SINGAPORE – A man was given a six-week jail sentence on Wednesday (October 7) after he used his smartphone to record a teenage girl while she was in the shower.
31-year old Teo Jing Zhi pleaded guilty in court to intentionally insulting the victim’s modesty on the evening of November 8, 2018.
According to a report in TODAY, the victim, who cannot be named in order to protect her identity, was 18 years old at the time the crime took place.
Mr Teo happened to be biking in the HDB estate where the teenage girl was living when he heard the sounds of her shower, which caused him to look for it, finding her in the bathroom of her ground-floor flat.
This is when the accused decided to pull out his phone to video her without her knowledge. The victim saw a hand holding up a mobile phone through her bathroom’s window louvres. She immediately screamed for help, causing Mr Teo to flee the premises.
Her brother heard her call for help and immediately went in search of the assailant, but he wasn’t able to find anyone when he got outside.
This prompted him to call the police. Initial investigations into the case led the police to CCTV footage that showed Mr Teo lurking around the back of the teenage victim’s flat, which happened to be close to the kitchen toilet window.
The CCTV footage also showed that Mr Teo had remained in that location for around three minutes before biking away. The footage also allowed the authorities to identify him, and eventually apprehend him.
According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Joseph Gwee, the accused deleted any footage he had taken of the victim from his phone.
DPP Gwee was pushing for an eight-week jail term because of a number of aggravating factors in the case.
He explained that there was a major degree of intrusion into the teenager’s privacy, citing “The victim was fully nude as she was showering and the offence had taken place in the sanctity of her own home, where she should have expected to have been safe.” / TISG