[Contributed by Vance] Just last week, the National University of Singapore (NUS) shared that they were considering tougher enforcement on alcohol consumption in school. This idea came from the fact that 7 of 8 sexual misconduct cases in NUS involved drinking.
Besides the fact that alcohol consumption is already mostly banned in school, this idea completely missed the point. Local comedian Sharul Chana pointed out:
“saying that alcohol causes people to act on sexual impulses is like saying that having a knife around causes murder”
Sharul Channa
The point is, it is not the alcohol that made people misbehave. It’s their conscious desire to do so in the first place. Drinking just makes them a little bit more daring.
It is the fact that men feel entitled to act on their sexual impulses that creates the problem.
It’s the same narrative when the decided that Andrew Gosling who threw a bottle at a group of Malay-Muslims only needed to go to jail for killing a 73-year-old man. It wasn’t the alcohol that made him throw the bottle, it was his innate hatred for the religious community. Yet the law decided that it was “just a rash act” and decided to merely jail him.
The issue is also that the decision makers don’t see it – they once again choose to act on the symptom instead of trying to solve the problem. Following their logic, it wouldn’t be surprising if Singapore decides to ban all knives because of all the recent blade-related incidents.
