SINGAPORE — The first person to be convicted of unlawful stalking in Singapore was sentenced to 12 months’ jail on Friday (June 17), with the judge chastising the man for his “unrelenting” and “merciless” acts against his victim.

For about three years, the 26-year-old man perpetuated a cycle of demanding his former lover to send him compromising photos, then using these to threaten her into sending him more.

“(But) yielding to his sexting demands and threats served only to fuel them. The more the victim acceded to his demands in fear, the more a warped sense of empowerment seemed to form in him, and the more he became armed with the means to carry out even more grievous and harmful forms of harassment and abuse,” said district judge Lim Keng Yeow.

The acts and threats against the girl started when she was just 16 years old, and were not only “prolonged and unrelenting”, but were also “acute and vicious”, the judge added.

“(They were) aimed at keeping the victim trapped under his power so as to do his bidding, and calculated to cause as much embarrassment and inflict as much humiliation as possible,” he added.

The man, who cannot be named so as to protect the victim’s identity, is the first to be convicted of unlawful stalking since the Protection from Harassment Act (POHA) came into force in November 2014. He was also convicted of criminally intimidating the victim and committing a rash act that endangered the girl’s brother’s life. 

He received a six-month jail term for the POHA charge, and six months’ and four months’ jail for the rash act and criminal intimidation offences respectively. The POHA and rash act sentences will run consecutively.

The stalking started shortly after the pair had a brief sexual relationship in 2013, where he persisted with his romantic advances by insisting on accompanying her to and from school every day. He threatened to inform her parents about their sexual relationship if she did not go out with him.

The victim confided in a lecturer who intervened and the man dropped out of school. From then on, he held on to the belief that the victim had ruined his life.

Time and again, he demanded that she send him nude photos of herself. He also printed these photos on fliers, accompanied by harassing messages, and put them up at public areas of her block and dropped them into letter boxes.

On one occasion when he was caught in the act by the victim’s brother, the man drove off while the latter sat on the front bonnet of the car, causing him to be flung off. The brother scraped his limbs, chin and scalp and suffered a minor head injury.

Even after she transferred to polytechnic last year, the harassment did not stop. To make her talk to him, the man uploaded her nude photos on her school’s social media platform.

Despite being charged in court late last year, the man threatened to post the victim’s nude photos unless she wrote a letter pleading for leniency. 

In sentencing him on Friday, the judge said the man’s harassing acts “flowed from an obdurate and absorbing obsession” which had little to do with any affection he had for the victim. Instead, the man’s fixation was driven by a consuming need to have power and control over her; and also by his “intense sense of grievance over perceived wrongs against him by the victim”.The judge said he gave due consideration to an Institute of Mental Health report on the offender’s personality traits and persistent depressive disorder, but said he was unable to attach “significant mitigatory weight” to these conditions which were of low severity.

In his concluding remarks, the judge also noted that while he sympathised with the victim in this case, other young people should be cautioned about engaging in sexting and treating it as something “adventurous and harmless”.

“The facts of this case do demonstrate how sexting can lead to an avalanche of harm far beyond what a sender can anticipate. What seems innocent may easily prove to be profoundly damaging, for there are myriad motivations and methods for what is sexted to be abused,” the judge said.

The maximum punishment for unlawful stalking under POHA is a 12-month jail term and a S$5,000 fine.