A 54-year-old man was sentenced in the High Court to 22 years of jail for two charges each of aggravated sexual assault by penetration and attempted sexual assault by penetration.
Another seven siimilar charged, which includes aggravated molestation, were considered during sentencing.
The man, who has a son of his own, began targeting his nephew when the boy was only five years old.
His sexual acts aggravated over the next five years.
Truth revealed
His crimes were uncovered four years later when the boy was caught taking an upskirt video when he was in Secondary 1.
He broke down during a counselling session and revealed to his counselor that he had been sexually abused by his uncle.
The accused’s wife is the victim’s maternal aunt, and the couple have a 13-year-old son.
Both the accused and the victim cannot be named because of a court order protecting the victim’s identity.
Sequence of events
The boy’s biological parents divorced when he was born and his grandmother took care of him.
Living together with the grandmother and the victim was the accused and his wife, who slept in the master bedroom, while the victim slept in the living room with the accused’s son and their grandmother.
The accused worked as a technician and started exploiting the boy sexually in 2010 by touching his buttocks over his shorts.
The victim laughed, thinking that his uncle was being playful, and because he didn’t know this was wrong.
The man then frequently touched the boy’s buttocks whenever they were alone.
Then when the victim started primary school, the accused escalated his acts and started rubbing his private parts against the boy.
He subsequently forced the boy to give him oral sex and eventually attempted to sodomize the boy.
When the victim was in Secondary 1, he realized his uncle’s actions were wrong when he attended sex education classes in 2017.
Then in 2018, the victim was caught filming up someone’s skirt and subsequently referred to the school counselor.
During the counselling session, the boy broke down and revealed his abuse.
The school’s management and police were then informed.
The boy was then assessed by a psychiatrist who reported that the victim felt distressed when detailing the abuse.
Post-traumatic stress symptoms were also present in 2018 but have since improved.
Sending out a strong message
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Gregory Gan said: “The psychiatric report further disclosed that the victim felt some anger towards the accused in respect of the sexual abuse, but he also felt guilt towards the accused’s son for the distress caused by the incident — that is, the reporting of the sexual abuse.”
Referring to the aggravating factors that included a gross abuse of trust, sexual groooming and exploitation of an vulnerable victim; DPPs Gan, Wong Kok Weng and Michelle Lu sought the sentence imposed with one more year in lieu of caning.
They said: “This case strikes at the moral fabric of society… The sentence imposed on the accused must send out a strong message that society will not tolerate such wanton abuse of a young and vulnerable child, and that any offender who perpetrates such abuse will be met with the strongest disapprobation from the courts.”
The accused’s lawyers, Mr Mohamed Baiross, Mr Ashwin Ganapathy and Mr Norhakim Md Shah from IRB Law, said that their client’s relationship with his family wasn’t “adversely affected” despite his crimes.
They revealed that his wife still visits him in remand every month, and their son tags along during the school holidays.
His lawyers sought 20 years’s imprisonment with no additional jail time in lieu of caning, noting that it was by no means “a slap on the wrist”.
Justice Valerie Thean acknowledged that the sentence was long by itself and agreed that no extra jail time was warranted.
For sexual assault by penetration of a minor under 14, the man could have been jailed up to 20 years and given at least 12 strokes of the cane.