Why the legal system in Singapore is wrong

Hello again. I have been asked to comment on a rather disturbing piece of news from Singapore about an NUS student Terence Siow who was spared a jail sentence despite brazenly molesting a woman in public at an MRT station. The full details of what happened are available on the CNA website and there is now a petition protesting the seemingly light sentence he received. Obviously, this has many similarities to another case of Monica Baey earlier this year when another student Nicholas Lim who took a video of her as she was showering also got away with a light sentence. What is clear from the pattern of cases is that demanding harsher punishments for perpetrators of such sexual misconduct cases isn't working; whilst I totally understand why the public are clamoring for these perpetrators to be jailed, caned and even publicly shamed to the point where they will never ever dare to apply for a job again, it is a very natural reaction for we all want justice for the victims - we want the perverts like Siow and Lim to pay dearly for their crimes. We still have to ask ourselves why such cases happen in the first place and if there are any better responses we can come up with as a society in light of these cases. How did we end up in this situation in the first place? Instead of just sitting back and demanding that the government do something about the situation - how could we find a solution together as a society?

Most of the newspaper articles available online have focused on the fact that he received a light sentence despite the severity of the crime, that the system in Singapore seems to allow university students to get away with serious crimes like this simply on the basis of their good grades and the fact that they have a good future based on those good grades. I can only shake my head in despair - after all, one of the most famous murder cases in Singapore dates back to 1965: it was the first time a man was convicted of murder in the absence of a body. Sunny Ang thought he could get away with killing his girlfriend and collecting the insurance money, he was extremely intelligent (hey, like me, he attended Raffles Institution) and thus was able to plan the perfect murder. But back in 1965, he was still convicted and hanged in 1967. The fact is Ang was only able to plan such a complex crime because he was extremely intelligent and a person who was plain stupid would have never ever been able to carry off such a devious but ingenious plan. But somehow, the legal system in Singapore seems to equate good grades to good morals because hey, you had to be at home studying to score those straight As thus somehow that makes you morally upstanding. The justification given is that someone like Siow and Lim who have good grades have the chance to reform and become a useful member of society in the long run - which I disagree with of course, it is bullshit. Utter total bullshit. Indeed, the law should be fair - all men should be equal before the eyes of the law, it shouldn't be one set of rules for graduates with excellent grades and another set of rules for the others deemed 'stupid' for a simple reason: the effects of their actions on their victims are exactly the same regardless of their paper qualifications. Which is why I would have loved to have seen both Siow and Lim thrown in jail for a substantial jail sentence and their futures ruined. Go ahead and cane them Michael Fay style - heck, Fay was but a teenage vandal but these two got away so lightly despite having committed a far more serious offence? Seriously, WTF?

Criminals are not deterred by the fact that punishments exists - we live in a society which is governed by law and order, of course the law is very clear about what can happen to men who commit such sexual offences, but rather it is a question of whether or not the perpetrators think that they can get away with it. In both case, both Siow and Lim were NUS students - they're most certainly not stupid and they are certainly educated enough to understand the consequences of their actions. However, this is when we enter a grey area of morality when we think we can get away with something. Let me give you a very simple example from my army days: when we used to do guard duty, we had to patrol the perimeter of the army camp every hour. It is a long walk of a few kilometers in the dark when everyone is asleep in the middle of the night, with only mosquitoes to keep you company. There was a short cut that we all knew about - it meant not patrolling a huge section of the camp and some of the soldiers would take the short cut, knowing that they could get away with it. The commanders used to scare us with threats that they would do spot checks in the middle of the night to see if anyone on guard duty dared to take the short cut; but given how hardly anyone ever got caught, it was deemed as a calculated risk that you could take and probably get away with it. Would the commanding officer bother to get up at 3:30 am in the morning just to do a spot check? It wasn't impossible, just quite unlikely. So it is not like we were oblivious of the consequences of taking the short cut, we based our decision on whether or not we thought we could get away with it. Thus my estimate is that about half the soldiers took the short cut, whilst the other half didn't dare.

