Disclaimer: this article contains discussion of sexual and gender-based violence, which may be upsetting or difficult to read for some readers. Please proceed with caution as you engage with this material and seek support if needed.
Concerning Events
2025 has been no stranger to cases of gender-based violence (GBV). However, In recent months, Malaysia itself has witnessed an alarming number of such cases—from the Cyberjaya dorm murder that occurred back in June, up to the school stabbing case in SMK Bandar Utama in October that gained significant virality, and the many other cases that did not receive as much traction but are no less heartbreaking, such as the act of a man murdering a mother and her daughter in Penang, and the act of two men murdering a saleswoman in Seri Kembangan. As the rise of GBV draws closer and closer to home, women living in Malaysia are left feeling increasingly unsafe, and there is much left to desire when it comes to sex education, prevention methods, and in general what the Malaysian government is doing to address this ever prevalent issue.
Additionally, between the stabbing incident in Taylor’s University, the gang rape cases in Melacca and Kedah secondary schools, and the SMK Bandar Utama case—the latter 3 happening within the span of a month—fierce national debate has sparked regarding student safety, mental health and violence in schools.
Misogyny
Regardless of shared motive—be it sexually motivated or to seek revenge—no two cases are exactly the same. The ages of both victims and perpetrators range from high school students to working adults, while ethnicity differs across cases as well. However, one thing that ties these cases together is their fundamental root in misogyny; prejudice against women and the consideration of them as a lesser being.
Malaysia’s Response
Amidst growing unease, the public response regarding cases that happened in academic institutions shows parents advocating to “bring back caning”, and criticising the removal of milestone examinations such as UPSR and PT3. Many others also blamed it on the bullying culture in Malaysia, as well as on other issues such as allowing minors access to the internet or violent video games.
Local media sites that reported on the cases failed to mention any relation to sexism or misogyny, framing each as an isolated case of unfortunate violence. School institutions also responded on a similar wavelength, expelling students who committed the crimes, and implementing bag checks to prevent dangerous weapons from entering the school compound—but none of these target the problem at its root. Without systemic reform, cases like these will continue to remain an issue as these men are not the “bad apples” of society, but rather they grow from a tree that’s entirely poisoned.
On a global scale, there has been a rising interest in feminism, which is painted as a solution to gender inequality. The use of social media has also greatly boosted global awareness of the ideology and helped build global solidarity among women through their shared struggles of living under patriarchal systems.
What is Feminism?
Generally, feminism advocates for better women’s rights and protection; though different paradigms have different methods and ideas on how to achieve this. For example, there is liberal feminism which advocates for equal rights for women without radically altering the structure of society; as opposed to radical feminism, which calls for societal reform through the elimination of patriarchy.
Intersectional feminism states that different forms of oppression are not experienced in isolation, and takes into account overlapping factors that can affect oppression or empowerment—such as sexuality, class, and ethnicity—and analyses them collectively.
Which brings us to the real question: does feminism actually help in relieving GBV?
While feminism has brought on many rights for women since the 1800s and significantly improved their lives from the despicable days of staying at home and being the head-of-the-household’s maid and childbearer, gender inequality continues to pose a large issue today. Should we wait another 200 years for women’s rights to eventually catch up to those of men’s?
Missing the Bigger Picture
The issue with some of these responses and ideologies is that it frames GBV as an issue of its own that can be solved by treating it as such, when it is very much a symptom of a flawed system.
What exactly about the system is flawed? To arrive at a reasonable explanation, it’s helpful to keep asking further questions until we get to its very basis.
So why are men violent towards women?
We are born and raised in a bi-gendered society—where social constructs are built around biological sex—and unfortunately, where one tends to be seen as lesser. How does this translate into our day-to-day lives? Things perceived as related to femininity are looked down on, such as being emotional or sensitive. It affects the very language we speak, where words like “gay”, “pussy” and “bitch” are used as insults.
Girls are raised to suppress themselves—being told to “act like a lady” essentially means to be unopinionated and palatable—while boys are encouraged to do the opposite—the term “boys will be boys” being used to justify misbehaviour and rowdy antics. A “high body count” is something women are shamed for (via derogatory terms such as whores and sluts), while being something for men to boast about.
Even more harmful is victim blaming culture, where blame for being assaulted is put onto women. Asking questions like “what was she wearing?” or “was she drunk?” imply that women are assaulted under circumstances they could’ve avoided, rather than focusing on the assaulter and what led them into thinking that treating women in such a degrading manner is acceptable in the first place. Along the same vein, while having women-only coaches on the MRT can to some extent help women feel safer, it does nothing to eradicate the threat of predatory men. Rather, it again shifts the responsibility onto women by insisting they enter a space deemed as “safe” (so if a woman were assaulted on the train, would it be her fault for not seeking asylum within the women-only coach?).
More concerning is how this leaks into our institutional and legal systems. Many schools require female students to dress modestly, the cited reason being that “showing too much skin” will prove distracting to male students. Again, this is the burden of men’s predatory mindsets being placed onto women under the guise of protecting them. The state also plays a crucial role in this system that continuously devalues women’s worth, which is reflected in the way it “grants” women rights and benefits. For example, maternal leave being more common than paternal leave implies that child-raising is the mother’s task, similar to how “domestic” jobs such as cleaning and babysitting receive lower wages as they are deemed tasks that mothers should inherently be responsible for.
Women’s oppression in the name of morality and religion is nothing new. Many sexist laws exist to “protect” women’s “purity” and “virginity”, but they highlight the underlying issue of a society that only values women for their bodies and ability to give birth. Looking at it this way, can it not be assumed that rather than being innate to a certain sex, that these gendered concepts are instead conditioned into us from a young age?
