SINGAPORE, Dec 7 — A 60-year-old man pleaded guilty today to two charges of committing incest on his intellectually disabled adult daughter.
Two other similar charges will be taken into consideration for the Singaporean’s sentencing, which is scheduled for December 23.
The man’s name cannot be published in order to protect the identity of his 28-year-old daughter.
What happened
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Yvonne Poon told the court that the victim, who is a volunteer for a welfare organisation for the intellectually disabled, was born out of wedlock and grew up in another country in the care of her maternal grandmother.
Her biological parents married each other in 2002, and she met her father for the first time only around 2008 when she was about 14 years.
Between 2008 and 2014, they saw each other once every two years before she moved to Singapore to be with both her parents around the middle of 2014, when she was 19 years old.
The sexual encounters between the man and his daughter began sometime around Chinese New Year in 2019, when the older man showed his genitals to his daughter, then aged 24, and instructed her to touch him inappropriately, which she did.
DPP Poon said that he did this under the pretext of educating his daughter sexually so that she would not fall pregnant.
Following that incident, the prosecutor said that the accused went on to engage in sex acts with the victim on at least four occasions.
“Most instances began with the accused scolding the victim for unrelated matters — for instance, because she accidentally broke the accused’s weight set while exercising, or because she brought home a used face mask that she had found outside,” DPP Poon said.
The victim then performed sex acts as a means of apologising to him and in the hopes of appeasing his anger, she added.
These acts typically occurred in the evening, when the victim’s mother was working, and her father told her not to tell anyone about them.
In another instance, which took place around March or April in 2019, the victim was telling her father that she felt physically attracted to members of a Korean boy band, which aroused the man.
He began showing his daughter pornographic videos and told her “that is how people engage in sex acts”, DPP Poon said.
After that, he again told his daughter to engage in sex acts with him and she reluctantly complied.
The court heard that the accused told his daughter that he was “teaching her so that she could get experience in sexual matters, and that if she serviced other men outside, they might harm her instead”.
DPP Poon said that in early April 2020 when father and daughter were eating together at home, she dipped her own spoon into a shared dish of food instead of using the serving spoon.
“The accused became furious and shouted at the victim about her lack of hygiene. Out of anger, he refused to talk to her. The victim felt very sad,” she added.
Later that day, the woman apologised to her father and the two engaged in a sexual act. After that, he again told his daughter to keep it a secret.
DPP Poon said that the woman disliked what she did with her father and felt that he was asking her to do it more frequently.
She eventually confided in her training officer at the welfare organisation where she volunteered about her father’s sexual abuse of her. The man was arrested by the police on April 6, 2020.
DPP Poon said that after the matter came to the attention of the police, the woman was taken to stay at a home for disabled persons, where she still is.
A psychiatric report from the Institute of Mental Health showed that the woman’s intellectual disability rendered her dependent on others.
Her interactions with her biological parents resulted in a pattern of learned behaviour of submitting to them out of a fear of punishment “that is not in keeping with developmentally normal peers of the same age”, the report added.
The report also stated that the woman understood that her father’s actions were not right, and was able to state to him that she was not keen to participate in the acts of abuse.
However, it said that she struggled to protect herself from being subjected to these acts at the time, “given her concrete problem-solving ability and dependency on her parents”, which were a direct result of her intellectual disability.
A concrete thinker generally refers to someone who interprets things literally.
‘Tainted relationship’
DPP Poon told the court that she was seeking a jail sentence of between three and 3.5 years, and four and 4.5 years respectively for the two charges to which the man pleaded guilty.
She added that both sentences should run consecutively, rather than concurrently, or it will “essentially grant the accused a free pass for one of his two offences”.
A concurrent sentence, she said, “significantly undermines the principles of deterrence and retribution, and leads to a sentence that is grossly lenient when viewed against the backdrop of his offending”.
DPP Poon said: “This was a completely normal father-child relationship.
"What the accused had done was to taint this relationship by introducing the sexual element, whether through the showing of pornography to his intellectually disabled daughter, or to proffer his own genitalia to her for learning purposes, as he says.”
She added that this was an element of grooming and an element of sexuality that would not have been present in their relationship before the man’s actions.
The man’s lawyers, Joshua Tong and Chloe Chen of Kalco Law LLC, sought a jail term of three years for their client.
Tong said that his client had spent a long time reflecting on his actions, and that he was not contesting any elements of the charge.
“We simply ask for a fair sentence in this case, that is proportionate to his culpability,” the lawyer added.
District Judge Toh Han Li, who presided over the hearing, said that he wished to take time to consider the appropriate sentence.
The man remains out on bail of S$20,000 (RM65,000).
Anyone found guilty of committing incest can be punished with a jail term of up to five years. — TODAY
