Did we learn anything from the GISBH scandal?

Amar-Singh HSS

The Global Ikhwan Services and Business Holdings (GISBH) child abuse scandal, which involved the extensive physical and sexual abuse of hundreds of children, appears to have reached the end of its ‘media cycle’.

We appear to have turned a page and moved on with limited punishment of the GISBH leadership responsible for the abuse and no apparent accountability from the government agencies that failed these children.

We do not seem to have learnt from the nightmare or had a wake-up call to revamp our child protection services. It appears we are waiting for the next horror to surface before we have another knee-jerk response.

Much has been written by many of us about our concerns regarding our weak child protection services but we see little change. Strong calls by the children’s commissioner, Suhakam and more than 50 civil society organisations for a royal commission of inquiry have gone unheeded by the government.

The government agencies responsible for the protection of children appear unable to learn from failure. All we are left with is a Wikipedia page to chronicle this blight on Malaysia’s child protection services.

If we do not learn from our failures, we are doomed to repeat them. But the cost is unmeasurable for the children that suffer due to the failure of the nation’s child protection services.

We still hope that the Attorney General’s Chambers will continue to prosecute the GISBH leadership who were allegedly involved in the abuse of many children.

That said, this article aims to highlight what a professional and competent child protection service should and would have done when the GISBH abuse was uncovered.

Act promptly

A competent child protection service would have acted immediately to investigate and to protect children.

Police trained in child protection, aided by trained social workers, would have launched an investigation into any possible child abuse the moment the first report was made.

Instead, what we saw was 41 police reports lodged against GISBH from 2011 to 2024 but not acted upon.

We have no information on the Welfare Department’s involvement during those critical years.

In working with the Welfare Department, we have often noticed a reluctance to monitor and enforce child protection policies in religious institutions.

The Child Act is clear: it covers all children, and the Welfare Department is the designated protecter of all children in the country.

Investigate the past

A competent child protection service would not just rescue children currently in the welfare homes. It would also investigate all those who had been there in the past.

While 560 to 625 children (numbers vary according to different reports) were rescued, what about the possibly thousands of children who have been severely traumatised over decades in these homes?

A competent and adequately resourced child protection service would make attempts to identify children who had previously been in its facilities and offer them the support they need.

We are not aware that any attempt to do this has been undertaken by the Welfare Department, although a few survivors of abuse have come forward.

We are concerned about the wellbeing of these children, some of them possibly now adults, and their life trajectories, carrying the pain and trauma of unresolved abuse memories. Children and adults suffering in silence.

Reliable placement with ongoing monitoring

Managing more than 500 child abuse victims is a daunting task for any social services. It was not easy to absorb such a large number into the existing children’s homes run by the government. Hence, there is a need to place as many of them back with their own parents as possible.

A competent child protection service would do a detailed evaluation and ensure that the parents are fit people, before reuniting them with their children.

We must remember it was these very same parents who originally placed their children fully in the care of the GISBH welfare homes. We have to ask if they were aware of the abuse.

Currently the majority of children have been placed back with their families. We hope this was done after a meaningful evaluation.

We are unaware if there is any follow-up monitoring of these children and their families to ensure their safety.

Taking responsibility for failure

A competent child protection service would take responsibility for failure and be accountable.

We can see, from the recent death of an abused child in Singapore arising from failures in the child protection systems, how an independent panel was formed to evaluate the government agencies. Both the social and family development minister and the social services integration minister made public apologies with new measures to improve safeguards in the child protection ecosystem.

In the GISBH situation the impact of a competent child protection service taking action in 2011 cannot be adequately fathomed. We can only imagine how many hundreds of children would have been spared ongoing abuse.

Hence, we ask, what action has been taken against the authorities that failed all these children and many more?

With the lack of transparency, and without an independent evaluation or a royal commission of inquiry, no responsibility has been taken for failure and no change in the system is apparent.

There is a dire need for a competent nationwide child protection service within the police and the Department of Social Welfare. We need all child protecters in the department to be professionally trained social workers fully aware of all child protection regulations and their responsibilities and powers.

This will require the passing and implementation of a good social work profession bill, a dramatic upscaling of social worker training, and more posts for such professionals and others. This will help provide the in-depth, personalised service the traumatised children need.

We will continue to fail children, again and again, unless we fix our child protection services and adopt a more holistic approach in addressing the challenges. We must restore public confidence in our child protection agencies.

The legal framework to monitor residential care and respond to child abuse – wherever it occurs to any child – exists.

But what is lacking is the investment in providing a strong, professional, well-co-ordinated and resourced child protection system operating effectively at all levels from the community upwards. Optimising this needs to be the lesson learnt and acted upon from the GISBH scandal. 

The legacy of Richard Huckle’s conviction was the Sexual Offences Against Children Act.

We need the legacy of GISBH to be a child protection system worthy of a nation as developed as Malaysia.

Dato’ Dr Amar-Singh HSS is a consultant paediatrician and a child-disability activist.

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