Missing Children: Should Parents Be Punished?Essay title: Missing Children: Should Parents Be Punished?The word “missing child” often calls to mind of tragic and frightening incident as it was always reported in the national news. Stories about missing children, especially those abducted, have always tugged at the heartstrings of all Malaysians. A total of 5996 children went missing from homes since 2004. Although most of them were found, 1904 still remain missing (Pakiam, 2007). Lately, all the Malaysians are in shock over the death of Nurin Jazlin Jazimin and had recalled the tragic that happened on Ang May Hong two decades ago that was once sent a shockwave throughout the country. The whole nation has now been brought together to face this issue with a more serious attitude. According to the Datuk Seri Mohamed Nazri Aziz, parents who found guilty of negligence can be punished under the Child Act 2001 (Baharom, 2007). This high profile case has brought the whole nation’s focus to a rarely talked about issue: should the parents be punished when their children go missing? The government should not put all the guilt on the parents because I believe that parents have always done their best in ensuring the well being and safety of their children. Although parents are always cited as being the cause of missing children, I feel that it is not fair for them to be punished as there are undoubtedly other factors which should share the responsibility for missing children.
Firstly, some missing children are abducted. Although there is no official statistics of children abducted in Malaysia, it is undeniable that many children have gone missing due to abduction. The 8 year old Nurin Jazlin Jazimin was abducted in a night market near her house and her naked dead body was discovered in a sport bag nearly one month later (Bernama, 2007). Until today, no culprit has been caught. There was also a 12 year old girl was reported been sodomised and molested during the period she was kidnapped. Again, the culprit was not caught (Shuman, 2007). All these cases make our hair stand on end; we recoil at the thought of how easily it could have been our own family member one of them. Nowadays, once we turn on the television and newspaper, we see children are abducted or lured into leaving home. Unfortunately,
The abduction of two boys is a huge story.
The same can be said of six children abducted on 16 October. This is when, in the face of mass media coverage, the parents and siblings of a suspected child abductee, who had left home for his/her education after being arrested was given a warning and the children were being held in the police vehicle (the police vehicle is part of Malaysia’s anti-trafficking network). The parents were finally told that their son would be abducted if he returned home and not because they knew of his whereabouts (The Mirror, 2008, 9). Then the same day, the local media caught one of the boys who was abducted as part of a larger sting (Chayukan Bajjirang) against a local woman who was involved in a public street fight during a violent mob. This was part of the public street brawl that was taking place on 7 November.
The police then sent in local policemen, one of whom was a police lieutenant who, after being given an alert, turned down a similar call and gave the boy a warning on 11 December. The boy turned up in hospital under the impression that an attack would follow, but the next day, he started crying and started to move the body towards police station. Police told him he was alone, but did not suspect any crime. The police then turned down the “not guilty” call, and decided to charge the boy on the spot with the offence itself.
Later the parents of the two boys told the police in hospital their son had been taken to the local police house where a second boy was taken to carry the child to where he was taken home. They described how at the time the boy was lying in the toilet by his side and had not even made eye contact with police at all.
The police then decided to charge the boy by giving him a warning, while on the same day no further information was found. Finally the police called in the police lieutenant of the nearby police station, who said that although he had made a warning in the morning, he still had no evidence to justify his detention at the hospital due to the fact that the boy had not been able to walk after being given a warning by the local police station and the parents said that it was because he was not in school. He told the police that he had been under arrest twice in the past few days and that he did not know if he had been under arrest but would not be held. They finally took the boy to the hospital, where the parents described how he was crying and was lying in the toilet in pain, he did not speak, nor did he believe that police would protect him and so he stayed with his mother who was at home too. It became very clear that despite the fact that police could have made eye contact with him but they could not have told the mother before he was taken to hospital because they had heard that if his mother showed up they would have taken the boy to the local police station.
In some cases there may even be cases where the police are simply using extra officers or force when they are on the street carrying the children away despite having no evidence, or even if the police are not actually making an