JUNE 5 ― The media should stop labelling British paedophile Richard Huckle a “monster.”

Trying to make Huckle appear alien only lulls us into a false sense of security. It makes us blind to how terrible humanity is.

Huckle wasn’t a sexual predator lurking in an alley. He interacted with us, dined with us, and visited our homes.

Paedophiles, rapists and sexual abusers are usually people close to us. They know our hopes, fears and dreams; they laugh and cry with us; they sometimes say that they love us and care for us.

Huckle, 30, didn’t just drop from the sky and began raping babies and children. Sure, his behaviours were extreme, to say the least ― sexually assaulting the same girl from age five to 12, photographing himself raping a three-year-old girl and selling the image, and even keeping a ledger of his attacks and penning a guidebook for fellow paedophiles.

But he shares characteristics with other sex offenders and abusers living among us ― a lack of respect for girls and boys, treating people like sex objects, fearing women.

Women are still blamed for their rape. Some people think a woman deserves at least part of the blame if she’s wearing a short skirt.

Girls and women have to deal with male entitlement to sex, where they’re not treated as fellow human beings but as passive bodies for the satiation of lust.

It is this environment where Huckle (and all of us) live in.

We can’t simply dismiss Huckle as an aberration when we normalise sexual violence and the objectification of girls and women.

What makes it worse is that while the local media launches a full-on assault against Huckle, we are seemingly more forgivable towards fellow Malaysians who commit the same crimes as the British photographer, whose laptop had 20,253 indecent photographs of children.

A Majlis Amanah Rakyat (MARA) council member once said former scholar Nur Fitri Azmeer Nordin, who was convicted in the UK and found to be in possession of over 30,000 videos and photographs of child pornography, should be given a “second chance”.

The Court of Appeal freed national bowler Noor Afizal Azizan, who had sex at age 19 with a 13-year-old girl, because he had a “bright future.”

Then there is the legalisation of child marriage in Malaysia, where there are cases of 12-year-old and 11-year-old girls getting married to men over 40.

If we are appalled at Huckle for having sex with six-month-old babies, toddlers and 12-year-old girls, then why are we not similarly outraged at child marriage? How can sex with a child suddenly be okay if it is legalised in the institution of marriage?

Huckle, who sexually abused four girls from the same family, himself wanted to marry one of them when she turns 18.

In Malaysia, the legal age for marriage under civil law is 18, whereas it’s 16 for girls under Shariah law. But we allow even prepubescent girls to be married off, sometimes to men who are Huckle’s age or older, if there is consent from the chief minister or from the Shariah courts respectively.

Child marriage doesn’t protect girls. It only binds them to a lifetime of servitude to men who will have 24/7 sexual access to them. Marital rape isn’t criminalised in Malaysia.

It’s illogical to justify child marriage for the sake of mengelakkan maksiat (avoiding vice), a sexist concept that places a woman’s value in her virginity. A woman is considered soiled if she is “passed around” from one man to another, as if she were an object that has no bodily agency to determine who and how many partners she wants to have. Not so for a man.

Malaysia cannot just be outraged at one foreigner for violating 22 of our children.

We must act with the same anger against our fellow citizens who use outdated cultural and religious norms to justify having sex with prepubescent (paedophilia), pubescent (hebephilia) or adolescent (ephebophilia) children.

There are Richard Huckles among us. Let’s not turn a blind eye to them.

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.