Staff Writer TJ Sari examines the recent wave of gender-based violence in Malaysian schools, contextualising it in systemic apathy and rising disolutionment.
Content warning: This article follows several active legal cases, and contains sensitive discussions of juvenile gender-based violence, including sexual violence, gang rape, violations of bodily autonomy, murder, and femicide. Reader discretion is advised.
Two consecutive tragedies, both occurring in school environments, have shocked the nation. The first incident on October 13th involved the filmed gang rape of a 15-year-old female student by four of her 17-year-old male seniors in Melaka.
The second, occurring just days later, involved the fatal stabbing of a 16-year-old female student by a 14-year-old junior in Selangor. Both cases have been referred to law enforcement and are being actively investigated by the authorities, with the Ministry of Education Malaysia promising their full cooperation.
Two of the four 17-year-old students were charged on 16 October with “gang rape, carnal intercourse against the order of nature, and physical sexual assault on a child.” One has claimed trial against these allegations.
Meanwhile, on 22 October, the 14-year-old perpetrator of the fatal stabbing was charged with murder under Section 302 of the Malaysian Penal Code. Because of the convict’s status as a juvenile per Malaysian jurisdiction, only their family has been allowed in the courtroom.
Yap Shing Xuen, the victim of the fatal stabbing, was peacefully laid to rest, with final goodbyes given at a five-day wake beginning on 17th October.
Not random incidents, nor isolated causes
These tragedies are not isolated incidents. These are not the first cases of severe violence taking place in Malaysian schools. Just last August, news of a 15-year-old student being beaten, slapped, and nearly strangled with wire by six 16-year-old seniors reached Malaysian headlines.
Before that, Malaysians mourned the loss of 13-year-old Zara Qairina Mahathir in July, whose death at a religious boarding school is still being investigated as newly-emerging allegations of bullying and foul play from witnesses muddy the waters of evidence.
On their Instagram account @beritaks, the Malaysian news site and podcast show KeluarSekejap posted a slideshow summarising some basic facts regarding the recent rise of violent incidents occurring in Malaysian schools. In particular, it highlights that the cases currently being circulated in the media are only the very recent ones, hinting at Malaysia’s legacy of ineffective responses towards the severity of violence in schools.
In a slideshow post on Instagram, the Malaysian NGO WOMEN:girls stressed a key aspect of the recent violent school incidents: female students are at greater risk, due to the silencing culture and victim-blaming policies that young girls are taught to internalise.
Public outrage—this is more than a Malaysian education crisis
In connection to the gang rape case, Malaysians expressed outrage as the Ministry of Education seemed to prioritise a solution for whether or not the four accused suspects would be allowed to sit for their Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examinations—a national exam typically taken by students in their final year of secondary school, although it is possible to sit for the exam as a private candidate regardless of one’s age.
Speaking to the press, the Minister of Education Fadhlina Sidek said on Oct 12th that efforts would be taken to ensure that the four students could sit their SPM exams and would not fall behind in their exams despite being under investigation for their conduct.
This sparked outrage from many corners of Malaysian society, who took to various platforms to condemn the carelessness of authority figures in the aftermath of the case. Lawyers were some of the most vocal, with human rights lawyer Rajesh Nagarajan insisting that safer, more lawful options were available to address the concerns of whether the four suspects could sit for their SPM exams.
“The Education Ministry’s first duty is to ensure that schools remain safe spaces for learning, not crime scenes revisited under official sanction,” he said on Oct 13th, suggesting alternatives such as deferred or isolated sitting arrangements for the suspects. “The fact that none of these were pursued reveals a shocking lack of judgment, empathy, and leadership.”
Rajesh stressed that the presumption of innocence, which aligns with the right to fair trial, did not mean that the suspects should have been immune to the consequences of their severely reprehensible actions.
More sinister than bullying—what are we teaching our children to believe?
With so many lethal incidents taking place in the same environment, wider society in Malaysia seems to be realising too late that the nation is risking a “US-style school violence epidemic,” as the recent uptick in serious school-related violence begins to mirror the early warning signs faced by the United States before its own epidemic of school shootings began.
Paying particular attention to the recent fatal stabbing where the victim was reported to have been stabbed 200 times before the perpetrator finally stopped, professionals across Malaysia are voicing concern for the harmful cultures being fostered in environments where the impressionable are a concentrated demographic.
