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This report provides a critical examination of moral policing within the Malaysian education system, highlighting its prevalence and detrimental impact on students. By delving into manifestations of moral policing, from dress codes and gender segregation to restrictions on freedom of expression, it argues that far from being a benign force for good, moral policing, often enacted subtly and implicitly, creates a climate of fear and self-censorship within schools, hindering students’ personal growth and intellectual development.

It interrogates how moral policing shapes and enforces hegemonic norms and behaviour within Malaysian schools, through institutional (formal) and informal measures. By analysing testimonies, policies, and media reports from 2019 – 2024, the report uncovers the harmful impacts of moral policing, including its role in perpetuating stereotypes, discrimination and violence against students based on gender, religion, and self-expression. Furthermore, it also explores the ways in which moral policing manifests in the form of pressure to assimilate into the majority or conform to hegemonic norms. Some examples include suppression of a person’s gender expression, gender identity or sexual orientation, or being forced to adopt conservative and rigid ideas in order to be a ‘good religious person’ or an ‘acceptable minority’.

The findings show that moral policing in educational institutions persists with the following key features:

• Moral policing is undergirded by the notion of socially accepted norms. In national schools, socially acceptable norms are shaped by Malay-Muslim hegemonic and majoritarian norms through formal and informal mechanisms, impacting both Muslims and non-Muslims. Formal mechanisms include policies, disciplinary regulations and curriculum, while informal mechanisms comprise personal biases and beliefs.
  
  
• The findings reveal the highly complex nature of moral policing. Based on media monitoring, at least 65 incidents of moral policing in Malaysian public schools were reported between January 2019 to August 2024. The majority of incidents were intersectional and complex, where students were targeted based on multiple marginalised identities, including race, religion, gender, class, disability, family status, and other grounds of discrimination. However, the most prominent intersections reported were between gender and religion, highlighting how moral policing primarily manifests in the form of patriarchal interpretations of religion imposed by teachers, school authorities, and the education system.
  
  
• There is a pervasive conflation of discipline and moral policing within Malaysian schools, normalising the policing of students’ diverse behaviours and identities in the name of preserving discipline. Under the Ministry of Education (MOE) guidelines, behaviour deemed as inconsistent with certain moral norms is punished alongside harmful or criminal behaviours such as vandalism and bullying. This results in the targeting and punishment of a wide range of behaviours, ranging from the enforcement of patriarchal and binary dress codes to the shaming of consensual sexual relationships between adolescents to the repression of diverse forms of religious and cultural expression.
  
  
• Moral policing is often arbitrary and idiosyncratic, heavily reliant on the personal values and beliefs of school principals and teachers. The broad powers granted to principals, teachers and schools to determine and enforce school rules under the Disciplinary Regulation Act (1959) further create a ripe environment for policing of gender, religion, and socially acceptable norms with impunity.
  
  
• Finally, the arbitrary nature of moral policing results in significantly varied sanctions against students who do not conform to the perceived societal moral standards. These sanctions can range from formally sanctioned measures such as corporal punishment and discipline (including caning, fines, suspension and expulsion) to informal measures like social ostracisation (such as isolation, exclusion, and denial of opportunities) and verbal or psychological violence (including shaming, name-calling, labelling, and microaggressions). Other forms of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment and sexual violence, are also used to enforce compliance with or punish those who do not conform to certain patriarchal norms.
  

The report concludes that moral policing not only undermines a sense of self and agency among students but also perpetuates a cycle of unquestioning obedience and a culture of impunity that extends far beyond the classroom.