KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 1 — The act of victim shaming in sexual crime cases must be stopped so that the more victims would come forward with their accusations to allow justice to be served.

Deputy Minister of Women, Family and Community Development Hannah Yeoh said such acts, if continue to persist, would prompt sexual crime victims to take an easy but wrong way out of their problems.

"We have to stop victim shaming because we want to encourage the victims to come forward… the stigma of victim shaming has caused the victims to be too scared to lodge reports,” she told reporters after appearing on Bernama Radio’s ‘A la Carte Pagi’ show today.

Elaborating, Yeoh said the act of victim shaming would also prompt victims who have gotten pregnant as a result of rape to abandon their babies for fear of being condemned by their own family and friends or community.

She said this would inadvertently disrupt the government’s intervention programme to reduce the worrying number of abandoned baby cases in the country.

"Statistics shows that from 2010 until now, approximately 1,000 abandoned baby cases were reported nationwide, with 60 per cent of the babies found dead,” she said, adding that such statistics could give a bad image to the country. — Bernama