This article is written by Vijeyatharzhini Bathmanathan, assistant secretary, Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development, Malaysia

This is the story of a pilot project that took seven long years to finally launch, by a policy officer who had no clue what she was doing.

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It's the story of how, sometimes, we have to make sacrifices to make headway, and it's the story of how challenging it can be to work across government silos.

A good idea that hadn’t worked

The story begins in 2017 when I joined the Policy and Strategic Planning Division of the Ministry of Women, Family and Community Development as an assistant secretary in the Children’s Policy Unit.

When I joined the team, they were working on implementing a diversion pilot project for children in conflict with the law for minor offences. Diversion is essentially a mechanism for promoting a social welfare response, rather than a criminal justice response, to low-risk children who commit non-serious offences.

Diversion has been proven to be more cost effective than charging children to court and sentencing them to juvenile institutions

The team had worked to engage the stakeholders since 2012 through a series of seminars and workshops with technical support from Unicef Malaysia. They had made a lot of headway, but weren’t successful in getting the pilot off the ground. I ‘inherited’ this task at the end of 2017, as an officer who just joined the civil service and had to google what diversion of child offenders meant.

Put simply, the diversion pilot project aimed to divert some children from the court system by using the Deputy Public Prosecutor’s power to decide whether or not an offender should be charged. As part of the project, the child would instead be given a warning or offered an intervention programme, depending on their offence.

Diversion has been proven to be more cost effective than charging children to court and sentencing them to juvenile institutions. It has also been proven to reduce reoffending. I found that this had been done quite successfully in many countries, and Malaysia was the only Asean country that had not implemented any form of diversion.

Meeting the villains

So we come to the villains in the story. I quickly realised we hadn’t been successful all these years because, although we were spearheading this project, the main implementing agencies were the Police and the Deputy Public Prosecutors. And it seemed that they weren’t too happy with implementing this pilot.

I thought they were simply afraid of change, didn’t want the extra workload, and felt that child offenders should be punished as harshly as adults. Bear in mind, my only references came from reading years and years of files and boring minutes of meetings from the first years of the project’s life.

And then I attended my first meeting with all the agencies involved. My main takeaway from that meeting was that everyone was angry. By my second meeting, I saw that they were actually frustrated.

All the agencies at the table had been trying to resolve their differences for years. They had spent years looking at best practices around the world and trying to adapt those to our current legal framework. Everyone really wanted this to work, they had just not been able to find the right compromise between the implementation model that my Ministry was pushing for, which everyone agreed was ideal, and their own internal policies and procedures. I realised that, in fact, there were no villains in our story. But we had some very dedicated officers who weren’t willing to back down.

Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good

I then took the decision that I wouldn’t interfere in areas that were clearly another agency’s jurisdiction. Needless to say this was an easy decision for a junior officer in her first placement.

Now you are probably wondering what the various stakeholders felt was so unimportant that they weren’t willing to compromise. For the Deputy Public Prosecutors, it was the criteria of eligibility for diversion. For the police, it was their internal procedures relating to chain of command and internal timelines. These were important for them to feel comfortable in exercising their power of discretion within the current legal framework.

When things begin to become a tug of war of “us vs them”, always take a step back to look at the issue with fresh eyes

Finally in September 2019, the National Cabinet approved the diversion pilot project in three districts. As of July 2020, more than 200 children had been issued a warning or referred to an intervention programme. We continue monitoring the pilot along with the implementing agencies.

It’s not the most ideal model, but at least it is no longer simply a concept on paper. Now, with the pilot running, the agencies themselves are more open to tweaking the model as we go along. We have also gained their buy-in towards amending relevant laws and implementing diversion for children nationwide in future.

Being junior can be your superpower

Often, agencies are merely defending their own policies or abiding by existing guidelines. Pushing to do something outside of those policy frameworks takes great political will. In the absence of that, civil servants have to pick their battles.

If you find yourself in this situation, break the battle up into bite sized pieces whenever possible. Decide to either begin with what you can, focus efforts on sensitising your stakeholders, or perhaps concentrate on expanding the policy framework.

When things begin to become a tug of war of “us vs them”, always take a step back to look at the issue with fresh eyes. Sometimes the answer is so simple, it takes the most junior person in the team to see it. – Vijeyatharzhini Bathmanathan

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