JUNE 17 — Reading about Richard Huckle’s crimes of raping babies and children pales in comparison to witnessing the sexual abuse of young girls and women in videos shared in Malaysian Telegram groups. The videos that I found in a dozen local porn groups and channels on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app which has millions of Malaysian users, were so disturbing that I had a panic attack hours later and cried for the victims.

Those places are a hellish pit filled with thousands and thousands of images and videos of breasts and vaginas, where girls and women are sexually assaulted for the pleasure of passive viewers and reduced to pieces of meat.

One of the worst videos, titled “Melayu-Bawah Umur” (Underage Malay), that I watched showed a young girl who was crying as two men raped her with their fingers. They ignored her “Sakit, nak balik” (Painful, I want to go home) pleas and even mocked her by saying they would take her to the hospital.

A second video showed three little girls below 12, with the camera focusing on their naked bodies. One of them fellated a man. Other videos showed men having sex with 10-year-old girls.

There was also a video of a young woman crying while a man recorded her giving oral sex to another man as she desperately tried to push the camera away. The two men ignored her, lifted her shirt and pawed at her breasts.

The Malaysian porn groups and channels on Telegram, where most of the users spoke in Malay, had thousands of explicit photographs and videos, including child pornography and videos depicting actual sexual assault (they didn’t look like the staged “forced sex” porn genre where adult actors are paid for their work).

Users shared not only professional pornographic material from the West, but lots of amateur porn featuring what appeared to be local children and teenage schoolgirls in their uniforms. So many files were titled “budak” (child). Many others were titled “rogol” (rape) or “paksa” (forced).

If the country can be outraged by just one British man, we should be equally angry at the thousands of fellow Malaysians who are taking part in the sexual exploitation of our own children and women.

Viewers cannot absolve themselves of the crime of sexual abuse. By watching such videos and images and sharing them on social media, they’re as complicit as the perpetrators who violated and humiliated their victims.

Why are the authorities spending so many resources investigating mere insults against government leaders, when girls and women are being sexually assaulted with videos taken for public consumption?

Where are our priorities?

We should be protecting children and women instead of wasting our time trying to clamp down on anti-government speech.

The existence of such violent material on local Telegram groups shows that Richard Huckle is not the only “monster” out there — there are thousands of “monsters” among us who do not respect women, who violate the trust of children whom they’re supposed to protect, and who treat females as sex objects.

We shouldn’t merely focus on the role of the authorities in preventing sexual abuse. As it is, it’ll be rather difficult for the police to identify and arrest the perpetrators on an app like Telegram that strongly protects user privacy.

Malaysian society as a whole must work towards eradicating sexism and gender discrimination that creates the environment for sexual assault.

Clerics and religious authorities should tell men to treat girls and women as equals, instead of trying to control women’s behaviour and telling them to dress “modestly."

Parents need to educate their sons to respect girls and teach them the importance of female sexual consent, instead of just telling their daughters how to avoid rape.

We must also create a safe environment for children where everyone, not just their immediate family members, takes care of them and takes any complaints of sexual abuse seriously.

It’s only when we confront and change our own attitudes towards girls and women that we will have some hope of preventing child abuse and rape.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.