It would be easy to say that the distribution of Elizabeth Wong's private photos was a gross invasion of her privacy. Scrape beneath the simplistic judgement, however, and many more questions emerge: What is private and public? Who defines the private sphere? What moral justification is there for the private life to become public knowledge?

These questions of consent, public morality and gender were explored during a forum titled Hidden Cameras: The Politics of Gender and Public Morality, held at Bangsar Lutheran Church on March 6.

The panelists comprised of Masjaliza Hamzah, Programme Manager, Sisters-In-Islam, Dr. Sharon Bong, senior lecturer in Gender and Creative Writing, Monash University; Andrew Khoo from the Malaysian Bar Human Rights Committee, and Irene Fernandez, Director of Tenaganita.

From an Islamic point of view, Masjaliza said that Islam has much respect for personal dignity and privacy, but because of the different interpretations of the Muslim holy texts there is a disjuncture between what is said and the reality of the situation.

“In Malaysia, because Islam is understood in a particular way, and because certain laws have been codified, that allows for these kind of abuses and intrusion into the private lives of people to take place,” she said.

Masjaliza on Islam's view of privacy

A common theme was how inequalities still exist between the way men and women are regarded and policed, especially in Malaysia. Using the case of Elizabeth Wong as an example, Bong raised the point of how the single woman is seen as a threat to the normative values of marriage and family.

According to Monash's Bong, the single woman’s sexuality challenges these traditional institutions because she is not asexual; rather, she is a sexual being who has escaped the (traditionally) male control of a female’s reproductive capacity.

She also raised further questions about how the public’s reaction to Wong’s quandary would have been had circumstances been different.

“If she had given her informed consent, would that be a a problem to the people who defended her so gallantly? Secondly, if she did not already have a track record of public service, would the defenders be so quick to defend her?”

Bong on the public's reaction to Wong

Malaysian Bar's Khoo also raised the point of whose version of morality society adopts. “Our government tends to make sweeping statements, assuming they are the guardians of morality,” he said.

Besides discussing among themselves, the panelists also asked the audience about the media's role in sensationalising Wong's case.

Masjaliza commented that it was the media who actively cornered Wong into admitting that it was her in the pictures and how this raises questions about the need for media regulation in cases that involve an invasion of privacy.

The media’s choice of adjectives in describing the photographs - e.g. scandalous, indecent, etc... - was also questioned. “What you decide to call the pictures contributes to how good a copy it’s going to be,” said Khoo.

“The media has been irresponsible in the way it addressed the photo and discussed public morality," said Tenaganita's Fernandez. "The media put her on trial before any charge was there at all."

Fernandez takes the media to task

At the end of the forum, however, more questions were raised than were answered. “But this is just to show that perhaps it's not as straightforward as some of us would like to believe,” Khoo says.