Education Ministry director-general Azam Ahmad said many sexual harassment and bullying cases were swept under the rug. These are adults who are supposed to keep children safe.

So, either these adults were not beaten enough when they were young, or they did receive the required beatings but still engaged in behaviour which was detrimental to society and which was enabled by the state.

The education minister’s feeble attempt to clarify what the DG meant made the situation worse. What it did was make the ministry incompetent or worse, negligent.

Federal agencies sweeping things under the rug is not new. Since we are talking about children here, in 2016, Reuters did a story on how child sexual abuse went unpunished in Malaysia.

A couple of interesting points were made in the article that demonstrate how insidious the problem is.

Defending the rather dubious practice of not publishing child sexual abuse data because it is protected under the Official Secrets Act, then head of the police Sexual, Women and Children Investigation Division, Ong Chin Lan said, “We don't want people to misinterpret it.”

Addressing the same point, DAP’s Kashturi Patto wrote, “While I know her (Ong’s) heart is in the right place, by not revealing data on this type of crime, the issue remains largely unaddressed and will inadvertently contribute to the increase in the number of potential paedophiles and abusers.

“By also concealing information like this, it makes victims and victims' families hesitate to make reports, thinking that the matter is taboo.”

Exposure, understanding of sex

Let us talk about sexual activity. On the one hand, we have all these religious and moral values that demonise sex. These same religious values also sexualise children to the point that justifications are made for child marriages and how they should dress.

Add to this a social media which reinforces certain forms of misogyny and gender behaviour, and we get children exposed to and replicating the sexual behaviour of adults. This, of course, cuts across race and religion.

So all these religious groups asking for the state to crack down on porn and online violent content are not only missing the point but also willfully gaslighting people into not looking at religious institutions and discovering that prosperity and repression have supplanted any kind of ethical education these institutions inculcate in the flock.

The social and political environment normalises bullying, and in the Malaysian context, it means it is acceptable to bully people in the defence of race and religion.

Children will replicate this behaviour in the school yard, and I don’t mean this in a simplistic “monkey see, monkey do” way, but rather that certain norms are established which make it difficult to argue that bullying is an anti-social behaviour.

Online bullying and harassment can lead to suicide, which again points to a deeper systemic dysfunction rather than that there is something wrong with children.

Is the answer banning youth of a certain age from participating in social media? This is the terrifying aspect of technology. You cannot put the genie back in the bottle.

Banning certain age groups from social media is a band-aid solution. They will eventually get on in.

The question really is how social media is being used by people and the agendas of tech companies in ensuring a toxic environment. It is extremely difficult to legislate that without sacrificing foundational democratic ideas.

Children wired differently

Children can suffer mental health issues like adults do, which is why schools must be equipped to deal with these kinds of situations. But here is the thing: we only think of this when a child is stabbed 200 times by an obviously mentally ill student.

The state and public rarely pay attention to schools until something bad happens, and then people are outraged.

Instead, Madani, in this instance, sees no issue with spending RM600 million on restoring heritage buildings but contemplates all sorts of dubious measures for children instead of equipping schools with the necessary expertise needed for addressing the mental health issue of school-going children.

Children's brains are wired differently. They engage in risky behaviour and disregard normative values until they get older.

Couple this with social media, hypocritical adult behaviour and failing educational policies - you have a Molotov cocktail of anti-social behaviour in some students.

What we are dealing with is not some sort of epidemic of school anti-social and criminal behaviour, but rather the logical conclusion of the social and political policies that define an ethnocratic kakistocracy.