LET’S be clear about one thing: Rape should never be trivialised or joked about. It is never funny, and there is nothing ‘common’ about such jokes. This needs to be a message to everyone – students, parents, teachers and the authorities.
This is why it is truly sickening to read about the 17-year-old secondary school student who received a rape threat from a schoolmate.
This came after the teenager, Ain Husniza Saiful Nizam, had spoken out against her male teacher for allegedly making jokes about rape in class.
What had ensued from the exposure was a flurry of gross and undeserved backlash. Many claimed that the family had disgraced the name of the school by lodging a police report. Many more had criticised the family for taking a joke too seriously.
More shockingly, another teacher from the teenager’s school allegedly claimed that Ain is autistic, in an attempt to invalidate her response on the matter.
But here’s the thing: Would you still call it a joke if the same threat was made against a member of your own family?
To have a school teacher joke about something like this is truly horrifying. Who in their right mind would tell his students “If you want to rape someone, don’t rape those under 18, rape those above 18?”
The more important question is do we really want teachers like this anywhere near our children?
Even if the teacher in question had meant it as a ‘joke’, it is simply unbecoming for an educator to use such crude and disrespectful means to ‘educate’ male students. In his case, maybe he ought to rethink his career choice because school is no place for people like him.
As for the male schoolmate who threatened sexual violence, not only has he failed to understand that it’s wrong to joke about rape, but he went to the extent of threatening to carry out the act himself.
No doubt, he is another ‘brilliant’ product of our education system, an immature and self-righteous idiot who believes that duty demands that he protect the sacred icons that Ain had offended when she took the matter to social media and worse, lodged a police report.
As such, stern action must be taken – against the teacher and also the student who made the threat – to make sure that incidents like this do not happen in schools.
Schools should be the sacrosanct and safe space for any student, and the authorities must do whatever it takes to make sure that it stays that way. – April 29, 2021
