COMMENT | Imagine you have a 12-year-old daughter.

Imagine receiving a phone call at your workplace and being informed by your daughter’s caretaker that she is in trouble. Would you drop everything and head home at once, or would you ask the caretaker to wait until you return home because you are too “busy” at work?

Imagine reaching home some eight hours after receiving the phone call, and being told that your daughter who had left in the morning to go to school has not returned home in the evening.

Imagine having your neighbour’s daughter inform you that a man your daughter had befriended on Facebook three months ago had raped her inside a car. Would you rush to the police station in an attempt to find her, or would you wait for your daughter to return home, not knowing when that would be?

Imagine finding out that the man who raped your daughter was a married 40-year-old man with four young children of his own, not the 24-year-old bachelor he claimed to be when he befriended your daughter.

Imagine being offered RM10,000 as an inducement to withdraw the report lodged against him. Would you agree to give your daughter’s hand to her rapist, or would you instead beat the crap out of him for even suggesting that he marry a child he has violated?

When Rohani Abdul Karim from the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development said in Parliament recently that a 12-year-old girl who was made to marry her rapist in 2013 was now happy, healthy and doing well, living under the protection and care of her father and family, I flipped...