Brickfields Asia College managing director and founder Raja Singham speaks to Malay Mail Online in an interview in Petaling Jaya April 25, 2017. — Pictures by Choo Choy May

PETALING JAYA, April 26 ― The Brickfields Asia College (BAC) said it has suspended a student indefinitely and assigned him 100 hours of community service after he posted a rape joke in a WhatsApp group.

The management of the private law school stressed that the remark by the student, who turned 18 in January, was not a rape threat, noting that the female target, an IACT College student who has since left the college, was not in the chat group that had seven other male freshmen students.

“There is no issue of safety as far as we’re concerned,” BAC founder and managing director Raja Singham told Malay Mail Online in an interview at the Petaling Jaya campus yesterday.

He added that the campus is safe and that they have been running the college for 26 years “and so far, incident-free.”

Raja said the WhatsApp group had both BAC and IACT freshmen students who had joined just a few weeks ago and were interested in playing futsal. (IACT College, which is a subsidiary of BAC, is located in the same building as the BAC PJ campus.)

According to him, the students shut down the WhatsApp group after an uproar erupted on social media when the target of the rape joke, a teenager who turned 18 in February, tweeted last Wednesday a screenshot of the comment: “She gonna ‘kena’ rape from me. Then she must marry me.”

Raja said the teenager discovered the rape joke when a member of the WhatsApp group, a friend, showed it to her.

According to Raja, the 18-year-old did not lodge a complaint with the college administration and management only found out about the incident through social media.

The BAC managing director said the youth who posted the rape joke had apologised on his own accord to the teenager in person last Thursday as well as issued an apology on his Facebook page and accepted his punishment from the college. He has also undergone two hours of counselling.

“He was remorseful and accepted everything that was thrown at him,” said Raja, adding that the youth had also received threats himself.

Raja stressed that action would have been taken, including lodging a police report if necessary, even if the young woman did not go public and made a complaint with the student services department instead.

“We would have called the boys in, we would have done the whole thing properly,” he said.

The 18-year-old woman had questioned last Saturday on Twitter if BAC would have “swept it under the mat” if she had gone straight to the college administration instead of going public.

Raja denied the young woman’s claim of intimidation during her Thursday meeting with three BAC and two IACT staff, claiming that she was “very fine” then from what he understood about the meeting.

Brickfields Asia College organised a lecture on April 11 about date rape.

He claimed that the college staff had merely advised her to delete her tweets containing her phone number because they were “really concerned about her safety”, which she did later. She has also deleted her tweets about the rape joke.

“We did say, ‘Why didn’t you go to student services? Why did you put your number [on Twitter]? What you’re doing is not safe’,” said Raja. “But that was it.”

On the young woman’s statement that her parents withdrew her from IACT because they feared for her safety, Raja claimed they had asked the college to guarantee their daughter’s safety off-campus.

“‘Can you assure my daughter will be safe once she’s outside campus, outside anywhere, that she will be safe?’

“We have no issues about safety on campus. We have no worries that this boy is going to do anything of that nature. He’s shown his remorse whatever it is but nobody can guarantee safety anywhere else outside,” said Raja. “They said ‘since you can’t guarantee the safety of my child, we want to withdraw her’.”

He said in sexual assault cases, students can lodge reports with student services and the college has counsellors and a gender specialist. No such complaints have been lodged before, he added.

Raja stressed that “rape is not a joking matter”, adding that BAC runs gender equality seminars and even conducted a lecture earlier this month on date rape.

“We don’t excuse it,” he said.

“This is one isolated incident. The college has been around for 26 years. We have trained thousands of lawyers, we have 5,000 students now. This is one isolated incident of a person who didn’t follow procedure.”

The young woman told Malay Mail Online yesterday that her parents pulled her out of IACT because they were afraid of what might happen because of the backlash.

“They didn't want to put me through unnecessary stress in college,” said the 18-year-old, who was studying mass communications.

“And no, I wasn't harassed but the boy had talked to seniors of his college and one even called me, and if I stayed, it could’ve escalated to face to face contact which I didn't want,” she added.

Some social media users have made light of the incident, saying that it was merely a joke made in private.

“Regardless of what they say in the statement, I am just glad that they heard about my dissatisfaction and took a step in the right direction and not sweep it under the mat,” she said, referring to BAC’s Sunday statement.

She added that it did not matter how BAC decided to punish the youth, as long as they understood the “gravity of the situation”.

“So in fact, I'd like to thank BAC for putting themselves in my shoes and taking such speedy action, but I will not stop fighting for what I believe in and fighting for women,” she said.