A 71-year-old Singaporean man who sexually abused 11 girls over more than three decades has been sentenced to 21 years in jail.
The victims included his daughter, two granddaughters, four nieces and four other girls who were students at an enrichment centre he ran with his wife.
The offences took place between 1990 and 2023, with some of the victims as young as five or six when the abuse began.
The man cannot be named because of a court gag order protecting the identities of the victims. He was also not eligible for caning because of his age.
He pleaded guilty in July to 10 charges involving six victims. The charges included rape, sexual assault by penetration, molestation, committing obscene acts involving children, showing pornography to a child and unnatural sex. Another 23 charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.
The man began abusing his daughter when she was about six or seven years old. He repeatedly warned her not to tell anyone, saying that doing so would cause the family to break apart.
He later raped her when she was 15. The abuse stopped after that incident.
In 2023, after being released from prison in 2021, he sexually abused his two granddaughters, who were then five and seven years old. The younger girl eventually told her mother what had happened, prompting a police report. The older girl then disclosed that she had also been abused.
One of his nieces was abused between 1994 and 1996, when she was between nine and 12 years old. She had attended tuition at his home and sometimes stayed there to play with her cousins.
The man had also sexually abused other children who attended or received tuition through the enrichment centre he operated with his wife between 1997 and 2021.
The offences involving the 11 victims came to light in 2023, although the man had previously been jailed twice, in 1999 and 2020, for sexual offences involving other victims.
The prosecution sought a sentence of between 32 and 36 years in jail, while the defence asked for 15 years.
High Court judge Mavis Chionh said the case involved extremely serious and persistent offending, but rejected the prosecution’s proposed sentence as disproportionate when compared with similar cases.
The judge said she would otherwise have imposed a 26-year sentence. However, she reduced it to 21 years after taking into account the man’s reduced life expectancy because he has myelofibrosis, a rare form of blood cancer.
She said the adjustment was necessary to ensure the sentence did not effectively amount to a life sentence.
The case highlights the prolonged nature of the man’s offending and the breach of trust involved, as several of the victims were members of his own family or children under his care as a tutor and enrichment-centre operator.
The 21-year sentence reflects the court’s consideration of the seriousness of the offences, the number of victims and the circumstances surrounding the offender’s health and previous convictions.
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