[ad_1]
SINGAPORE – On multiple occasions over a two-year period, a man waited until his wife and son fell asleep before sexually abusing his niece in the next bedroom.
She was eight years old when he started abusing her.
The 42-year-old man cannot be identified to protect the identity of the victim, and was sentenced to three years in prison and six strokes of the baton on Friday (September 25).
He faced two counts of modesty outrage and one count under the Children and Youth Act. During his sentencing, four other similar charges were taken into consideration.
The court heard that the girl’s parents are divorced and she was in the care of her paternal grandmother at the time of the crimes, which occurred between 2015 and 2017.
From time to time he would spend the night with his uncle and aunt in the guest bedroom of their Punggol apartment, as he regarded the man as a close uncle.
In one incident, the court heard that the man rubbed his genitals against her through his boxer shorts while his wife and son slept in the master bedroom.
He had also asked the girl to lift his shirt and touched it.
In another incident, the man used a cloth to blindfold the girl before performing sexual acts on her.
The girl, now 12, reported her uncle to the police in September 2017.
The deputy prosecutor, Jaime Pang, pointed out that the man “abused (d) his position of trust” and “they trusted him so much that she stayed at home.”
Regarding the similar charges taken into consideration, DPP Pang added: “This is not an isolated event (but rather) a pattern of sexual abuse that lasted two years.”
She added that the man’s acts were somewhat premeditated, as he decided to commit the crimes when he was alone with her.
The man’s lawyer, Peter Fernando, pleaded with the court to allow his client to “turn a new page,” as his client is married and the caretaker of their five-year-old son.
In addition, Fernando said that a psychiatrist believed that the man suffers from major depression and that, at the time of the crime, he had “unresolved grief and guilt” for his father’s suicide and was watching a lot of pornography to cope with it.
In response to this, DPP Pang said that these factors did not appear mitigating.
“These factors were already in place at the time of the crimes … They did not deter him from committing crimes and these crimes occurred over a long period of time,” he said.
[ad_2]
