SINGAPORE, Dec 5 — A 50-year-old man repeatedly raped his stepdaughter over a span of six years, first committing the act when she was 11.
When she finally confronted him about it after turning 17, he slapped her and said that her stepbrother would be left without a father if anything were to happen to him.
In the High Court on Friday (Dec 2), the man was sentenced to 28 years’ jail after pleading guilty to two charges of aggravated statutory rape.
A total of 19 other similar charges, including rape, outrage of modesty and sexual assault by penetration were taken into consideration.
The man cannot be named due to a court order to protect the victim’s identity.
The court heard that the victim’s mother had divorced the victim’s biological father in 2006 and remarried the accused two years later in Singapore.
They lived in a two-bedroom flat in Singapore and had a son together in 2009.
In the same year, the victim’s mother found a job here that required her to work in various shifts. Her night shifts would begin from 7.30pm or 11.30pm and continue until the next morning.
The victim, who is 20 this year, was born in Malaysia and lived there with her maternal grandmother until she turned 10 in 2012.
Sometime in 2012, the victim moved to Singapore and started living together with her mother and stepbrother, as well as the man and his mother, court documents stated.
The man’s mother occupied one bedroom, while the victim’s family occupied the master bedroom, where they would sleep on two mattresses on the floor.
The victim shared a mattress with her stepbrother, while the man and his wife shared the other mattress.
His sexual crimes began a year later, in 2013, after the victim turned 11. The court heard that the man started to touch her inappropriately in bed.
He would sometimes exchange places with his son on the mattress in order to sleep next to the victim when his wife was working the night shift.
This was the sleeping arrangement on the night of the first offence that year, when his wife was not at home.
Waiting until the girl and her stepbrother had gone to bed, the man covered her face with a blanket before raping her.
Court documents showed that he would cover her face with a blanket whenever he did this because he did not want her to see that he was sexually abusing her.
Throughout the assault, the victim pretended to be asleep because she was afraid the man would hurt her if she retaliated.
On another night sometime in 2014, after the victim turned 12, the man repeated the acts of sexual abuse and rape on his stepdaughter.
The court heard that between 2013 and 2015, the man would also make his stepdaughter perform oral sex on him.
He would do so by asking her to play a “guessing game” with him, where he would blindfold her with a towel and ask her to guess what he put into her mouth.
‘Warned her to think carefully’
In 2019, when the victim was around 17, she began resisting the man’s advances by opening her eyes to look at him whenever he tried to touch her inappropriately.
The court heard that around March that year, the man sent a message to the victim that said: “I want you to be my lady forever”.
When she replied that she was his daughter, he reminded her that they had different surnames.
He also threatened to divorce her mother if she told her about the abuse.
On one night in March 2019, the man stopped his attempt at sexually assaulting her after she woke up and looked at him.
After she confronted him later, he claimed that “he was merely playing with her”.
Her mother, who overheard the confrontation, decided not to report the matter but warned him not to do it again, court documents stated.
The girl eventually told her boyfriend on September 11, 2019, about the full extent of the man’s sexual abuse over the years. She did so because she felt guilty about hiding these from him after getting together sometime in 2019.
He was the first person who learnt of the abuse and later told the victim’s mother about it.
When her mother confronted the man, he denied his actions.
The next day, before the victim’s tuition class, the man decided to meet her in public to warn her against reporting him.
He cautioned her to “think carefully” before saying anything and said that her stepbrother would be left without a father if anything were to happen to him.
When the victim said that he had raped her, the man reacted by slapping her and did so again at least four times over the course of their argument.
He added that if she “wanted this family”, they could still be a happy family and the decision laid with her.
He also suggested that she could tell her mother that what she had said was not true, and they could be a “happy family again”.
When the victim told her mother that he had slapped her, they decided to seek help at the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) the next day.
They were later referred to the police and the man was arrested that day.
‘Caused nightmares’
Deputy Public Prosecutors Gordon Oh and Tessa Tan sought a sentence of at least 29 years’ jail, including an extra 12 months’ jail in lieu of the proposed 24 strokes of the cane.
Offenders who are above 50 cannot be caned by law.
“It is clear from the victim impact statement that years of abuse at the hands of the accused have deeply traumatised and wounded her,” DPP Oh said.
He added that the incidents have caused her nightmares, where she would wake up crying in the middle of the night thinking that the man was on top of her.
“She even thought of committing suicide because of what the accused did to her and did actually commit self-harm by biting herself and scratching herself with a mechanical pencil.”
The man’s defence counsel, Teo Choo Kee of CK Teo and Co, said during his client’s mitigation plea that the case “is not the worst of its lot”.
He sought a sentence of 24 years, stating that the prosecution’s proposed sentence amounts to “more than a quarter of a normal lifetime”.
Justice Pang Khang Chau sentenced the man to 28 years’ jail after considering several aggravating factors such as the man’s abuse of a position of trust, as well as the age and vulnerability of the victim.
For each offence of aggravated rape, the man could have been jailed for up to 20 years and fined or caned. — TODAY
