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SINGAPORE: A senior professor at the Institute of Technical Education altered his laptop bag by placing mini cameras inside and toured shopping malls to film videos of women under skirts.
Chia Teck Huat, 41, who lost his job and now works as a part-time deliveryman, pleaded guilty on Thursday (October 29) to three counts of insulting a woman’s modesty, and a fourth count was taken into consideration. Similary.
The court heard that Chia bought mini cameras online and modified them so she could hide them in her laptop bag to record upskirt videos.
He would zip the bag up to make it appear to be closed, setting up the settings after a few tries with different camera positions, and he kept at least two spare cameras in his bag.
He kept the bag in his car and activated the video recording function when he wanted to film clips of women under the skirt.
“The defendants were walking through shopping malls in various parts of Singapore, such as Plaza Singapura, ION Orchard, Tampines Mall and Changi City Point, looking for middle-aged office ladies in short skirts,” said Assistant District Attorney Kathy Chu.
He would later review the clips and remove any footage that did not capture a woman’s underwear, and he would copy the other files to his personal electronic devices, organizing them by date and tagging them in order.
He did it between July 2017 and October 2017, until a man caught him taking upskirt videos at Daiso in Plaza Singapura on October 23, 2017.
Police officers arrested Chia that day and confiscated her modified laptop bag and other devices. They also raided his home and seized other devices.
A total of 362 videos were retrieved from their devices, with 335 unidentified women filmed in 335 of the clips. The remaining 27 videos could not be played.
Chu asked for at least 40 weeks in jail, citing the high degree of planning and premeditation and the multiple victims.
HE HAD “DREADING STRESS AND ANXIETY”: DEFENSE
Defense attorneys Ravinderpal Singh, Joshua Tong and Justin Ng asked instead for 24 weeks in jail. They said Chia had been working as a full professor at ITE since 2012, but now works as a part-time deliveryman.
He married in 2011, but the union was “fraught with difficulties”, including health problems. Chia’s mother suffered from stage 4 cancer between 2016 and 2017, and the combined circumstances gave Chia “tremendous stress and anxiety,” the defense said.
At this point, he began to experiment with the idea of taking videos under the skirts “as it provided a release, albeit incorrect,” the defense said.
They said he took his first upskirt video in mid-2017, his urges “triggered when he saw girls in short skirts,” eventually going to more malls until he was caught.
“The defendant was really relieved to have been caught by the police because he knew that his behavior was obsessive and compulsive and that he was unable to control himself,” the attorneys said.
Chia immediately confessed to all the crimes, offered devices with passwords and usernames, and has since attended many counseling sessions, the court heard.
The defense said this is Chia’s first brush with the law and that he was previously “a law-abiding citizen, a highly respected speaker at ITE and a committed family man.”
He will return to court for sentencing on December 7. For each count of insulting a woman’s modesty, you could be jailed for up to a year, fined, or both.
