5 Reports of Rape Every Day: What is to be done while Parliament laments low prosecution rate?

However, filing charges is but one stage of the criminal justice process. It tells us nothing about how many cases actually proceed to trial, conviction, or sentencing. Past research and NGO reporting on sexual crimes in Malaysia show that very few reported and prosecuted cases ever reach conviction. Historical Home Ministry figures suggested that in an earlier decade only about 16% of reported rape cases were taken to court and only about 2.7% resulted in convictions. This gap between reported incidents and prosecutions points to systemic failures in investigation, evidence handling, and legal accountability, now subject to rigorous critique from all sections of civil society.

Tragically, these numbers constitute merely the tip of the iceberg. Official statistics alone cannot capture the unreported, the coerced silence, victims dissuaded by shame, fear, or legal indifference. Activists note that formal figures greatly understate the reality because many victims never file reports at all. By estimates, only around 10% of rape incidents ever reach law enforcement, consistent with about 8–11% globally. The Women’s Aid Organization and other NGO observers have long argued that cultural stigma, victim-blaming, and weak confidence in the legal system deter most survivors from ever reaching out.

Parliament has also debated the controversial handling of specific cases, such as the Loh Wai Mun ordeal, in which an alleged attacker’s charge was downgraded from rape (Section 376) to a lesser offence of outraging modesty (Section 354) without the victim’s knowledge. The Home Ministry has maintained that such prosecutorial adjustments are well within the Attorney General’s discretion to maximize conviction chances given available evidence, as empowered under Article 145(3) of the Federal Constitution.

The government’s own comparative crime data suggest that rape reports have been climbing nationally, with the Department of Statistics Malaysia (DOSM) reporting an increase in cases in recent years, all while the technocrats struggle in search of a silver lining. As per the DOSM’s report for 2025: “Sexual offences presented a mixed trend. Rape cases rose by 12.1% to 1,899 cases. Rape without force increased 29.3%. Meanwhile, rape with force declined by 15.3%, suggesting shifts in reporting or perpetration patterns.”

Most crucially, a study of 304 sexual assault survivors at a Malaysian tertiary hospital’s One Stop Crisis Center found that a large majority (about 76%) of victims were from a low socioeconomic class. In another analysis cited by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information, it was found that more than 80% of sexually abused children came from poor families. Lower‑income individuals often have fewer resources, less social support, weaker bargaining power within households, and reduced access to protective services or legal recourse — all of which materially condition their exposure to violence.

This cycle of violence is rooted in the reproduction of class and gender inequalities within capitalist social relations, where economic marginalization exacerbates social vulnerability. Sexual violence and more broadly the double oppression faced by women cannot be understood except in relation to the reproduction of patriarchy in class society. With the emergence of private property, the ruling class must secure not only surplus labor in production but also reproduction of the labor force itself. Patriarchy historically resolves this by privatizing social reproduction within the family, assigning women to the unpaid labor of child-rearing, care work, and household maintenance. It reduces the cost of reproducing labor power for the ruling class and shifts it onto women of working-class families. Apart from safeguarding property inheritance, it divides the working class internally by gender, weakening class solidarity while channeling social frustration and disillusionment downward, poisoning the mind of working-class men deprived of any meaningful control and ownership of the means of production — working-class men, that is, alienated from their own labor.

We cannot even begin to end patriarchal social relations if we do not see an end to the capitalist mode of production which feeds on these antique relations, and instead seek endlessly to reform them under the banner of petty-bourgeois “feminism” whose identity politics remains always partial, always reversible, firmly subordinated to the “moral will” of the ruling class. In opposition to all opportunist elements of contemporary feminist movements, socialists are under no illusion that the struggle against any gendered form of oppression under capitalism can ever succeed without consciously bridging it to the struggle against capitalist exploitation in general.

This struggle is only winnable by the working class. And to win its most conscious layers, particularly female workers, over to the struggle against women’s oppression requires a set of transitional demands that confront patriarchal violence at its root. Examples include fully funded and democratically controlled crisis centers and victims’ shelters; survivor-centered investigative and judicial procedures independent of police and prosecutorial discretion; the socialization of care through universal childcare, healthcare, and eldercare; secure education, housing, and a living wage; and the defense of women’s right to organize independently in workplaces, trade unions, and communities. Such demands expose the limits of capitalism while mobilizing workers around immediate needs, forging class unity in the process.

