SINGAPORE, Jan 27 — Under the guise of teaching her self-defence, a man told his stepdaughter to engage in a sex act with him and bite his private part during the act.
The 50-year-old Singaporean was sentenced to 10 years’ jail yesterday (January 26) after he pleaded guilty to one charge of oral rape in November last year. Two other similar charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.
The accused and the stepdaughter, who was between 16 and 17 years old at the time of the incident, cannot be named under a court order to protect the victim’s identity.
The court heard that when the victim’s mother married her stepfather in October 2017, the victim was living with her grandparents.
It was only when the victim found out that she was pregnant with her then-boyfriend’s child that her mother and her stepfather offered to care for her during her pregnancy.
The victim eventually moved into the one-room rental flat to live with her mother, her stepfather, her two step-siblings and her daughter, whom she gave birth to on April 10 in 2019.
Sometime in 2020, while everyone was asleep, the victim’s stepfather approached her and pulled her into his bedroom, where he slept alone.
There, he told the victim that he wanted to teach her how to protect herself against men and made her follow his instructions to engage in a sex act with him. He then asked her to bite his genitals.
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) J Jayaletchmi told the court that the victim said she felt helpless and complied because she felt she had no choice
The victim then asked to leave the room by pretending to be sleepy.
The stepfather also made her engage in other sex acts on two other occasions in 2020, which were the subjects of the charges taken into consideration.
Social worker informed
Sometime in late August 2021, the victim told her uncle that she was sexually abused by her stepfather.
He advised her to leave the flat with her daughter and the victim did so on Sept 6 to stay with her grandparents.
About 10 days later, the victim visited the Thye Hua Kwan Family Service Centre to seek financial assistance for herself and her daughter.
This was when she told a social worker at the centre about her stepfather’s sexual abuse and explained that she was reluctant to make a police report out of fear that he might harm her and her daughter, DPP Jayaletchmi said.
The matter was raised to child protection services on Oct 5 and a police report was filed two days later.
The stepfather was arrested on October 8.
After assessing the victim at the Institute of Mental Health, Dr Lau Boon Jia diagnosed the victim to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with the abuse having contributed greatly to the development of a major depressive disorder.
Dr Lau also observed that the victim felt very distressed and had multiple physical symptoms related to PTSD.
Psychiatric harm, abuse of trust
Seeking a jail term of between 11 and 13 years, DPP Rimplejit Kaur argued that the stepfather had committed an abuse of trust and that his act was as severe an infringement of sexual autonomy as violation through intercourse that it deserved the label of rape.
DPP Kaur added that due to his age the prosecution also sought an extra six months’ jail in lieu of the proposed 12 strokes of the cane.
Defence counsel Gregory Fong, who represented the stepfather, reiterated that severity has to play a big part in the offence and in this case, the assault took place for less than a minute.
“It was for purposes of disciplining his stepdaughter and no sexual pleasure was derived by my client as there was an element of pain rather than pleasure,” Fong said.
In delivering her judgement, Justice Hoo Sheau Peng agreed that there was psychiatric harm and an abuse of trust.
She added, however, that mitigating weight should be given to the stepfather for pleading guilty since that spared the victim from reliving the trauma, which had left a certain mental effect on the victim.
Anyone guilty of committing oral rape could be jailed for up to 20 years and fined or caned. — TODAY