The fact that you could face very severe punishments for taking the short cut during guard duty didn't bother those who did take the short cut - their decision wasn't based on how severe the punishments were but the probability of getting caught. If the probability of getting caught is very low, then that made it more likely for them to take that risk. Thus in the case of men who molest women in public, it is not like they have some kind of mental illness that impairs their moral judgement about such an act - they are doing it because they think they can get away with it. Unfortunately, this is often the case, many perpetrators would choose to target their victims during the extremely busy rush hour, when trains and platforms are very crowded so the victims are left feeling unsure if they had been groped or if someone had accidentally brushed against them in the crowd. And even if the victim is sure they they had been groped, it would be hard to try to identify and catch the perpetrator in such a crowded situation. This is a serious problem that affects cities all over the world to the point where many countries like Mexico, Brazil, Japan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iran have all introduced women-only train carriages. That is one way to deal with the situation but there are two ways we can address the issue of perpetrators thinking they can get away with it: the first is with better enforcement, to encourage victims to speak up and ask for help the moment something happens. The second is to have a 杀一儆百 (literally "kill one warn a hundred" - to punish an individual as a warning to others) approach with someone like Siow by imposing an extremely harsh sentence on him. Clearly, the Singaporean government chose not to go down that route.

I'm wondering if there's technological solution to this problem, given how Singapore is such a high tech society? Let's go back to my army camp and the short cut I talked about - now if you wanted to do the short cut, you would have to walk down this path between two buildings. It was dark, the buildings were empty at night and there's nobody there, but what if we put a CCTV camera there and for the sake of the argument, installed some lights along the path so if anyone were to be brazen enough to take that short cut, they would be captured on CCTV? I can guarantee you that if you did that, then few people would dare to attempt the short cut, because the probability of being caught was high once your image had been captured on CCTV. Therefore you're no longer dependent on the commanding officer getting out of bed in the middle of the night to catch you red handed - he can review the CCTV footage anytime he wants and still summon you to his office two weeks later once he has seen the evidence. This is the reason why many shops have invested in CCTV because there is a direct correlation between CCTV and the amount of shoplifting they experience. Would be shoplifters will notice that they are constantly being monitored and their brains would then make a quick risk evaluation which would lead to the only logical conclusion: you're never going to get away with it, so don't even try. This is why some shops take a gamble and install dummy CCTVs - they are totally useless as they don't record anything, but they do succeed in giving the shoplifters the impression that they are being watched and by that token, some shops even just put up a sign that says, "Smile! You're on CCTV!" without actually installing such a system. Such is the placebo effect and it actually works.

There are plenty of CCTV on the MRT system in Singapore already so it is not like installing any more CCTVs would be the answer, but let me share with you something they did in London a few years ago. There was quite a brutal robbery on the street where I lived where an old man was attacked. It was late at night, the old man was returning home and the robber attacked him on the street outside - the entrance of the building was well lit and had CCTV but of course, the robber is smart and knew that, thus the crime happened just off camera. This incident alarmed the residents of course, so the police responded by making quite a public display of distributing 'personal attack alarms' (also known as rape alarms). It is a little gadget that can make one hell of us loud noise the moment you pull out the safety pin, so if you're an old man being attacked in the middle of the night, you can at least use such an alarm to draw attention to yourself and scare away your attacker. I questioned the effectiveness of such a little device - no doubt it was very loud, but the robber took the old man by surprise, pushed him over, beat him up and took his belongings very quickly, it was over and done with in 20 to 30 seconds. So even if the old man had such a personal attack alarm on him, would he have had the chance to use it? The police officer told me that they had put up posters informing the residents to come to get their free personal attack alarms but the posters were actually meant to deter would be robbers - if they knew that the residents in the area carried personal attack alarms, they would be less likely to want to attack anyone in the area. I smirked and replied, "then they just go attack the old people in another part of town instead, but at least our neighbourhood is safer."

