SINGAPORE: Over a period of five years, a man secretly filmed his landlady showering and her young daughter changing clothes in the home he shared with their family.
The 40-year-old was jailed for 19 months on Monday (Dec 30) after pleading guilty to two counts of voyeurism and one count of insulting the young girl’s modesty – the old charge under which voyeurism was punishable.
Two other similar charges were considered in sentencing.
The identities of both victims are protected by gag order. The offender’s name was redacted in court documents.
The man had been the family’s tenant for about a decade when the offences came to light. He was working as an aerospace machine operator when he was arrested in April.
Investigators found 13 videos of the landlady, nine videos of her daughter and 74 screenshots of the videos of the landlady on the man’s devices.
He admitted to having filmed the victims since around 2018, and said that he became bolder the more he did it. He kept the videos for his own sexual gratification.
The court heard that the landlady would usually change her daughter’s clothes in the master bedroom with the door open.
The tenant would keep his own door ajar and film them by placing his phone in his room, with the rear camera facing the master bedroom.
In 2018, when the landlady’s daughter was three to four years old, he recorded six videos of the toddler naked while she was getting her clothes or diaper changed in the master bedroom.
When the daughter was eight to nine years old in 2023, he recorded another three videos of her naked while changing clothes in the master bedroom.
Around 2018, and again from June 2020 to this March, he also recorded the girl’s mother when she was showering or in a state of undress at home.
He was caught red-handed by the landlady on Apr 8. She was alone in the house with him that day as her husband had gone to work and her daughter was in school.
The woman went to take a shower in the bathroom of the master bedroom at about 10am. She closed the bathroom door but left the bedroom door open.
The man had come out of his bedroom to use the common toilet when he heard the sound of water running. He knew that his landlady was showering.
He snuck into the master bedroom, squatted before the bathroom door, and filmed her by slipping his phone through the gap under the closed door.
He was engrossed in the recording and did not realise the woman had finished showering. When she opened the door, she saw him recording with his phone and screamed.
The woman called her husband, who in turn called the police.
The man dashed back to his bedroom. He forwarded the video to another phone of his and deleted it from the phone he had used to record. He later deleted the video from the other phone too.
The police arrived and arrested him that day and his electronic devices were seized. A forensic examination of the devices unearthed the voyeuristic videos.
An Institute of Mental Health doctor who examined the tenant found that he had features of voyeuristic disorder, but that these did not contribute to his offending behaviour.
In a victim impact statement, the landlady said that she was shaken by her tenant’s voyeuristic recording of her daughter over a long period.
The man had lived with her family for a long time and they knew each other well. “It did not cross her mind that he would do such a thing,” Deputy Public Prosecutor Lynda Lee said.
The woman was especially affected by the offences against her daughter and would cry whenever she thought about them.
She and her husband had decided not to let their daughter know about the offences committed against her, and the girl remained unaware of what had happened.
Initially, the landlady would worry about someone being outside the bathroom while she showered, and of being targeted by the offender when she was outside alone.
She now has a closed-circuit television camera in her living room and only accepts female tenants. Her husband has replaced all the locks in their home with digital locks to reassure her.
The prosecutor sought a jail term of 21 to 24 months with caning, leaving the number of strokes to the judge’s discretion.
In arguing for caning, Ms Lee urged the judge to consider the landlady’s daughter as a vulnerable victim because she was very young at the time of the offences.
Defence lawyer Ashvin Hariharan asked for a year’s imprisonment and argued that his client’s offences did not warrant caning.
He stressed that the man did not make physical contact with the victims, and that the offences were not sophisticated and did not involve concealing the recording device.
Senior District Judge Ong Hian Sun did not sentence the offender to caning, after considering both sides’ arguments and previous court decisions that they cited.
He explained that this was because the man’s voyeuristic recordings did not involve any criminal act of violence.
The penalty for voyeurism is a jail term of up to two years, which may come with a fine, caning or any combination of these punishments.
As one of the voyeurism charges for filming the landlady’s daughter was amalgamated, any punishment the man received for that offence could have been doubled.
The penalty for insulting a woman’s modesty is a jail term of up to a year, or a fine, or both.
Source: CNA
