SINGAPORE, July 8 — A voyeur was sentenced to a two-year mandatory treatment order on Friday (July 8), escaping jail time after a psychiatrist found that his mental illnesses made it difficult for him to resist his urges.

The 32-year-old Singaporean, who cannot be named due to a gag order to protect his victims’ identities, had gotten away with taking upskirt videos at a shopping mall in 2018 when his victim did not report him to the police.

For more than a year until his arrest in 2019, he went back to filming up women’s skirts and secretly took videos of his female colleagues in the unisex toilet at their workplace.

He also placed a pinhole camera in his in-laws’ home to film his wife’s sisters in the shower

On Friday, District Judge Shaiffudin Saruwan agreed with the prosecution’s proposal for the mandatory treatment order — a community sentencing option offered to offenders suffering from mental conditions that contributed to the offence.

Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Niranjan Ranjakunalan referred to a supplementary report prepared by psychiatrist Stephen Phang from the Institute of Mental Health (IMH).

When the accused pleaded guilty in March to three counts of insulting a woman’s modesty, the DPP had sought 16 to 20 weeks’ jail.

Dr Phang, who assessed the accused for a mandatory treatment order, stated in his report that he could have been experiencing an episode of full-blown depressive order at the time of his offences, along with his previously-diagnosed adjustment disorder with depressed mood.

This "abnormal state of a combination of psychiatric illnesses” led to the accused having "significant difficulties in resisting his deviant urges”, said Dr Phang.

The psychiatrist added that the accused’s "emotional and volitional control" was very likely to have been substantially impaired as well.

He has been making good progress in his treatment and his chances of re-offending will be diminished with proper and robust psychiatrist treatment, found Dr Phang, who has also agreed to be the accused’s treating psychiatrist.

Because of this, the prosecution did not object to a mandatory treatment order being imposed. The accused’s lawyer Wee Pan Lee agreed with this.

District Judge Shaiffudin warned the accused not to breach any of the conditions of his community sentence, as it would be revoked and he could be hauled back to court to be re-sentenced.

What happened

When the accused was arrested and examined in IMH, he had told Dr Phang that he realised taking upskirt videos "helped to alleviate his subjective sense of stress and distress” and that he would do it "almost every day” on his breaks and commutes.

He started filming up women’s skirts around December 2017 at places like a Sheng Siong supermarket outlet, an MRT station and on public buses.

One victim was a friend from university who was in the same course as him. Court documents did not name the university.

From 2018 to 2019, he also targeted his colleagues, following one into their workplace toilet and filming her relieving herself.

During investigations, he admitted that he could no longer remember the names of the colleagues he filmed. He also admitted to watching the videos in whichever cubicle he was in and masturbating.

In September 2018, a woman whom he did not know caught him trying to take an upskirt video of her at Tiong Bahru Plaza and confronted him. Ultimately, she did not report the matter to the police.

Following this incident, he then deleted all the voyeuristic videos from his mobile phone and transferred them to his laptop.

He then got married in October 2018 and visited his in-laws at their flat sometime that year, placing the pinhole camera — which was concealed within a pen — in their kitchen toilet. He hid the camera in a basket containing brushes and scrubs.

When the device stopped working, he smashed it with a hammer and discarded it.

In March 2019, he began downloading upskirt videos from the sex-themed Sammyboy online forum and amassed at least 110 such clips. He also uploaded three of his own videos to the forum.

His voyeuristic spate finally came to an end after one of his colleagues caught him filming her in the toilet on Dec 3, 2019. He had tailed her from their office to do so.

Under the Penal Code, those convicted of insulting a woman's modesty can be jailed for up to a year or fined, or be punished with both. — TODAY