Crime expert R Paneir Selvam stated via Sinar Daily that we should closely monitor the growing consumption of “red pill” and “alpha male” content, alongside its unforeseen influence on Malaysian boys. He warned that such content and its beliefs can lead to boys belittling the concept of mutual respect and believing in the notion that violence equals strength.
In the same article, psychologist and criminologist Dr Geshina Ayu highlighted that social media alone cannot be blamed, stating that both proactive and reactive intervention methods such as teacher training and appropriate victim support are needed in larger sums to collectively address and uproot anti-social culture.
Criminologist Nadiah Syarif echoed this belief, maintaining that collective responsibility towards curbing juvenile violence involves addressing what we are exposed to when learning beyond the classroom. “High exposure to content that promotes dominance and aggression creates learning paths through observation and imitation,” she said, adding that children often reflect the values that their parents model around them.
#MakeSchoolASaferPlace—what social media reactions tell us
Malaysian netizens have voiced their abject disapproval with the incidents overall in droves, with their disappointments ranging from expressing frustration that the tragedies happened at all, to feeling anger that Malaysian society has collectively allowed misogynistic and rape culture to sink its claws into its youth.
Ain Husniza, the founder behind campaign #MakeSchoolASaferPlace, expressed in a post on X: “a girl gets gangraped and our solutions are still all violence and punitive-based… reflective on why the rape happened in the first place.”
Meant to highlight that environments which promote power and control through violence are the same ones that breed and normalise rape culture, her post received mixed reactions, illustrating that Malaysian society may still have a long way to go in understanding the sociological frameworks that enables sexual violence and violence in schools to occur.
On TikTok, several netizens highlighted the role of misogyny and the demonisation of feminism as key obstacles to implementing effective policies that actually guarantee the safety and security of all Malaysians.
One user begged the million-dollar question. “Someone please tell me why no one–and I mean no big media outlets and no politicians–are talking about sexism and misogyny. Clearly, these two cases are gendered, right? Even when people are talking about the solutions to this, they’re talking about restricting women’s freedoms, and hinging their life upon their relationship to men.”
“Her passing is tied to her gender,” said another user speaking of the fatal stabbing, “but how do you talk about femicide in a country where the word ‘feminism’ has become equivalent to obscene language? Until we admit that the problem is sexism, we will never solve this problem.”
Virtual to real-life—the implications of socialising in two worlds
The perpetrator of the fatal stabbing incident had a chilling note with him upon being caught. It read: “This world is fake. I have already won.”
Just last May, the United Nations Programme for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women) published several articles focusing on the dangers of the “manosphere”; an echo chamber of online misogyny that spans the entire Interne and has diffused into the real world, with men and boys of all ages regurgitating bigotry in the spaces they occupy. Presented as content aimed at helping men develop in their personhood and self-actualisation, personalities within the manosphere suggest both directly and subliminally that the real world “actually hates men”, and that misandrist “females” are out to make men their victims using feminism.
Note that the term “manosphere” and manospheric language already implies many things about it: the manosphere is its own space, the manosphere has its own reality and its own rules on its reality, the manosphere is separate and different from real-world atmospheres and societies. People who regularly engage with the manosphere online end up navigating the real world as though it were the manosphere. And if they are disproportionately exposed to the manosphere, the reality they construct for themselves accommodates these harmful ideas as real-world norms, because they comprehend manosphere practices as valid social participation. Ultimately, this enables destructive tendencies both outwards and inwards in their lives.
Meanwhile, the Malaysian government has followed in Australia’s footsteps, by moving to ban social media for those aged 16 and under. Reported to be implemented as part of wider measures in light of a new Online Safety Act coming into force for the nation in 2026, this solution—made with the focus of curbing cyberbullying and online sexual harassment—merely pulls at a small strand of the larger issue at play.
The reality of implementing online safety acts, done by countries in multitudes, glosses past the actual problem instead of addressing it. The digital world itself is not harmful, but what bad actors from the real world churn into it and use it for certainly are.
The chill of the double life
To understand that social media does not directly cause violence or antisocialism is one thing. But understanding that harmful spaces and people, both digital and physical, hurt everybody is another.
