KUALA LUMPUR: Her own painful struggles and childhood peers' experiences drove Nadia (not her real name) to pursue a career in law with a single mission — to protect children from sexual predators.
As an activist, she works tirelessly to help others, but nothing prepared her for the heartbreaking reality of her own daughters falling victim to a "predator".
"I studied law, but I failed to protect my children. That is the most painful thing for me.
"I failed as a mother," said the mother of five in an exclusive interview with the New Straits Times.
Nadia, a successful businesswoman, felt compelled to share her struggles with her two daughters — one of whom developed schizophrenia after years of internal battles stemming from exposure to pornographic content at a tender age.
"I only knew about their addiction and internal struggles last year. Worse, it was on my eldest's 14th birthday.
"I was picking her up from school and she told me, 'Ayah selalu tengok benda ni depan kakak.' (Dad always watches this thing [porn] in front of me.) But I couldn't understand it," she said.
When Nadia's eldest daughter was just 9, she stumbled upon her father's pornographic collection online. Ironically, he often preached against watching such explicit content.
The shocking discovery forced the girl to grapple with an intense internal conflict at a tender age, leaving scars that profoundly changed her behaviour.
As she had access to her father's collection, she also developed an addiction to the explicit content, causing her life to spiral downwards.
Nadia's once happy and carefree daughter became secretive and rebellious, and she started distancing herself from the family.
"She was struggling internally, questioning why her father's actions didn't match his words," she said, adding that her daughter developed anxiety that turned into depression.
As she became a loner, Nadia said, her daughter turned to an artificial intelligence (AI) application to satisfy her curiosity about sex.
The application provided an interactive experience where she could explore and ask questions in private.
However, without parental supervision, the whole "technological experience" went awry when she began treating the machine as an intimate partner. She even substituted the role of her father with an AI avatar.
"Once I managed to gain her trust, she told me everything, including how she would talk to an AI avatar that was soothing and able to replace the 'love' that she didn't get from her father.
"The AI app also helped her explore more of what she saw. She wanted to know how it felt, and her conversation with the avatar was so deep, it was as if she was talking to a real intimate person.
"In short, she was groomed by the AI," she said.
Things worsened when Nadia found a love letter her daughter had written to her father.
"I was terrified when I read it. The letter had words and expressions that were so explicit and inappropriate that it felt like reading content meant for adults.
"It made me physically ill. I couldn't get out of bed for three days," Nadia said.
The letter, she said, was filled with explicit language that her daughter picked up from interacting with the AI app.
Her second daughter, only 11 at the time, also became addicted to the AI app.
Her eldest daughter's desperate attempt to make sense of the adult content she saw eventually led her to experience hallucinations and suffer severe mental health struggles.
"She couldn't control her feelings after seeing all the pornographic content. This curiosity, combined with her inability to explore things in reality, pushed her into hallucinating and eventually led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia," Nadia said.
She believed that her daughters' early exposure to pornographic material, combined with a lack of understanding about sex, made them uncomfortable in simple interactions like receiving affection from their father.
On her husband's problem, Nadia said she confronted him about his habits multiple times, but was always met with denial.
Her daughters' experiences ultimately became the reason she sought a divorce.
However, Nadia's personal experiences were not only limited to her daughters' struggles.
"When I was 10, I had a 7-year-old neighbour who studied the Quran with me, but we didn't know that she had been molested by her father, until the news came out in the newspaper.
"I was so shocked. I couldn't believe she suffered for so long but didn't know how to seek help, or maybe she thought her father was just showing affection.
"Then, when I entered secondary school, I had another friend — a top student — who became a victim of abuse by a relative.
"She would tremble every time she had to return to her hometown, but had no one to turn to, not even her mother, because she feared that no one would believe her.
"She was left to endure this suffering for years. Witnessing these experiences inspired me to fight hard to become a lawyer so that I could fight for victims like them," she said.
Nadia said while it was difficult to control children's use of communication devices, parents must earn their children's trust and maintain open communication.
"You can't be too strict or your children will drift away. Once they do, it's hard to bring them back because the AI or their peers (strangers on social media) are nicer, and they will become a stronger source of influence than a parent," she said.
On the bright side, Nadia revealed that her daughters' mental health had improved significantly since her divorce, thanks to efforts to rebuild trust and communication within the family.