OCTOBER 15 — When it comes to the mentally ill we so easily believe in the stereotypes — either they're the flamboyant types whose portrayals win actors Oscars or they're secret, smiling psychopaths using charm to lure victims.

In reality, illnesses of the mind, like the body, aren't so easy to generalise.

What do you do then when the sickness isn't in the body but the soul, and not in individuals but in the collective, society itself?

Our boys are sick.

Our young are sick.

Our institutions are rotting.

This sickness is from what we've allowed to fester and throwing money at added security at schools is like squirting water guns at peat fires. 

The woes of disenfranchised youth is a tale as old as the media that existed to write about it.

We treat youth as though they're the problem when it's always been us who failed them.

It's so easy to demonise the youth, which has been going on since I was part of the demographic.

I remember the so-called "social ills" of my time, the multiple PSAs about budaya lepak (loitering culture) and the teen runaway girls derisively nicknamed bohsia.

If the kids aren't all right, why are we blaming the kids? It's like getting mad at eggs becoming omelettes when we're the ones doing the frying.

Every time something happens we get knee jerk reactions, politicians making speeches and so much hand wringing.

Meanwhile our kids are growing up in a world where what they thought was attainable isn't so easy anymore.

We blame kids for not being raised right when their parents work long hours for too little money and don't have the time nor energy to be doing any kind of "upbringing."

Kids don't even have safe spaces for them to just be kids.

The average Malaysian child faces all sorts of dangers outside the home — getting run over, uncovered drains, untrustworthy adults (who might even be related to them) and now, other children.

Seeing all the people online who think the solution to bullying and other youth violence is allowing teachers to beat children makes me think a lot of you just don't like children at all.

The problem is that we do not see children as collectively ours.

It's those, their, them.

Our kids are good. Those kids are bad.

I know parents who were upset when schools switched temporarily online for events.

"I have to work! Who'll look after them?"

In a perfect world, childcare wouldn't be such a fraught thing to the point that children feel like inconveniences that come between a parent and their ability to work.

We need creches. Affordable and safe means for children to go to and from school that don't require expensive private hire cars. 

Instead we have created a world where parents must work for their children but having children (if you're a woman) can affect your career progression.

AI should have made a world where mommy and daddy didn't need to work overtime or do dangerous jobs like cleaning sewage tanks.

Instead AI is making daddy unemployed, while mommy is lonely and talking to chatbots.

Yes, Erna, the world is broken. We know that but what can we do now?

Maybe the first thing we should have done was not insist the school where the stabbing incident occurred stay open.

Why could it not close even just one day? Their learning was already disrupted, pretending it did not happen by just insisting on business as usual when it was a traumatising event.

I've seen the crime scene photos and the image of that toilet stall covered in blood is burned into my mind; I wasn't even there, so how do you think the kids are doing?

That's the very heart of the problem — that we just don't know how our kids are doing.

Any girl or woman for that matter has the right to expect not to be murdered just for saying no to a boy (or man).

Maybe listen to child advocates and psychologists, those who work with children.

Maybe too, we just need spaces where kids can talk to someone instead of giving into the urge to fast forward to murder.

Just listen to boarding school alumni (many who are even local public figures) and how they romanticise bullying by calling it "ragging".

I have heard a graduate from a male boarding school I won't name tell me to my face that all that mistreatment was "character building".

The first thing we need to do is acknowledge that everything is broken instead of trying to pretend it isn't.

Normalising bullying, laughing at rape jokes, making heroes out of misogynists, just why is it surprising that our young men turn into sexual predators or straight up murderers?

It doesn't happen overnight.

Changing things won't happen overnight either so let's start by listening to the children and fighting for them, instead of the right to have teachers beat the s**t out of them. 

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.