- A 50-year-old secondary school teacher has been sentenced to 10 months and two weeks’ jail
- He pleaded guilty last year to three charges of taking upskirt videos of his female colleagues and students at the school premises
- He filmed the videos on about 170 occasions over more than three years involving at least 40 different victims. He saved the videos in a hard disk for his sexual gratification
- Immediately after the sentencing, the man’s lawyer said the teacher would appeal. He was granted S$15,000 bail pending the appeal
- TODAY understands the man has been suspended from teaching since 2018
SINGAPORE — A secondary school teacher who took about 170 upskirt videos of both his colleagues and students at the school premises has been sentenced to 10 months and two weeks’ jail.
The 50-year-old man, who cannot be named under a gag order to protect the victims’ identities, pleaded guilty in September last year to three counts of insulting a woman’s modesty by taking upskirt videos.
Five other similar charges were taken into account during sentencing.
The man had been working at the secondary school since 2008 and became the discipline master in 2015. At the time of his arrest, he also taught Mandarin. Under the gag order, the school cannot be named either.
MEZIESBLOG understands that he is still employed as a teacher though he has been suspended since 2018.
Immediately after the sentencing on Tuesday (June 13), the man’s lawyer Laurence Goh said that his client intended to appeal against the sentence. The man was granted S$15,000 bail pending the hearing of the appeal.
WHAT HAPPENED
Between April 18, 2015, and July 11, 2018, the offender filmed a total of 156 upskirt videos of at least 38 different colleagues at his school, with as many as 12 videos of the same victim taken on multiple occasions.
He also filmed 12 videos of at least seven different female students at the school.
According to court documents prepared by Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Yvonne Poon, the teacher would typically film upskirt videos of his female colleagues by first inviting them over to his workstation for data entry.
He would set his mobile phone to video recording mode while the colleague stood at his desk to key in school-related data.
The man would then hold his mobile phone beneath the victim’s skirt with the camera pointed upwards to record an upskirt video without her knowledge or consent.
The teacher would invite only female colleagues wearing skirts or dresses over to his workstation and not those wearing trousers. He rarely invited his male colleagues to the workstation.
The offender took a similar approach when taking upskirt videos of students.
He typically took the student into the discipline room and got the girl to key something into the computer. While the student was distracted, he would use his mobile phone to record an upskirt video of her.
After recording the videos, the teacher would then transfer them from his mobile phone onto an external hard disk using his office laptop.
On another occasion, a male student was caught and punished for taking two upskirt videos of a female teacher.
The teacher made his own recording of these videos from the student’s mobile phone which he took under the pretence of “retrieving evidence”.
Even though the man did not share or publish the many videos he had made, he had used them for his own sexual gratification, DPP Poon said.
A police report was lodged by a female teacher on July 14, 2018, after she suspected that the man had been taking upskirt videos of female teachers, including herself.
The man’s hard disk was seized by the police and found to contain about 170 upskirt videos. Each video was also titled with the victim’s name or initials if he knew them, and a vague description like “Student1” or “Lift Girl” if he did not know them.
Investigations also revealed a separate incident where the accused had recorded an upskirt video of a female relative who was standing next to him at a party held by his mother-in-law.
WHAT THE DEFENCE AND JUDGE SAID
The defence lawyer, Mr Goh, referred to a psychiatric report from the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) which, he said, showed that the teacher was suffering from two types of depressive disorders which contributed to his offence.
Mr Goh said this meant that his client should receive a non-jail sentence.
However, District Judge Brenda Tan disagreed and cited remarks made by a doctor in the report that even though the teacher may have relied on a “highly dysfunctional” and “unlawful” coping mechanism to “alleviate his depressed mood”, he still had the ability to exercise self-control over his desires and impulses.
She added that the scale and duration of his offences warrants jail time as he had abused the trust of his colleagues and students when he committed the acts with premeditation in his role as a discipline master.
For each count of taking upskirt videos of his colleagues and students, the teacher could have been jailed for up to one year or fined, or both.
