SINGAPORE: A man was sentenced to 20 years’ jail on Monday (Aug 21) for raping the underage daughter of his girlfriend-turned-wife repeatedly since she was 12.
The girl’s mother saw a video on his laptop of the pair engaged in intercourse and confronted her daughter before cutting off contact with her in 2013.
It was only in 2017 that the victim told her mother that the man had been engaging in sex acts with her since she was in Primary 6, and lodged a police report.
The man, now 50, pleaded guilty to one count of rape and two counts of carnal connection with a minor. Another six charges were taken into consideration.
THE CASE
The offender met the victim’s mother, now 56, in 2002 when the woman was visiting her brother at a halfway house.
The pair began dating soon after. At the time, the woman had four children from a previous marriage. The victim was her second child, and the offender took a special liking to her.
He would advise her on school issues, take her out for meals and buy her gifts, including a handphone that he used to communicate with her.
He began sending sexual messages to the girl, who was between 11 and 12 at the time.
In 2003, the man went to the girl’s flat while her mother was working a night shift. He performed a sex act on the girl, and told her that he would be her boyfriend. He also told her to keep what they had done a secret.
As the victim was fond of the offender, she agreed, said the prosecution. She was in Primary 6 at the time.
The man continued to engage in sexual acts with the girl until 2011. The first time he raped her was in July, 2004, a month after he married her mother.
The girl was 12 at the time. They continued to engage in intercourse about three times a week until 2008, when the offender went to jail for other crimes, the prosecution said.
That same year, the girl left the country to study overseas. They continued to write letters to each other while the offender was in prison.
In 2011, the man was released from jail, and the girl, who was about 20 years old, took a six-month leave of absence from her studies. She returned to Singapore to visit the man, and they continued to engage in sexual intercourse.
However, in end-2011, after the victim left Singapore to continue studying, she cut off contact with the offender.
She felt guilty “about having a sexual relationship with her mother’s husband and wanted to move on with her life”, the prosecutors said.
The offences went undiscovered until 2013, when the victim’s mother was looking through the offender’s laptop. She discovered a 2011 video of her husband engaging in sexual intercourse with her daughter.
The woman confronted her daughter in an email, and the victim admitted to it and begged for forgiveness, but her mother stopped communicating with her.
In February 2017, the victim returned to Singapore and visited her mother. She explained that the offender had began engaging in sexual acts with her in 2003, when she was in Primary 6. She also told her mother that she would be lodging a police report against the offender, which she did that same month.
SENTENCING ARGUMENTS
On Monday, Deputy Public Prosecutors Sheldon Lim and Sruthi Boppana sought between 18 and 24 years’ jail for the man.
Mr Lim read out a long list of the man’s previous convictions, which were mostly drug-related.
He pointed to the man’s abuse of position, breach of trust, premeditation and rape of a vulnerable victim. Not only had he exposed the victim to the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, “severe harm” was done to the victim, he said.
He highlighted the man’s persistence in committing the offences and pointed to how the man’s “selfish and predatory actions” tainted the victim’s childhood “irrevocably”.
“The burden of keeping their taboo ‘relationship’ secret was isolating, and imposed on the victim a toll that no child should have to bear,” said Mr Lim.
He said that years of being manipulated by a father figure made it difficult for the victim to trust others, and that her relationship with her family was “irretrievably shattered” when her mother discovered the truth.
“The accused’s actions in this case fractured the family,” Mr Lim said. “It prompted the victim to uproot herself entirely from Singapore, to distance herself from the painful memories of the past.”
He said the offender had normalised sexual topics with the victim and primed her for sexual activity in an escalating series of sexual acts that culminated in rape. This is a paradigm example of sexual grooming of a child, said Mr Lim.
He said the victim, as a child, was “quite understandably” unable to withstand the man’s “practised grooming”.
While the man had kept quiet about his past offences, hoping they would stay buried forever, accounting is due, concluded Mr Lim.
The man’s lawyers, Mr Ashwin Ganapathy and Ms A Meenakshi from IRB Law, asked instead for 13-and-a-half years’ jail.
Mr Ganapathy said his client is no longer married and lives with his elderly mother. While he has past convictions, none of them are sex-related, he said.
Mr Ganapathy argued that the jail term asked for by the prosecution was excessive. While he conceded that there was sexual grooming, he said it was “not as profound” as the grooming in other cases.
He said his client is “genuinely remorseful” for the anguish he caused the victim and his family.
“He also accepts that he was the sole reason for the pain and suffering caused to the victim,” said Mr Ganapathy.