We have trapped ourselves in a unique cycle of harm: the failure to empathise and understand that everything online has external, real-world consequences. The likelihood of being stuck in an online space like the manosphere is scarily high, regardless of who you or what your beliefs are. And the dangers of somebody exploring increasingly extreme ideas, in a manner detached from real-world society, are frankly endless.
People are not safely contained away from harmful or extreme ideologies and personalities once we are cooped up alone with controlled (or otherwise) screen times to make up for social interactions. Spaces like the manosphere cause everyday people to become detached from reality, and behave and conduct themselves as though everything in the media they consume is normal. The ability to empathise erodes, replaced by something uglier and meaner.
Being tech-savvy is only part of it
This is not to perpetuate the “phone bad, book good” argument, or lament on “that damn phone” being the problem. Mobile phones, the internet and social media have done wonders in increasing accessibility to knowledge, community, and opportunities we would not previously have otherwise, simply because the physical world has physical limits.
Rather, this is to re-evaluate the relationship we have with each other on and off of social media, specifically from a social and political standpoint. To discuss it any other way would be ignoring the reality that we, as humans, need and will seek to socialise no matter the barriers imposed. If we cannot do so in the physical world, we will go online to find community in others that are like-minded.
What we have seen in Malaysia is just a sample of the violence that takes place when people—especially those in more vulnerable echelons of society—find themselves exposed to and trapped in dangerous spaces that promote strong-over-the-weak mentalities, self-victimisation and increasing polarisation. We are slowly being socialised to de-socialise; we hold on to beliefs in isolation of other real people that are affected by them, and stick only to those that agree with us.
The existence of a boundless digital realm that can be accessed by anyone and everyone at any time, gains us a non-physical “fourth space” that is difficult to monitor or control (unless you are the right person, that is.) On top of that, there is a bizarre surge in the amount of increasingly far-right, or simply extremely problematic content, that is being pushed onto media algorithms everywhere.
This “fourth space” redefines socialisation more than we understand it to. Picture the average day one has for themselves: we wake up, check our notifications from emails, the news and social media, and have breakfast before venturing out into the real world for work, school, and play. We head back home, make dinner, and lay in our beds to doomscroll until we fall asleep. And certainly, we cannot leave out the fact that during those in-between moments in our lives—our daily commutes, our mental breaks from emails and school assignments—especially post-Covid 19, we reach for our phones to see what the world is up to.
Instead of simply placing blanket age restrictions on social media (though relevant), we ought to look to other solutions in combating the harms of the digital world. We should fund courses for media literacy in schools, and teach people how to access, process, and filter what they see online. We should empower achievement in the humanities—a field that has historically facilitated our abilities to empathise and evaluate our beliefs, alongside empowering tech-savviness. We should have discussions with young boys and girls about what it truly means to self-actualise, and how ‘deep gender differences’ are shallower than some make them out to be.
And yet, time and time again, we continue to fail—often times, catastrophically—in this regard.
Not a conclusion, but a question
It was not that long ago that many of us (including myself) were in school, where some of our best memories were made even as we grew up with the expectations of academic and supercurricular (over)achievement constantly looming over our heads. Today, that environment seems to have changed, or in the worst case, become completely unrecognisable.
We are not socialising the way we used to, and we are all finding it increasingly difficult to establish the bonds that make school a special place for learning and lifelong relationships. Learning checkpoints are either being systemised or glorifying mediocrity as trying becomes uncool, and many are no longer chasing the lasting gratification of holistic improvement in their academic, professional and personal lives.
From a Malaysian perspective, with national benchmark exams abolished and claims circulating that the passing grade for Malaysian students has been dropped from 40% to 20%, we start to wonder if education today is still doing what it set out to do. Are we learning empathy when we learn English? Are we examining and evaluating our moral beliefs when we read a KOMSAS (Malay literature) book? Are maths and science fulfilling their passive capacities to teach us the softer parts of life—that numbers are stories as much as they are data?
Or are we doing it all for a grade? Maybe not even a grade at all?
The National Oath of Malaysia prescribes five pillars of what it means to be Malaysian, with the fifth and final one being “kesopanan dan kesusilaan” (courtesy and morality). As we witness the degradation of these values permeating into our schools, it is high time we examine our relationships with ourselves and those around us—not just in our physical lives, but our digital ones too.
