A Singaporean man, 50, has been found guilty of sexually assaulting his 15-year-old biological daughter by forcing her to perform oral sex on him.
He pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault by penetration and was sentenced in court on Wednesday, Jan. 22 to 10 years in jail, as well as an additional four months in jail in lieu of caning, reported the Straits Times.
Happened in late 2016
According to court documents, the victim was an only child and lived with her father and mother in a one-room flat.
She usually shared the bedroom with her mother while her father, who was working as a security guard, slept on the sofa bed in the living room.
One night in late 2016, the girl and her father were drinking beer at a nearby void deck, and her father became intoxicated.
After returning home, the girl lay down on the sofa bed in the living room as she did not want to disturb her mother, who was already asleep inside the bedroom.
Soon after, her father joined her on the sofa bed. The victim asked her father to lull her to sleep by patting her thigh or arm, which he had frequently done before in the presence of the girl's mother.
Something was amiss
However, this time, the girl sensed something was amiss when her father slipped his hand under her t-shirt and began rubbing her waist intimately.
She asked her father what he was doing and moved away, backing against a wall and telling him not to come close to her.
However, he pinned her down and tried to kiss her while she struggled to get away.
The man repeatedly told his daughter to stay quiet while she protested, and slipped his hands into her shorts to touch her vagina.
He then removed his hand from his daughter's shorts, exposed his penis, and told her to "do it" for him.
Against the girl's protests, the man held her down and forced his penis into her mouth for approximately one minute.
After masturbating in the toilet, the man returned to the sofa couch and fell asleep.
Father asked her if she "enjoyed" it
The girl remained in the living room, shocked, as she did not want to alert her mother and cause a confrontation between her parents.
She feared that doing so would cause her parents to break up, as their marriage already had frequent disputes, and she did not want to make the problem worse.
The next day, her father asked her whether "it was nice" and if she "enjoyed" the previous night.
The girl rebuked her father, saying that given their relationship, he should not have behaved that way.
In March 2017, the girl was placed in a welfare home by the Ministry of Social Affairs and Family Development after her father threatened her with a knife in a familial dispute.
While the girl was back on home leave in 2017, her father asked her if she knew what would happen if she were to tell her child protection officer about what had happened.
Felt motivated to report after meeting other victims of sexual assault
At the welfare home, the girl found out that some of her hostel mates had also been victims of sexual assault.
Knowing that she was not alone in having experienced such an ordeal, the girl told her mother about it.
The girl told her mother about the sexual assault in Jan. 2018, who was shocked to find out what had happened.
She then filed a police report against her father on Jan. 23, 2018, and he was arrested the next day.
The prosecution sought a jail sentence for the man of at least 11 years, with an additional four months' imprisonment in lieu of the eight strokes of cane he would have gotten had he not exceeded the statutory age limit of 50 years old for caning.
They pointed out that the man "exhibited no qualms in abusing the trust reposed in him by sexually assaulting his own biological daughter", who was an an "exceptionally vulnerable position" due to her relationship with her abuser.
Top image by Zac Durant on Unsplash.