SHAH ALAM – Urgent action is needed to break the cycle of school violence, as more female students face bullying, assault and fatal attacks amid a lack of preventive measures.
Social activist Ain Husniza Saiful Nizam has issued a renewed and impassioned call for immediate education reform, saying that Malaysia can no longer ignore the escalating violence within its schools following the latest tragic incident in Petaling Jaya.
"Just this week we were shocked by the news of a 15-year-old girl being gang-raped and now I'm faced with this news from this morning.
"Our girls are being violated. They are bullied, stabbed. If this doesn't signal that we need a clear policy directly addressing schools as spaces of violence, I don't know what does," she said in a video posted on her Instagram account.
Her statement came in the wake of a fatal stabbing incident at a secondary school, where a Form Four female student died after being stabbed by a male schoolmate on Tuesday morning.
The incident occured merely weeks after the nation was shaken by a gang rape case in Melaka, forming a devastating pattern of violence in educational spaces.
Ain, who is also Pocket of Pink founder, an initiative advocating for consent education and safe spaces for women and youth said the continuous stream of violent incidents in schools signalled a systemic failure that can no longer be ignored.
While the stabbing case remained under investigation, she highlighted a pattern of escalating violence in educational institutions, referencing not only to the recent rape case in Melaka but also other instances of bullying, harassment and assault.
"What I do know is that the boy didn’t just stab the girl. He also stabbed other people," she said, highlighting the broader threat to safety within the school environment.
Ain has long campaigned for the implementation of stronger legal and policy frameworks to protect students, including the introduction of a specific anti-sexual harassment law for schools, a measure she said was long overdue.
"Malaysia already has an anti-sexual harassment law for workplaces. So why don’t we have one for schools? Reforms in our education system must happen and we need safer schools now," she said previously.
Her ongoing movement, #MakeSchoolASaferPlace, continued to rally public support for comprehensive education reform and the establishment of robust student protection policies.
"If not now, then when? How many more lives need to be lost?," she said.
Police are investigating the stabbing incident, with Petaling Jaya district police chief ACP Shamsudin Mamat and a team of officers still at the scene gathering evidence and statements from witnesses.
It was reported that the victim was found dead near the school toilet area with several stab wounds on her body.
The 14-year-old male suspect, who is also a student at the same school, was detained at the scene to assist in the investigation.
Police also recovered two sharp objects believed to have been used in the stabbing incident.