A 50-year-old man in Singapore pleaded guilty to 2 charges of aggravated statutory rape, with another 19 charges being taken into consideration during his sentencing, according to TODAY.
He had raped his then-11-year-old stepdaughter for 6 years.
He was sentenced to 28 years imprisonment, and he cannot be named due to a court order protecting the identity of the victim.
What happened?
The victim’s mother married the man in 2008 and they lived in a 2-room flat, before the couple had a son of their own in 2009.
The mother then found a job where she worked the night shifts from 7.30pm or 11.30pm until the next morning.
The victim lived in Malaysia with her grandmother until she turned 10 in 2012 and moved to Singapore to live with her mother and stepfather, stepbrother and stepgrandmother.
The stepgrandmother slept in one room while the rest of the family slept in the master bedroom, with 2 mattresses on the floor that was shared by the victim and her stepbrother.
The man then started touching the victim in bed after she turned 11 in 2013, and would swap places with his son to sleep beside her while his wife was working the night shift.
He waited until his son and the victim went to bed before covering her face with a blanket so that she couldn’t see him, and raped her.
The girl pretended to be asleep while she was being raped because she was afraid of being harmed by her stepfather if she fought back.
The man then raped her again on another night in 2014 when she was 12, and between 2013 and 2015, he would make the victim perform oral intercourse on him.
He blindfolded her with a towel under the guise of playing a “guessing game” and asked her to guess what he put in her mouth.
After the girl turned 17 in 2019, she started to resist the man’s advances towards her.
In March 2019, he texted her saying that he wanted her to be his “lady forever”, but she told him that she was his daughter, to which he replied that they had different surnames and threatened to divorce her mother if she spilled the truth.
Later that month, he stopped his assault on her after she woke up and confronted him, to which he claimed that he was only playing with her.
The victim’s mother overheard the confrontation but didn’t report him, only warning him instead about repeating his actions.
The girl then eventually told her boyfriend about what her stepfather had been doing to her on 11 September 2019, and he then told her mother about it.
The mother then confronted her husband who denied any wrongdoing. and he then warned the victim the next day against reporting him, telling her to “think carefully” and said that her stepbrother won’t have a father if anything happened to him.
The victim then said that he had raped her, to which the man then slapped her at least 4 times as the argument escalated.
The man then told her that they could go back to being a happy family again if she told her mother that what she said was not true.
The victim then told her mother that she was slapped by her stepfather, and they then went to the Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) for help the next day, where they were then referred to the police.
The man was subsequently arrested on the same day.