Such personal attack alarms are relatively cheap at a few dollars - heck, a nice bubble tea in Singapore would cost more. So instead of waiting for the police to try such an initiative, individual groups can get organized and send out a message, "warning: all the women here (eg., a university hostel) are all carrying personal attack alarms at all times." Yes I know some people would argue that women have the right not to be attacked and I agree with that totally, but we're dealing with a messy situation here whereby we're trying to deter would-be perpetrators from committing any crimes if we can alter the risk vs reward equation in their heads. If we can convince them that the risk is too great, then they wouldn't dare to try anything illegal. But there are also other ways we can try to influence this risk for the perpetrators: so let's return once again to my old army camp and that short cut. Now the previous suggestion of installing CCTV and lighting on that path between the two buildings would not have been practical as it would have been too expensive to light a path that nobody uses at night - so instead, the camp commander came up with a cunning plan: there were some barracks on the camp and if you got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet or if you were just up late then you were in a position to spot if anyone was taking a short cut given that the short cut involved walking close to those barracks. The commander offered a rather handsome reward for people who would be snitches and report anyone they spotted taking the short cut - this involved immediately notifying the officer on duty and then trying to catch the perpetrator red handed.

This made taking the short cut more risky of course, it became almost like a game because you had to stay out of the light and hide in the shadows and in the bushes, there were several areas where you had no cover at all and you had to try to creep across the road as quickly but as silently as possible to avoid anyone noticing you. You were only out in the open for a few seconds each time and so the chances of being spotted are low (unless you were extremely unlucky). But with this system in place, the commander was now able to count on a much larger group of people to catch those who dared to take the short cut and the desired effect of this measure is to discourage anyone thinking of attempting the short cut. It worked because even I didn't dare take the short cut after that - it felt too risky. Now I remember being in a shop in Singapore where I witnessed a boy no more than ten years old shoplifting; it caught me by surprise as I noticed it out of the corner of my eye and I wasn't quite sure what to do. Do I run up to the cashier or a shop assistant? Do I try to chase after that young shoplifter myself? Do I start shouting to draw attention to the shoplifter? He is just a kid, what if his parents are nearby? What should I do? And whilst I was running through all of those options in my head, the shoplifter turned and left the shop swiftly before I could decide - it was all over and done with in a few seconds. Contrast that to the army camp where we were briefed very clearly exactly what to do should we spot someone attempting the short cut whilst on guard duty. Shop owners are encouraged to develop good rapport with their customers by greeting them as they enter the store so they are more likely to speak up when they witness shoplifting rather than just look the other way.

The important principle here is to create a culture where the general public is willing and able to help women who are victims of sexual misconduct, to let women know that if they ask for help, people will respond accordingly and willingly render them whatever assistance they need. Not only will this make women feel safer but it will also make the potential perpetrators think twice if they know that the nearest people would be instantly mobilized to wrestle him to the ground the moment a lady screams for help. In the latest case, it was horrific that the victim had to run to the station control at the MRT station for some kind of help - she didn't feel confident enough to just anyone on the MRT itself or on the station platform for help despite having already been touched by Siow. Whether or not she would have received help if she had asked for it is a hypothetical question - the fact is she didn't feel comfortable or confident enough to ask for help tells us that she didn't think the people around her would step in and help her. There is an element of education and training involved here: women need to be taught exactly how to respond in such a situation and I could write a whole post on it, but for example, you should never shout into a crowd things like, "somebody help me" or even just "help!" Instead, you should find someone nearby and address that person directly, "Sir/Madam, that man over there is bothering me, I need you to protect me." We need to be aware of the bystander effect, because if a woman is screaming for help in a crowded place, there's the temptation to think, "someone else will respond". But if you place the responsibility squarely on one person to help you, then that person is far more likely to help. Little things like that need to become common knowledge.