In no way should a program consisting of these among other transitional demands be subjugated under the leadership of some “progressive” bourgeois forces or else their petty-bourgeois power brokers. The political independence of the working class, which is of absolute imperative to its victory, must be defended at all times. To this end, Sosialis Alternatif calls for the building of an independent mass workers’ party, to serve as the political vehicle for transforming spontaneous resistance, in our context here against women’s oppression, into a conscious fight to overthrow capitalism itself.

On the other hand, with regard to building our revolutionary socialist party, whose duty it is to nurture the independence of the working class, we must also ensure we do everything we can in recruiting and developing female cadres. While the task of enlisting working-class women into the fight for socialism is no doubt markedly more challenging in the neocolonial world, where women are most exploited and oppressed, it is also markedly more important.

For this purpose, socialist parties must enact policies such as systematic political education organized for and by women workers and youth; the conscious promotion of women into leadership at every level of the organization; internal mechanisms to combat sexism, harassment, and exclusion; not to mention material support structures within the party such as childcare provision, transport assistance, flexible meeting arrangements — all in order to remove practical barriers to participation. Resources must be allocated deliberately and transparently to this work, not as token measures but as a strategic priority inseparable from party-building itself. Without the active recruitment, political development, and leadership of women from the most exploited layers of the working class, no revolutionary organization can claim to represent the class as a whole, nor can it hope to uproot the patriarchal relations upon which capitalist domination continues to rest. On this front, Sosialis Alternatif still has tremendous amount of work to do, not least with the challenges that lie ahead in respect to the continued failure of liberal policies which feed into right-wing reaction.

In conjunction with the upcoming International Women’s Day on March 8, we invite the organizers, participants, and supporters of the Women’s March to reflect on this socialist tradition over a century old that made its political debut during the February Revolution in Russia. Without the most vehement resistance and organization of the female workers in St. Petersburg who so courageously blazed the trail of February 1917, especially in and around the Putilov manufacturing complex, events alone could neither have ended centuries of Tsarist rule nor paved the path for the successful proletarian seizure of power in October.

Thus we look forward to the most rigorous discussion and contribution on strategies and tactics to our collective building of an independent working-class perspective of women’s liberation — one that rejects liberal moralism and NGO substitutionism, and instead grounds itself in the organization of the working class and its revolutionary struggle against all forms of capitalist oppression. In this spirit, let us take inspiration from one of the greatest Bolshevik revolutionaries and leading Marxist theorists of women’s liberation, Aleksandra Kollontai, who wrote the following impassioned passages in her 1909 essay titled The Social Basis of the Woman Question:

Only the working class is capable of maintaining morale in the modern world with its distorted social relations. With firm and measured step it advances steadily toward its aim. It draws the working women to its ranks. The proletarian woman bravely starts out on the thorny path of labor. Her legs sag; her body is torn. There are dangerous precipices along the way, and cruel beasts of prey are close at hand.

But only by taking this path is the woman able to achieve that distant but alluring aim — her true liberation in a new world of labor. During this difficult march to the bright future the proletarian woman, until recently a humiliated, downtrodden slave with no rights, learns to discard the slave mentality that has clung to her, step by step she transforms herself into an independent worker, an independent personality, free in love. It is she, fighting in the ranks of the proletariat, who wins for women the right to work; it is she, the “younger sister”, who prepares the ground for the “free” and “equal” woman of the future.

For what reason, then, should the woman worker seek a union with the bourgeois feminists? Who, in actual fact, would stand to gain in the event of such an alliance? Certainly not the woman worker. She is her own savior; her future is in her own hands. The working woman guards her class interests and is not deceived by great speeches about the “world all women share”. The working woman must not and does not forget that while the aim of bourgeois women is to secure their own welfare in the framework of a society antagonistic to us, our aim is to build, in the place of the old, outdated world, a bright temple of universal labor, comradely solidarity, and joyful freedom.