KUCHING: The rape of women and girls in remote areas of Sarawak is in the news again.

As the police close their files on the alleged rape of Penan women by logging camp employees on the grounds of insufficient evidence, a new case opens in a primary school where a teacher is a suspect.

To Sarawak Women for Women Society (SWWS), the lessons for society to learn is that rape happens in the interior and will continue to happen until people who commit the crime know they are going to be found out and held accountable for their actions.

“We urgently need to build effective systems to reach out to people who have been raped so that prompt, appropriate responses occur.

“This is difficult to achieve in the interior, but is a challenge we have to meet,” said president Margaret Bedus in a press statement yesterday.

“The details of the rapes in the Lubok Antu area are not yet known, but it is likely the recent publicity and the willingness of adults to take action have ensured that the primary school pupils have been rescued from their nightmare.”

In the recent training SWWS conducted in Baram, it met Penan women who did not realise rape was a crime.

Margaret said: “Without this knowledge, how can we expect them to report? Reporting also needs user-friendly, accessible channels to report the crime.”

“How can a woman with little, if any, cash travel to a police station miles away by logging road? We can hardly expect her to ask the logging company to transport her,” she said.

She believed the victim would only report if she felt safe and she could trust the people she met in the process of relating the assault.

“Who will protect her from the rapist after she has reported? Will her report be accepted if she has yet to receive her IC or will she find herself in trouble as her status is questioned?” she asked.

Margaret added that there was also the issue of how to collect sufficient evidence.

Therefore, she advised rape victims not to wash until they were examined by a suitably trained medical officer able to take samples acceptable to the courts.

She said a victim should also keep the clothes she had on when raped and not wash them.

“How many women will think to do that after a traumatic incident and before setting off on a day’s journey to a police station?” she asked.

She suggested that the health clinics in the interior be a resource centre to collect preliminary medical evidence.

“Can we appoint women leaders in the interior to take statements from the survivors that will then be accepted as evidence by the authorities so an investigation can be initiated?” she asked.

For women to report, she said people needed to think what they needed and then find a way of serving them.

For rape of school children to be reported, she said, the relevant authorities needed to ensure that teachers, the vast majority of whom would not dream of hurting a child, knew how to be alert to the crime and what action to take regardless of who the suspect was.

Margaret said SWWS called for modules on child abuse to be included in the curriculum of all teacher training colleges and for every school in the interior to have a teacher willing and able to conduct personal safety programmes for the pupils so that children knew where to find help if sexual predators approached them.