When Did it All Start?
So now that it’s established that GBV is exacerbated through sociocultural and institutional reasons, we have to ask where these norms came from. How did they come to be? Surely it isn’t simply human nature for the “dominant, aggressive” male to be violent towards the “submissive, vulnerable” female?
Let’s take an anthropological look into history. The following paragraphs will try to condense key parts from over 90% of human history into a few sentences, so details could be missed and large timelines skipped over. Keep that in mind as you proceed!
In early societies, there was no separation of public and private sectors. Individuals of tribes and communities worked for the benefit and survival of the whole group. They practised promiscuity; parents were not exclusively bound to each other, and children belonged to the entire tribe, not to a sole or pair of parents. Due to this, there was also no way to verify the paternal lineage of a child.
It was only through the development of surplus that the concept of private property came to be, as certain individuals wanted to ensure that their next-of-kin inherited that surplus. Farming tools were developed for men’s use, and land was worked on by men, and was eventually considered to be their property. However, since only the maternal parent of children could be ascertained, to ensure a child was theirs, men started to restrict women’s sexual freedom and claimed ownership over them, limiting them to reproducing with only him; and that was more or less how the nuclear family came to be, with the wife and child being considered the male head-of-the-household’s property. It was also during this era that the division of public (largely men working outside the home) and private (largely women conducting (unpaid) domestic tasks) labour came to be.
Naturally, if some people decided to hoard resources and only distribute them within their bloodline, the rest of society wouldn’t simply sit around and let it happen. And that is how the state came to be: a “mediator” among the classes that worked in favour of the ruling class’s interests. In fact, it was the end of matriarchal civilisations and the birth of class society that Engels deemed the “historical defeat of the female sex” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884.
It was in the state’s interest to uphold the nuclear family, as the privatisation of domestic tasks—what was once the responsibility of and benefit to whole communities—such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, took the burden of social welfare off the state’s hands and into those of the private family. Lacking state provisions of public healthcare, education, food, and resources leading to poor development of children, could be blamed on mothers for not trying hard enough to raise their kids properly. Men were also encouraged to be the sole breadwinner of the household, creating an economic reliance of women on their husbands, making it extremely difficult for them to leave undesirable relationships.
To ensure the patriarchal nuclear family persisted, the state protected the rights of husbands to punish their wives (through domestic and sexual abuse) to keep women in line, and made it so that adultery committed by a married woman was a crime punishable by divorce and even death. Through this, the notion that women were mere sexual commodities was adopted.
So, is it human nature to establish and live under patriarchal systems? From a historical and anthropological perspective, no, such a system was born to uphold the ruling class, and only continues to exist to uphold the current capitalist class.
Malaysia Today
Malaysia still holds a backwards mentality regarding sex and gender. Our laws are shaped by culture and religion that frame any sex-related topic as taboo, which results in an extremely lacking sex education curriculum in our public schools, as well as a difficulty in legally dealing with sexual abuse cases. Making it difficult to report sexual abuse leads to a lack of legal consequences, but a society uneducated about gender and sex, whilst deeply ingrained with misogyny, creates a lack of social consequences as well. Time and time again we’ve seen men (especially men in power) have their accounts of sexual abuse against women come to light, just to slowly be forgotten as they go on to have unaffected, sometimes even successful careers and social lives; while their victims carry the scars they’ve inflicted forever. Combined, these ultimately spur men to feel more emboldened to enact such crimes, as it’s something they can easily get away with.
The concept of the patriarchal family still strongly persists as well, and it could be argued that women have even more of a burden under the current capitalist system, as while domestic tasks are still considered a woman’s duty, there is often also the need for them to take on a job, as a single-person income is no longer enough to sustain a household with children. Despite this, economic liberation has granted women a perspective outside of the home. No longer confined within the four walls of the home, they are able to tie their daily struggles to systemic flaws.
Women’s economic liberation does not come without its struggles, however. Rather than increasing women’s wages to match those of men, the capitalists instead ‘equalise down’, using it as an excuse to push working-class men into accepting lower wages (or risk losing their jobs). The same method is used to pit the local working class against migrant workers. It is a classic divide and conquer tactic, as men begin to see women as a threat to their job security, and that the increasing number of women entering the workforce is the problem, rather than their bosses’ refusal to cut back on profit. This prevents the working class from realising a united struggle within the workplace, and only benefits the capitalist class.
Moving Forward
Ultimately, women’s oppression and class society are not structures that developed independently. They are in fact interlinked, rooted in the same economic and social developments that took place thousands of years ago.
While it would be wrong to discredit the immense efforts and achievements of the feminists who have greatly improved the lives of women all across the globe today, at the end of the day, it is merely a temporary solution to an issue innate to the capitalist system.
On an individual level, we should reject gendered norms, and realise that these methods of pitting one sex against the other is a means of keeping us divided. The fundamental issue is not one of men versus women, but rather how both can work together in dismantling the system that tells us we are unable to co-exist. And while internalised prejudices can and should be challenged individually, the reality is that these ideals and identities are instilled into us from birth through a complex web of institutions (family, media, religion, etc.) and the ability to change ourselves and others is ultimately restricted by the constraints of the capitalist system itself.
To have lasting change is to target the issue at its root; which Engels argues can be achieved firstly by re-socialising what are currently considered private tasks, abolishing the nuclear family from being the economic unit of society, and eventually, the state!
