The 20-year-old Republic Polytechnic (RP) student, Rayson Chee Rui Sheng, who recorded multiple upskirt videos, received an 18-month probation sentence on June 2. Chee will have to remain indoors from 10 pm to 6 am every day while he will need to perform 100 hours of community service. A district court, on Tuesday, also ordered Chee's parents to provide a S$5,000 bond for their son's good behavior.
On November 19, 2018, Republic Polytechnic's discipline master notified the police after Chee recorded an upskirt video of a 21-year-old woman in the school. However, during his trial, four similar incidents also came to light. On July 31, 2018, Chee had targeted a woman at the Bukit Batok MRT station while in August the same year, he was also found committing a similar offense in a bookshop at the West Mall shopping center in Bukit Batok. The unsuspecting woman was wearing her school uniform.
Chee pleaded guilty to three counts of insulting woman's modesty in March. He was also suspended from his school and was asked to receive mandatory counseling. "RP takes a strong view against sexual misconduct on campus, and we will not hesitate to take disciplinary action against any student found guilty of misconduct," the polytechnic told the media. "As the offense was committed on campus, we have embarked on internal disciplinary proceedings."
Similar incidents in Singapore
In March this year, a former student of the National University of Singapore (NUS) received eight-week jail time for taking 31 upskirt videos. The 23-year-old, Luah Chao Zhi, pleaded guilty to two counts of insulting woman's modesty between April and August in 2019.
Another man, Tham Heng Yew, was sentenced to 44 weeks in jail for such repeated offenses in March. Heng pleaded guilty to 29 counts of insulting woman's modesty and one count of possessing obscene films. He was charged with 138 of such cases, including one at the Singapore Institute of Management when he was a student, between 2013 and 2018.
As per section 509 of Singapore penal code, invasive conduct such as the taking of "upskirt" photographs or video is considered an outrage of woman's modesty, and any such offender could be jailed up to a year and fined.
A similar incident surfaced at the Yale-NUS College in October last year when a 26-year-old Brandon Lee Bing Xiang, was also found guilty of taking illicit videos. Lee was charged with 24 counts of such offenses. But he is yet to be sentenced.
