The stranger in the train

Last week, I took the train from the north back to Kuala Lumpur. As I was bracing myself for the five-hour journey, I saw a young girl got on the train at Taiping.

She smiled warmly at everyone and took the seat in front of me. The train was fairly empty and as soon as she sat down, an elderly man came to sit next to her.

Throughout the journey, he tried to talk to her, asking her various questions about herself and her family.

The girl, seeming naïve, revealed a lot about herself and her family to this stranger she was seated next to.

Thirty minutes later, the elderly man was still persistently talking to her and it was evident that the girl was starting to feel uneasy with the whole situation.

I heard her politely declining to answer his questions, yet still calling him “pakcik” to be respectful.

Ten minutes later, she got up and changed seats. The rest of the passengers in the train (including me), watched the entire ordeal play out in front of us like a TV series from our local stations.

No one stopped the man from harassing her. No one spoke to the girl. We just sat and watched the drama.

The elderly man, still persistent to talk to this young girl, then got up and went to sit next to her again.

He continued pressing her to talk to him and the girl seemed bullied into replying the man. It was then that I tapped the girl on her shoulder and offered her a seat next to me.

She willingly got up and left the man alone. As we began talking, she told me how he had been harassing her since she got into the train and she didn’t know how to tell him to stop.

It also never occurred to her that it was dangerous to reveal so much about yourself and your travel plans to a stranger.

The young girl left her family in Taiping to come to KL in hopes for a better career. She did not do well in her SPM and was looking for any job to help her family pay the bills.

Her mother passed away years ago and she was also hoping her boyfriend, a teacher in KL, would marry her by this year.

Listening to her story not only broke my heart, it also reminded me of my young female students back in Kedah. Many of them were the same.

They would often talk about their dreams of finding a good job in the city and hoping for marriage to happen soon.

Many of them also befriended strangers wherever they go, unaware of the dangers that lurk behind these friendships.

The recent statistic from the Penang Women’s Development Corporation (PWDC) showed that 31,685 rape cases were reported from 2000 to 2013.

In other words, a girl or woman is being raped every 35 minutes somewhere in Malaysia.

Most of the rape cases involved victims below 16 years old. These upsetting numbers tell us that we should seriously look into educating our girls and our boys to take care of themselves.

We place very little importance on sex education, often shying away from the topic or not discussing it at all with our students.

We leave our students to learn about sex from their friends, or worse, from pornography, and we think it is fine.

What are we so afraid of when it comes to sex education? Why can’t we discuss it openly with our students at school to ensure they better understand the workings of it and know when danger is about to strike?

In the Netherlands, it is by law that all primary school students must receive some form of sexuality education.

This must address certain core principles – among them, sexual diversity and sexual assertiveness. Here, students develop skills to protect against sexual coercion, intimidation and abuse.

What I like most about this is that the underlying principle of the education is for students to understand that sexual development is a normal process and students have the right to direct, trustworthy information on the subject.

We shouldn’t leave our students to their own devices and knowledge when it comes to sex education.

They deserve to be educated and be given the adequate skills on how to defend themselves against perpetrators.

So long as we stay in the shadows and refuse to talk about sex, our stats will keep increasing and we will continue to fear for our daughters. – January 21, 2016.