Exactly How Malay are Problems Like Child Abuse?

Singapore's Malay-Muslim community was recently rattled with a series of child murder cases. But how fair are we to attribute them as symptoms of the community's degradation?

On the 7th May 2003, Land Transport Authority engineer Chow Peng Wah, 45 strangled his 11-year-old son, Weng Yan, in his bedroom before committing suicide by jumping off a HDB block in Yishun.

On the 24th March 2004, Chinese housewife Yap Cheng Chui tide red string to the wrists of her 2 young daughters and leapt of an apartment at Chin Swee Road. She was reportedly under various amounts of stress, including financial difficulties.

And in the latest incident of a similar nature, another Chinese man killed his two children and set his apartment on fire before taking his own life at Block 543 Ang Mo Kio Avenue 10 on the 7th November 2009. He too was reportedly drowning in gambling debts and had apparently resorted to the double-murder cum suicide as his final solution.

This particular string of infanticide cum murder in Singapore were committed by perpetrators that came from single ethnicity. But has any of its community leaders came forward to highlight them as a “Chinese problem”? What about other social malignants that this country faces such as problem gambling and elderly abandonment? Despite their seeming affiliation to a particular ethnic group, why have we not been tempted to look at them via ethnically-tinted glasses as much as we do towards social problems created by Malays?

Perhaps it was a sense of shame that had to be mitigated with an unsolicited self-reprimanding. It could have also been a genuine mis-diagnosis made in a moment of understandable outrage. Either way, the attribution that our Minister made between Malays and the sins of the social underclass came in a little too soon.

We should not conveniently pin our Malay community to the problem of child abuse the same way we do not pin our Chinese community to problem gambling & elderly abandonment and our Indian community to alcohol addiction & spousal abuse. A challenge faced by the nation is a challenge that we need to face as a country, despite our race, creed or religion.

The horrific crimes committed by the murderers of Nonoi and Natalie may have been perpetrated by Malays. But could these crimes reflect the problems of a growing social underclass in Singapore that have arisen from a lack of income distribution regardless of race, rather than the inherent problem of an ethnic community?

A social malignant can accurately be described as “Malay Problem” if it's observed to exist evenly within all social strata of the Malay community (for example obesity is thought to be a problem genuinely plaguing the Malay community evenly across all income groups and is disproportionately and consistently high when pitted against comparable social classes of other ethnicities). If no such conclusive link be made, then what is the wisdom is drawing an ethnic based approach to such problems?

What are the costs of persistently viewing our nation's problems through a racial perspective? Have we been missing opportunities to solve our social problems collectively and collaboratively as a nation from alternative points of view because our leaders, media and community elders have refused to shift their sights beyond the racial box?

Ethnic attribution can be applied when there is a need to rally the will of a community behind a genuinely attributable social malignant exclusive to a particular ethnicity. But it has to be done sparingly and tactfully. It will be absolutely detrimental if the youth of this country carry on with the perception that any one social malignant is the exclusive domain of that particular ethnicity. It breeds exclusivity, but more importantly it breeds racialism.

The writer is a student enrolled in the Bachelor of Islamic Revealed Knowledge at the International Islamic University & doing the Master of Science (Strategic Studies) at the Nanyang Technological University