Children's rights NGO says community service not the answer

Lawyer and director of Voice of the Children, Nizam Bashir, does not agree with the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development that community service be made as a sentence for negligent parents who cause their children's death as this is after the life of the child has been affected. The emphasis should be to protect the child. He says this raises questions on the child protection system that we have in Malaysia. “My concern is when the neglect has caused the death of a child, yet we have to prepare the considered community service and it raises questions to whether the child protection system should be rated towards the parents when it involves a life of a child or should be rated towards the child itself,” he says. Nizam added that the ministry's suggestion that counseling sessions be offered as a good thing, there is a need to encourage parents to be more sensitive towards the needs of their children and counseling sessions would serve that purpose. “But I think the welfare department should be play an active role in the counseling sessions because at the end of the day there must be some sort of outcome, because children are concerned and there have been complains of abuse in the past," he says. This certainly reflects the fact that parents are not necessarily in the best position to judge what is good for their children. Thus, there should be a third party to oversee this and by just leaving parents to work out what they are suppose to learn in the counseling sessions on their own is not necessarily sensible. Nizam is of the opinion that the idea for community service was brought up because there were just too many cases of neglect. And if this is the case, it might not be the right move. “I’m a bit troubled with that, just because there are X number of cases, community service shouldn’t be the way forward,” he added. At the moment, the ministry is under pressure for being understaffed. Hence, they should look at increasing the staff so they would not have to resort to neglecting cases. The Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development proposed on Tuesday for the Children's Act 2001 to be amended to include community service as a sentence, along with counseling and parenting sessions, for negligent parents who cause their children's death.