SEVERAL sex education videos for children uploaded on YouTube by the Women, Family and Community Development Ministry last June have been viewed 2.79 million times, Deputy Minister Hannah Yeoh said.

She said this figure, registered as at October 4, showed significant progress for the ministry in its efforts to reduce child sexual abuse in Malaysia.

“In terms of the ‘view rate’, meaning if the video is one-minute long, the overall video view rate is 43%, and this is higher than the industry average view rate of only 20%.

“So others, when they do it (upload videos on YouTube), the industry average view rate is 20%, but for our video, it is 43%, so it is a very good trend… they have also garnered 67,000 likes and shares,” she told a press conference in the Parliament lobby today.

On June 24, Deputy Prime Minister Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, who is also women, family and community development minister, launched five videos on sex education for children on YouTube.

The series of one-minute videos in Bahasa Melayu, produced by the ministry in collaboration with civil society group Malaysians Against Pornography and Google as the operator of YouTube, were initially targeted to draw 150,000 views among children this year.

Earlier, during the question-and-answer session, Yeoh said the ministry was in talks with the Public Service Department (PSD) to increase the number of child protectors in the country.

She said currently, Malaysia has more than 200 child protectors for about 9.4 million children.

“Based on our current population of children, we need 1,500 child protectors, so we are in discussions with the PSD to get more manpower in this regard,” she said in reply to a supplementary question from Syed Ibrahim Syed Noh (PH-Ledang), who wanted to know if the government was cooperating with relevant parties to protect children. – Bernama, November 6, 2019.