Malaysia ranks third in the Asean region when it comes to the possession and distribution of child pornography.

This is according to a report in The Star today quoting Bukit Aman’s sexual investigation unit chief Tan Gee Soon, who reportedly said this after speaking as a panellist at a town hall session yesterday.

She said Malaysia did not have any specific laws against child pornography, but has laws against pornography in general.

“We have Section 292 of the Penal Code and Section 5 of the Film Censorship Act to act against those with pornographic images and films respectively,” she was quoted as saying.

She added that the police is also studying amendments to Section 292, which only deals with the sale and distribution of obscene material.

The sexual investigation unit had also submitted proposals for an anti-grooming law, she said, but reportedly did not elaborate except that it is based on Singapore’s anti-grooming law.

Grooming, in this context, refers to the process of befriending and preparing a child - and sometimes the child’s family, too - with the intention of later sexually exploit the child.

Last month, Malaysia was rocked by revelations that a British national Richard Huckle had admitted to charges of sexually abusing children in Kuala Lumpur and Cambodia.

He reportedly filmed the child sex acts and uploaded them to the internet, and also kept a log of his exploits. Some 200 children are believed to have been abused between 2006 and 2014.

Huckle was subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment.

Since Huckle’s conviction, reports of local paedophile groups in Malaysia also began to surface.

A year earlier on April 30, 2015, a Malaysian studying in the UK was convicted for the possession of about 30,000 images and videos of child sexual exploitation, and sentenced to five years imprisonment.

The convict Nur Fitri Azmeer Noordin was studying on a Majlis Amanah Rakyat (Mara) student loan. His case caused an uproar when Mara councillor Nazir Hussin Akhtar Hussin said Mara is prepared to offer him a ‘second chance’ to study locally once he has completed his sentence.

Nazir Hussin later claimed that he was misquoted, while Mara clarified that Nur Fitri is expected to repay his student loans, and it was not a scholarship as earlier reported.