But remember that list of countries where they have women-only train carriages? There's one notable exception from that list - Western countries like America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and  Europe simply don't have the need for this and there's a really good reason why. I'm not saying that such instances of women being molested don't exist in the West, but the number of such incidents are far lower. The most crucial difference between the culture in Singapore where I grew up for the first 21 years of my life and the culture here in the UK where I have lived for the last 22 years is the attitude towards teenagers and sex: my parents for example were pretty typical. Their only advice when it came to sex education would be total abstinence - no relationships when you're a student and none when you're just establishing a career, then somehow, in spite of having no experience with relationships, you're meant to get married before you're 30 and then start having children (yeah, right). Needless to say, I thought that was completely stupid and unrealistic as it will result in either obedient children having very poor social skills when it came to relationships and eventually ending up single and unmarried; those who do decide to have relationships have to keep them a secret and the Asian parents then are completely kept in the dark, thus not being in a position of influence at all on this aspect of their children's lives. Whereas in the West, it's not like teenagers are out fucking anything on two - it's just that parents have a far more relaxed attitude when it comes to relationships and sex. Young people are given proper sex education at school and they generally have much better social skills when it comes to dating and relationships in this more progressive environment. 

The best case scenario of the extremely obedient Singaporean son who totally abstains from any kind of relationship and sex until marriage (that's the part I struggle with as many of them won't get married) is what is known as the diaosi 屌丝 in Chinese and the otaku オタク - to put it kindly, the words geek or nerd would be the English translation, but it has such negative connotations it would be far more derogatory like loser or loner because such people usually have such incredibly poor social skills they would never have the courage to speak to a nice girl at school or a female colleague at work, to engage in small talk or ask them out for a date, so increasingly their social interactions have been only online in the virtual world whilst they become extremely lonely and have no real friends. It is a tragic situation of course because their Asian parents will go from "my son is so obedient, he is staying at home and studying instead of going out drinking and partying" to "oh no, will my son ever have a girlfriend? Will he ever get married? He is already in his 30s and he has never ever been on a date. I might never have grandchildren at this rate." Short of forcing their son into an arrange marriage, the parents have already inflicted so much damage on their son's inability to form relationships and friendships that we are way beyond the point of repair by the time they realize their mistake. Tragic as this sounds, it is already the best case scenario. What can happen is that these seemingly obedient Asian kids can just explode under this kind of parenting regime and commit suicide, become murderers (as in the case of Ouyang Xiangyu, the scholar turned infamous murderer) and possibly somehow turn from mild mannered university student to such vicious sexual predators.

This is a major problem with the way a whole generation has been brought up in Singapore - there have been Singaporean parents who have expressed grave concerns about sending their children abroad to study (even after they have won scholarships to top universities) because they fear that their children would go wild, going clubbing a few times a week, take all kinds of drugs from cocaine to cannabis every night, have casual sex with loads of people and lose all control of themselves in a more liberal society in a country like the UK or US. Here's a major distinction: whilst I do live in a city where I can easily get hold of drugs if I wanted to, I choose not to take drugs because I have made a conscious choice to prioritize my career over everything else and I have plenty of other recreational activities to make me feel good without ever having to turn to some kind of chemically induced high to artificially make me get high - indeed, many people who do turn to drugs are depressed, they have problems in their lives they can't solve, thus feel very frustrated and unhappy. They turn to drinking to get drunk, in order to forget their problems and if that doesn't work they turn to drugs. This is because I am rational enough to know that if you don't solve the problems that are making you miserable in the first place, you'll forever be turning to alcohol and drugs to forget your problems, so you have to solve those problems that are troubling you. That's why I am not a drug addict today, not because my government has somehow managed to make all drug dealers disappear from the streets in London (that's never going to happen I'm afraid), but because I am a rational and sensible person who knows how to take care of myself. Ironically, I have to take all the credit for that because my parents were the typical awful Asian parents who taught me nothing, but I am just thankful that I am indeed intelligent enough to figure a lot of things out for myself despite having working class parents who weren't there for me. 

