SINGAPORE, June 17 — A 26-year-old man was sentenced to 12 months’ jail today for hounding an ex-lover for more than three years, making him the first to be sentenced for unlawful stalking under the Protection from Harassment Act (POHA).

The man, who cannot be named to protect the victim’s identity, was convicted of unlawful stalking under the POHA, criminally intimidating the victim, and committing a rash act that endangered the victim’s brother’s life.

Another similar charge of unlawful stalking was taken into consideration for his sentencing.

The court heard that in 2013, the man had a brief sexual relationship with the victim, who was 16 then. Both of them were classmates at the Institute of Technical Education.

After they broke up, the offender continued his romantic advances. He insisted on accompanying her to and from school every day and threatened to inform her parents about their sexual relationships if she did not go out with him.

The victim confided in a lecturer who intervened and the man dropped out of school. From then on, he held on to the belief that the victim had ruined his life as her complaint drove him to drop out.

But he continued hounding her, making repeated demands for her to send him nude photos of herself. When she blocked his number on her phone, the man printed fliers showing her nude photos, accompanied by harassing messages that she had “messed up his life”. He put these fliers up at public areas of her block and dropped them into letter boxes too.

On one occasion, he was caught in the act by the victim’s brother, but the man drove off while the latter sat on the front bonnet of the car, causing him to be flung off. The brother scraped his limbs, chin and scalp and suffered minor head injuries.

Despite being prosecuted for this act late last year, the man continued pestering the victim, forcing her to write a letter pleading for leniency, or he would post more nude photos online.

When the victim asked him to stop, she was forced to “apologise” by writing “I promise not to rebel again” 200 times.

Even after the victim went to polytechnic last year, the harassment did not stop. The man uploaded obscene photographs of her to her school’s social media platforms to threaten her into talking to him.

In meting out the sentence, district judge Lim Keng Yeow said the man’s acts were not only “prolonged and unrelenting”, but also “acute and vicious”.

They were aimed at keeping the victim trapped under his power so she would do his bidding and was calculated to cause as much embarrassment and inflict as much humiliation as possible, said DJ Lim.

The judge also noted that he gave due consideration to the Institute of Mental Health report but could not attach “significant mitigatory weight” to his personality traits and persistent depressive disorder, which was reported to be of low severity.

The POHA was passed in Parliament in March 2014 to protect the public at large against what some describe as a “social scourge”.

The maximum punishment for unlawful stalking under POHA is a jail term of 12 months and a S$5,000 (RM15,198) fine. — TODAY