He was speaking at this year’s Sexual Crime Awareness Seminar, which was held at the Police Cantonment Complex in conjunction with International Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
This initiative comes on top of others announced at last year’s inaugural seminar, such as the formation of the police’s Sexual Crime and Family Violence Command comprising officers who are specifically trained to handle such cases.
The command falls under the Criminal Investigation Department and became operational on Apr 3.
Later this month, the One-Stop Abuse Forensic Examination Centre (OneSAFE Centre) will open with an “enhanced, improved design”, Mr Shanmugam added.
The environment will provide victims with more privacy and comfort during the investigation process, and two medical rooms have been added to increase the capacity for forensic medical examination.
The police are also working closely with stakeholders so that more young victims can benefit from multi-disciplinary interviews, he said.
These interviews combine what used to be separate interviews by different parties — such as child protection officers and doctors — into a coordinated interview led by the police, reducing the need for repeated recounting of incidents.
Mr Shanmugam said in his speech: “There will always be situations where we can learn better; we will never get this completely right, because any organisation that has a large number of people dealing with a large number of different types of cases, with human agency, even with the best will in the world, there will be errors, if not something else.
“And we will just have to continuously learn, internalise and improve.”
He pointed out that in 2019, the Ministry of Home Affairs introduced amendments to the Penal Code to deter sexual crimes facilitated by technology. This included making voyeurism a specific offence.
Penalties were also increased for crimes committed against people in close or intimate relationships with their aggressors.
This year, MHA will table the Online Criminal Harms Act in parliament to more effectively deal with online activities that would be criminal in nature if they had taken place in the physical realm, Mr Shanmugam added.
In a press release, the police said that sexual crimes continue to be a concern in Singapore.
About 9,630 reports of sexual assault – including rape, sexual assault by penetration, outrage of modesty, and sexual crime involving children and vulnerable victims – were lodged between 2019 and 2022.
Of these, 1,096 were allegedly committed by family members or relatives.
Meanwhile, molestation cases rose from 1,474 in 2021 to 1,610 last year. Almost 60 per cent of the cases involved culprits known to the victim.