away by their wali ( legal guardians). As the girls were abducted, the marriages are not legal.

 

More liberal types will say that the girls should be free to do as they please and that they are not girls but are now considered women. They made the conscious decision to have sex, to leave their families, to abscond with their lovers to a foreign land and later to have children. Should we consider them sufficiently mature to make these life-changing decisions?

 

In the interests of justice, the law must be seen to be applied fairly. These girls should be jailed and whipped as several laws were broken and they had illicit sex.

 

Should any of the girls who had illicit sex be whipped? The interpretations of Syariah law in other parts of the world say that those who have illicit sex should be stoned. So which is it to be? Whipping or stoning? Or education?

 

These abductions have highlighted serious inconsistencies in our laws including Syariah law, our immigration policies and the issuance of MyKad.

 

The girls are children to be protected under the Convention on the Rights of the Child and Malaysia’s Child Act. Therefore, the men should be prosecuted under the Penal Code for statutory rape under Islamic family law.

montage In addition, the minimum age of marriage for Muslim girls must be raised to 18 to be in compliance with the Child Act which defines children as those below the age of 18. Hence, the loophole in the Islamic family law must be closed to prevent marriages below the age of 18.

 

Child marriages have health, economic and social risks. Children are denied a future and the opportunity to improve their own lives and also that of their families. Child brides are also prone to sexual abuse and exploitation.

 

Our children, especially girls, and our women must be given a good education, including sex education. We must encourage critical thinking but not rote learning. We must extinguish our feudalistic mindset.

Many parents no longer seem to be able to raise their children properly. They abrogate their parental responsibilities to the schools and the state. They spend all their time scraping a living and have none for passing on values to their children.

MARIAM MOKHTAR is a non-conformist traditionalist from Perak, a bucket chemist and an armchair eco-warrior. In ‘real–speak’, this translates into that she comes from Ipoh,  values change but respects culture, is a petroleum chemist and also an environmental pollution-control scientist.