THERE is a worrying trend of underaged girls who fall in love with Indonesian men and willing to risk their lives travelling by sea to Indonesia to be with their lovers, reported Kosmo!
It featured an indepth article on this following the return to Malaysia of 12-year-old Nor Azreen Che Ishak, from Ulu Sawah Rantau, Negri Sembilan, on Thursday night.
She had eloped with her Indonesian boyfriend, Tony Wijaya, 27, and married him in West Lombok, Indonesia.
Based on statistics recorded by the Malaysian Embassy in Indonesia, there were 12 similar cases reported since 2005.
The embassy immigration and manpower adviser Abdul Rahman Mohd Noh said the embassy had solved such cases with assistance from Indonesian police and immigration.
“The men should know that the law in our country is not the same as in other countries and it can lead to all sorts of problems,” he said.
The daily quoted psychology expert from Universiti Malaya’s Educational Psychology and Counselling Department Associate Professor Dr Mariani Md Nor as saying that the trend of teenagers aged between 12 and 15 falling into the “love trap” of foreign men was becoming widespread.
“The situation shows that local teenagers are attracted to foreign men. One of the factors was that foreign men are good with words. It is easy for girls who faced family problems and are desperate for love to fall for it.”
She also attributed it to teenagers thinking that they were smart and free to determine the path of their lives and so choose to ignore advice from parents, peers and teachers.
# Other News & Views is compiled from the vernacular newspapers (Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese and Tamil dailies). As such, stories are grouped according to the respective language/medium. Where a paragraph begins with a sub-heading, it denotes a separate news item.
