It’s not good news for children and young people in the Maldives that Maumoon Abdul Gayoom intends to run for yet another term in office. Asia’s longest-serving dictator considers under-21-year-olds too young to vote but 12-year-olds old enough to have consensual sex with adults.

In July a Maldives court convicted four men of “indecent behaviour” with a young girl. Legal terminology in this country often employs coy phrases to mask the seriousness of crimes like rape and child sexual abuse. Although the young girl in this case was only 12 years old, the judge pointed out that since she had not screamed she must have consented to the sex. So he gave the men the minimum sentence of just eight months of banishment. The paedophiles will serve their sentences in relative freedom in island communities, which may not know that they were convicted of a sex-offence with a minor.

The opposition Maldivian Democratic Party MDP, which never misses an opportunity to protest against the government, has remained eerily silent. Even the reactionary Islamic Democratic Party IDP has failed to issue a statement. But human rights activists and other individuals, including readers of the newspaper Haveeru, have expressed outrage. This has lead to hasty promises by the attorney-general and the child rights minister to appeal against the sentence. No one is holding their breath though. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who is effectively the country’s Supreme Court, can and has been known to influence trials. But in child sexual abuse cases, the dictator has shown more sympathy to paedophiles than to their victims.

There has been a resurgence in paedophilia in the last 12 months or so. In July, five girls aged 11 to 19 from Goidhoo, Baa Atoll, reported being sexually abused by Qur’an teacher Ali Rasheed. Three of the alleged victims are his nieces, one by blood. Much to the horror of the community, the police have released the accused back into the community. It is not known if there is enough evidence to convict him under Maldivian law.

Sexual offences such as rape and child abuse require a confession by the alleged perpetrator, or four witnesses, for a successful conviction to take place. This means that if a child reports to having been sexually abused, but the alleged perpetrator denies the charge and there are no witnesses, the court can find the child, even if he or she is a minor, guilty of consenting to sexual activity. As a result, victims of child sexual abuse are often punished for reporting the crime while the abuser is let free.

In 2006, the discovery of a dead infant in Dhambidhoo, Laamu Atoll, resulted in an unusual police procedure. All woman of the island aged12 to 45 years were subjected to a physical examination, to determine whether they had recently given birth. A 16-year-old girl was brought to Male for further investigation. According to sources involved in the investigation, the girl became pregnant when her own father sexually abused her. But the ministry of gender and family decided to send the girl back to her family and, in effect, back to the abuser. To date, no charges were brought against the alleged abuser and there are reports that the girl is pregnant again.

Earlier this year, a student of CHSE, the government higher secondary school, accused a foreign teacher of sexually abusing her. But even before an investigation could take the place, the school authority and the education ministry deported the teacher. This is not the first time that the education ministry has tried to hush up sexual abuse in Maldives schools.

In the early 1990s, the education ministry, then headed by Gayoom’s buddy Zahir Hussein, refused to take action against two teachers despite mounting reports of sexual abuse. It was only when frustrated parents threatened to take matters into their own hands that the government launched an investigation. It emerged that the two teachers, one of who taught Islam, had abused more than 30 students. Both were convicted and sentenced to two years of banishment. More than a decade later, the law has changed little and this shamefully lenient sentence still holds. The two abusers are now free and the education ministry has even allowed one of them, the notorious “Naseem Sir”, to give tuition to students.

More recently, well-known actor Hamid Wajeeh was given a job at the government reformatory on Maafushi. It is not known quite what qualifications the government saw in Wajeeh to entrust him to look after children. But not long into the job, he was caught abusing the boys in his charge. Thankfully, there was enough evidence to convict him and he was sentenced to two years of banishment. But for reasons best known to himself, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom used his presidential powers to grant a special pardon to the paedophile. Wajeeh served less than three months of his sentence.

The reformatory has undergone several name changes over the years, but no significant change in its treatment of its young residents. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the reformatory, under the then home minister Umar Zahir, was a popular target for predators, including known sadists and child-abusers. Although there were several reports of physical and sexual violence there, Gayoom’s government did little to bring the perpetrators to justice or to better protect the young people under its charge. When one such report surfaced in the early 1990s, Umar Zahir famously quipped: “Children are liars!” Allegations have also surfaced about the current resident supervisor there, but action is yet to take place.

Back in the early 1990s, Ali Shareef, a senior official at the information ministry, was caught on Male’s eastern seawall, engaged in what appeared to be a sexual activity with an under-aged boy. But the court accepted Shareef’s defense that he had been asleep and, therefore, unaware of what the boy was doing to him. In what must surely be the first case of its kind, the court found the minor guilty of abusing the elderly statesman. Gayoom later promoted Ali Shareef to his high-profile job, and he now spends much of his time writing poetry.

The Maldives, as a signatory of the Convention on the Rights of the Child CRC, has been taken to task by the body for country’s deplorable child rights record. Not only has Maumoon Abdul Gayoom openly showed his support for child abusers, but he has never, in his three decades of office, introduced a single piece of legislature to protect children from sexual abuse. As a result the Maldives has seen a proliferation of paedophilia.

A survey published this year has shed more light on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the Maldives. According to its findings, one in three woman aged 15-49 years have experienced physical or sexual abuse while one in six women reported to having been sexually abused when they were under 15 years of age. Given that the survey focused only on females, social workers have rightly commented that the actual figure for child sexual abuse may be much higher. If figures for children of both sexes are taken into account, the Maldives may very well have the highest rates of child sexual abuse in South Asia, probably even the world.

But Aishath Mohamed Didi, the child-rights minister, has chosen to downplay the findings of the survey, even though it was carried out by her own ministry. In response to an article in Haveeru, which criticized the government for its inadequacy in dealing with child sexual abuse, Didi tartly told Minivan News that the figures for child sexual abuse in the Maldives were no higher than other countries.

Aishath Mohamed Didi is a fervent supporter of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. She would be aware that it would not help the dictator’s already tarnished international image if the Maldives was found to be the child sexual abuse capital of the world. In 2005, only a month after she was appointed gender minister, Didi similarly attempted to undermine eyewitness accounts of police brutality against adolescents and a pregnant mother during a crackdown on dissent. She didn’t utter a murmur against the use of excessive force by the police but blamed, parents for allowing children out on the streets. In 2004, Aishath Mohamed Didi was part of the commission that investigated Eevan Naseem’s murder by the police and, the use of firearms to quell the subsequent riots inside Maafushi prison. Even though the report found ample evidence of murder and prisoner abuse by Gayoom’s police, Didi chose to join the ageing dictator’s cabinet.

Paedophiles in the Maldives couldn’t have hoped for a better pair than Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and Aishath Mohamed Didi to safeguard their interests.