This is why I am so keen to encourage my nephew to start developing relationships with girls his age (he is now 16) and to start asking girls out on dates. Unfortunately, I think he's so brainwashed by the bad Asian parenting and the church he goes to that he is probably convinced that he is being a good boy by not asking girls out - but I just don't want him to turn into a diaosi or otaku who will be unmarried and the kind of loser that got turned into the movie, "The 40 year old virgin". Asking a girl out on a date is possibly the best kind of training he can get when it comes to social skills - in order to ask someone out for a date, you have got to be of dating quality: not only do you have to make sure you look physically appealing, but you need to be charming, witty, caring and interesting. So if my nephew wants to increase his chances of the next girl he asks out on a date saying yes to him, then he would need to make himself more physically attractive (so we can talk about his image such as his clothing, his hair, his glasses, doing more exercise to become physically leaner and fitter etc) and also there's the whole area of social skills: so he has to learn how to be a good listener, he has to learn how to express interest in the other party by asking the right questions, he has got to learn how to pay attention to the girl and offer genuine compliments, he has got to learn to pay attention to her when on a date thus learning to put another person before himself. Little things like that: so if they go to the movies and he wants to watch an action thriller but she prefers to watch a period drama, he has to learn to say, "we'll do what you want but you have got to discuss the movie with me later, teach me more about this kind of movie." I'm not sure how my nephew would react in this hypothetical situation, but I know many guys would simply say, "you go watch your period drama another time, but when you're with me we'll watch the action thriller - your period drama sounds very boring, it's all about old English people from long ago!"

Ultimately, I want him to be a confident young man who feels confident about asking a girl he likes out on a date and for him to know how to treat her on a date - there's no way you can learn how to swim until you actually jump into the water and the same applies to dating: there's no way I can teach him those skills, he has to figure a lot of those skills out for himself by trying and failing over and over again until he becomes good at it. The challenge then is for him to deal with the disappointment of the early failures and persist until he becomes good at it - but heck, the same thing can be said about anything in life. There's an adult gymnastics class at my local gymnastics club - there are people who turn up for a few lessons and then declare, "it's too bloody difficult, I simply can't do it, I give up. I'm never coming back again." However, there are those that accept that they are going to struggle and find it very hard for the first few months, but after many lessons they start to see improvements and can reap the fruits of their labour. That's when gymnastics starts becoming fun and rewarding, but you cannot expect to be able to enjoy a sport like that without first investing a lot of hard work to acquire the necessary skills - you reap what you sow. There is an element of managing one's expectations when it come to being successful at dating and that's why I want to be part of the solution by encouraging him to start dating as soon as possible because he has so much to gain from the process. The problem is that a lot of Asian parents will see the case of Terence Siow and assume that he has been corrupted by porn on the internet and the solution would be to isolate him from anything to do with the opposite sex - but really, the long term solution as a society is to teach young people how to develop normal, healthy relationships (both platonic and romantic) and improve their social skills. 

In the two cases involving Siow and Lim, many Singaporeans would be too embarrassed to look at the underlying causes of why they committed such crimes - it is too easy to dismiss it as a temporary lapse of judgement or moment of madness. But the real issue here is why these young men choose to express their sexual urges in this manner, instead of trying to seek a consenting woman. After all, the option of paying for sex with a prostitute is always there - sure it may be taboo in some social circles, but would you rather people like Siow and Lim paid for a prostitute's service rather than attack some random woman in the manner that they did? We need to firstly admit that the current modus operandi when it comes to sex education and parenting is totally useless and inadequate and this is a clear example of how things can go badly wrong when young men are left to their own devices and expected to figure things out on their own. And I'm going to say something that is going to irk a lot of Singaporeans: there's so much that you guys can learn from the West, particularly from more progressive Western and Northern European countries when it comes to both the issues of sex education and social skills training for young people. People like Siow and Lim are but the tip of the iceberg and I had hoped that the natural process of a new generation of Singaporeans being first language English speakers (rather than Chinese speaking like my parents) would go a long way to naturally resolve that problem, but clearly, the fact that we're still having cases like that in 2019 shows that the problem is simply not going to go away by itself if we ignore it. After all, I'm sure you've heard the saying: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Surely the public outrage at the moment ought to be catalyst enough for a major change in our mindset. 

So that's it from me on this issue - I know we can all agree that Siow and Lim deserve to rot in jail for an extremely long time - but moving beyond that, what else can we do to try to improve this sorry situation in Singapore apart from simply demanding harsher punishments for people like Siow and Lim? How can we further empower women to fight back against people like that? Is it fair for me to blame poor Asian parenting for this situation? Or do you think that we have all been too harsh on Siow and Lim in condemning them? Do leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.