KUCHING, Sept 11 — The Sarawak Social Development Council (SDC) will profile the perpetrators and victims of incest before discussing further a proposal to castrate the perpetrators as a form of additional punishment, state Welfare, Community Wellbeing, Women, Family and Childhood Development Minister Datuk Seri Fatimah Abdullah said today.
She said the council, under her ministry, is expected to complete profiling of the perpetrators and victims by November this year.
Fatimah said the police, medical department, welfare department and women and family council are among agencies helping SDC to do the profiling.
"After we have completed the profiling, we will discuss the castrate proposal in-depth in our lab later," she told reporters after chairing the Women and Family Council meeting here.
The meeting was attended by the representatives of the police, medical department, welfare department, social development council and women non-governmental organisations.
She said the meeting agreed that the castration proposal need to be discussed at the lab which will also be attended by the representatives from the police, women non-governmental organisations, welfare department, medical department, village security and development committees, parents-teachers' association and school counsellors.
On the profiling of perpetrators and victims of incest, Fatimah said her ministry wants to know why such cases occurred.
"Did they happen because of the environment? Or because the family members did not have proper bedroom or were they sharing a common bedroom or because of broken homes?
"We also need to know the mental state of the perpetrators," she said, citing a case where a 72-year old grandfather who raped her granddaughter as an example.
Fatimah said the grandfather committed the rape after he was released from serving a 12-year jail sentence for raping her own daughter.
She said 15 cases of incest have been reported from January to September this year compared to 13 for the whole of last year and 21 cases which were reported for 2015.
Fatimah said the youngest victim in 2016 was only three years while for this year, the youngest was eight years old.
Based on the statistics provided by the police, she said the perpetrators are not confined to any particular ethnic group and that incest cases happened both in the rural and urban areas.
She said Sarawak Criminal Investigation Department (CID) head Datuk Dev Kumar has given an assurance that the police will deal with reports on incest with urgency.
