More than 10 months’ jail for teacher who took upskirt videos of colleagues and students
Shaffiq Alkhatib
Court Correspondent
UPDATED
13 JUN 2023, 1:48 PM SGT
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SINGAPORE – A teacher who took 170 upskirt videos of at least 47 different victims, including his then colleagues and students, was sentenced to 10 months and two weeks’ jail on Tuesday. The offences were committed from 2015 to 2018.
The names of the former discipline master, a 50-year-old father of three, and the school cannot be disclosed due to a gag order to protect the victims’ identities.
In September 2022, he pleaded guilty to three counts of insulting a woman’s modesty. Five other charges were considered during sentencing.
Before handing down the sentence on Tuesday, District Judge Brenda Tan noted that according to reports from Dr Stephen Phang from the Institute of Mental Health, the teacher was suffering from major depressive disorder at the time of the offences.
The teacher was found to be suitable to undergo a mandatory treatment order. Offenders given such an order have to undergo treatment to address their conditions in lieu of time behind bars.
However, Dr Phang also found that the teacher still retained his ability to make the choice to not commit the offences.
Due to this finding, Judge Tan said that his mental condition bore little or no mitigating weight and sentenced him to a jail term.
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On Tuesday, defence lawyer Laurence Goh told the court that his client intends to appeal against the sentence.
The teacher was then offered bail of $15,000.
For each count of insulting a woman’s modesty, an offender can be jailed for up to a year and fined.
The teacher’s offences came to light when a female teacher, who was one of the victims, suspected that he had been taking upskirt videos and alerted the police on July 14, 2018.
In an earlier statement, the Ministry of Education told The Straits Times that the man has been suspended from service since July 2018, and is no longer teaching in any school.
Between April 18, 2015, and July 11, 2018, the man filmed multiple upskirt videos of numerous women, targeting at least 38 of his colleagues.
To commit the offences, he would set his mobile phone to video-recording mode before inviting a female colleague to his workstation for data entry purposes.
While she was standing at his desk and keying in data, such as attendance records, he would place the device beneath her skirt and record a video without her knowledge or consent.
In earlier proceedings in 2022, Deputy Public Prosecutor Yvonne Poon said: “The accused only invited female colleagues wearing skirts or dresses over to his workstation for data entry.
“He would not invite female teachers who were wearing trousers, and seldom invited male teachers over to his workstation for data entry.”
Using a similar method, the man also filmed multiple upskirt videos of several students.
DPP Poon told Judge Tan: “At least seven of the victims were students of the secondary school, which means that they would have been aged 16 or below and especially vulnerable to his predation.
“In committing the offences, the accused exploited their deference to his authority, as well as the trust that their parents reposed in the school and its faculty.”
The prosecutor had also said in 2022 that the teacher on one occasion used his mobile phone to make recordings of two upskirt videos from a male student of the school who was caught for the offence.
He did it on the pretext of retrieving evidence of the student’s wrongdoing and then transferred the videos to a hard disk for his own collection.
Besides the school, the man also committed similar offences at other places, including his mother-in-law’s home, where he targeted a female relative in February 2017.
