Police should focus on threats to students, not truancy, say experts

The police should focus on threats to students instead of taking over schools’ responsibility to address truancy, academics say.

Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia’s Effendi Ewan Matore said monitoring students’ attendance, investigating the cause of their absenteeism and counselling them should remain the responsibility of schools and the social welfare department.

He said the police should focus on educating students about the law, road safety and the dangers of drugs, as well as tackling external threats such as drug syndicates and gangsterism.

Effendi said police lacked the pedagogical training, social work expertise and policy tools needed to address the root causes of truancy such as poverty, learning difficulties and family problems.

“The police’s involvement should not extend to monitoring the personal behaviour of ordinary students or compiling security profiles on them,” he told FMT.

He was commenting on Kuala Lumpur police chief Fadil Marsus’s statement that police would track and profile about 10% of students in the capital who frequently played truant or had dropped out of school.

Fadil said the initiative was aimed at identifying the reasons for their absenteeism and helping them return to school.

Universiti Malaya’s Ungku Aziz Centre for Development Studies director, Suhaiza Hanim Zailani, said profiling was important to identify the reasons for absenteeism and determine the appropriate intervention.

She said students who skipped school should not automatically be viewed as potential offenders but as individuals who might need help.

“Police involvement can be useful when there are issues such as gang activity, substance abuse or other crimes affecting students,” she said.

However, cases of truancy that do not involve such threats should be handled by education authorities, in collaboration with parents, counsellors and welfare agencies, she added.

Suhaiza said students might skip school because of financial difficulties, transport problems, family caregiving responsibilities, pressure to work, bullying or difficulties keeping up with their studies.

She said simply returning students to school without addressing the reasons for their absence would be only a temporary solution.

Suhaiza also warned that an approach which placed too much emphasis on police involvement could make students feel ashamed, fearful or cause them to be labelled as offenders, pushing them further away from school.

She stressed that students’ privacy must be protected if the police profile them, ensuring that the information gathered is used to support the students rather than create police records that could affect their future.

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