Saving Sufiah's privates

My little opinion on the recent brouhaha regarding former child prodigy Sufiah Yusof.

A little bit of background shall we? Sufiah Yusof was born in Britain in 1985 to a Malaysian mother and a Pakistani father so that makes her British (i.e NOT Malaysian). She first made headlines in 1997 when she gained entry into St. Hilda's College, Oxford University to study mathematics at the age of 13. In 2001, she ran away from her student flat in Oxford, after taking her final examination paper for the academic year claiming her parents had placed her under intolerable pressure to succeed. She was found by police 12 days later working as a waitress at a Bournemouth internet cafe but refused to return to her parents, who had given up their jobs to educate their five children at home. Miss Yusof was taken in by a foster family and shortly afterwards sent a searing email to her parents, documenting the "living hell" she said her father had created.
She wrote: "I've finally had enough of 15 years of physical and emotional abuse."

She accused her "controlling and bullying" father of forcing her to work in the cold to aid concentration and added that she never wanted to see him again. Two years later, she returned to Oxford to complete her undergraduate master, but failed to finish the year. In 2004, she married trainee lawyer Jonathan Marshall, but the couple divorced 13 months later.
In January this year, the Daily Mail revealed that her father Farooq had been remanded in custody after admitting sexually assaulting two girls, both aged 15. Farooq, 50, was sentenced to 18 months at Coventry Crown Court.

On 31st March, popular U.K tabloid magazine, News of the World reported that Sufiah is now earning a living as a £130 an hour prostitute. A news that had definitely sent shock and ripples across the globe including her other homeland Malaysia. The Malaysian Government who suddenly felt obliged, started a campaign to "Save Suffiah" the British so called mathematic genius. The effort is going to be championed by Dr Mashitah Ibrahim.

First and foremost, I'm don't want to be judging a person I hardly knew and have never met. God knows what this young woman has gone through all these years to end up that way. What perplexes me is the effort made by certain quarters who purportedly wanted to save this girl. Has it ever occurred to you that she chooses to live that way by her own free will and not forced into it by anyone? With her amazing brain she should be able to make money any way she wants but instead she chooses to be a call girl. Life is about making choices and Sufiah made hers. Anyway, £130 - that's pretty good maths if you ask me. For just 3 hours a day she could earn £390 a day (that's around RM2700), nearly as much as a British Member of Parliament earns in an hour.

And now they want to save her. What irks me is, why is the government so concerned about Sufiah's welfare? She is not even a Malaysian! Newly minted minister in the Prime Minister's Department, Dato Zaid Hamidi said,she need to be saved because she is a pride of our nation, Uh hello, she is British and she screwed up! End of story. If they are really concerned about saving women like her, why not start by visiting Lorong Hj. Taib, the back alleys of Petaling Street and a few dozen more places like that around the country? Most of them are in fact Malaysians and unlike Sufiah, they were forced into prostitution by life's hardship and yet to find a way out. Just because they didn't enrol into Oxford, are these woman not worth saving?

I think they government should really get their priorities right. Before we attempt to save Sufiah or any other foreign prostitutes abroad, we should really concentrate our efforts on saving all Malaysian women from prostitutions regardless of age, race or religion.