S’porean man, 49, who downloaded & kept child abuse material, gets 11 months’ jail

A 49-year-old Singaporean man was sentenced to 11 months’ jail after being found in possession of child abuse material on his electronic devices.

Tou Jen Hau pleaded guilty to one charge of possessing child abuse materials on Jun. 22, The Straits Times reported.

Raid

In court documents seen by Mothership, police raided his home and seized Tou’s devices on Mar. 6, 2023.

His devices consisted of a laptop, a four-terabyte hard drive, and another 10-terabyte hard drive.

Investigations revealed that Tou possessed adult pornography and child abuse material.

Child abuse material

A total of 13 of the videos extracted from his devices were identified as child abuse material.

The videos depicted children, who appeared to be aged between nine and 15, engaging in sexual poses and activities.

Genital regions of male children were also depicted.

The faces of at least 23 out of 24 of the children were visible in 12 of the videos.

Tou would search and download the materials from a file-sharing platform, using search terms such as “boy”, “pedo”, or “phtc”, an acronym that stood for “pre-teen hardcore”.

After downloading the materials, he would move the videos from his computer to his external hard drives so that the file-sharing platform would not automatically allow others to download the pornography from his computer.

Tou would then organise them into folders.

He admitted that he downloaded child abuse materials since 2010 and intentionally sought them for his own viewing and sexual pleasure.

Hour-long video

The prosecution sought a jail term of between 13 and 14 months for Tou, stating that one of the videos found in his possession was about an hour long.

Any person found in possession of child abuse materials may be liable to a jail term of up to five years, fined or caned.