It is some times interesting to read the Statutes and the wording of the law. A friend pointed out that at times it is quite absurd because when you look at Sections 376A and 376B. It simply means if you have sex with a 17-year old girl, you walk the thin line between having committed an offence or not. It all depends on whether you paid her for it.

That brings me to the matter of the 48 men who were charged for sex with a 17-year old “freelance prostitute”. I doubt many of those who are guilty know that the Penal Code was amended not long ago in October 2007 which increased the age of “legal prostitution” from 16 to 18. In fact, how many are aware that there was even an amendment back then? All I can recall from that period was that furore about Section 377A, and everything else was drowned out amidst all that noise. I wasn’t aware of this change had a friend not pointed out to me that the changes were mooted in 2005.

Had the men been aware of the amendment, it would still have been an issue because the pimp (or OKT, aka Or Kui Tow) “marketed” the girl as 18-year old. The girl also failed to inform her customers that she was below 18. A colleague of mine joked that this was as good as ‘mis-labeling a product’. (On the matter of jokes, another friend joked that the pimp is more pro-Singaporean in his “employment practices” than our SMEs and MNCs. Yet another mentioned that the pimp is a champion entrepreneur. After all, he allegedly “sampled” his girls for a mere $50 while the other clowns paid $450 or more for the same. Where else can you get to test something at a low cost and then rent it out at a huge margin?)

Jokes aside, there is a legal doctrine known as ‘Willful Blindness‘ – i.e. there is a duty to check whether the person representing something to you is telling the truth – which means it is unlikely that the Court will accept the men’s argument that their ignorance should not render them liable for this offence.

Even so, I must point out that it is difficult for the men to verify the girl’s age. Consider this, these freelance prostitutes usually operate under a different name so that they are not easily identified by their friends or relatives. For e.g. if “Tan Lian Hway” operates by the moniker “Mimi”, would she have shown her customers her identity card to prove she is above 18 and thus reveal her real name? Common sense tells me that even if she is 30-year old, she would still have given a myriad of excuses to avoid verification, simply to protect her true identity. (I am also puzzled as to why the prosecution refused to reveal her identity. Unless I am mistaken, isn’t she no longer a minor since she is above 16-year old? That’s not mentioning that if one searched hard enough, they will come across certainly websites which flout the law and reveal her identity for all those who are interested anyway.)

Juerg Buergin

R D Suhartono

Simply put, even though the men are considered offenders under the word of the law, they are also victims. I failed to understand why the papers had selectively picked on and humiliated some of them – in particular the ex-principal of Pei Chin and Howard Shaw – and shamed them publicly. There were so far 48 men charged but these two basically occupied the front page of the papers (at least on the evening Chinese tabloids such as Shin Ming) for at least 2 days. Meanwhile, very little is said about the foreigners, for e.g. the Indonesian who was allowed to leave Singapore allegedly for his marriage ceremony and the ex-UBS banker. Personally, I find it unacceptable that Indonesian was even allowed to leave in view of the fact that two foreigners who are indicted for assaulting a taxi-driver had jumped bail recently. Now contrast that with Taiwan which almost immediately impounded Makiyo and her friends’ passports after their assault on a taxi driver!

Anyway, how exactly are these two foreigners different from Howard Shaw, or even Allan Khoo (one of the other 46 men) who has been previously charged and convicted for attempting to extort money from another 21-year old student prostitute? If the Main Stream Media [MSM] claims that it is reporting all these about the ex-principal and Howard Shaw to keep the people in the know, then tell us everything about everybody or nothing at all. Why the bias, and in particular why pick on these two prominent Singaporeans? What they have done is not any more heinous than the other 46 offenders, or even those who “used” the same girl more than once. Had they been opposition members I am quite sure many would have screamed “political persecution”. It does make many wonder whether those two have crossed someone that brought such ill fate upon them! More ominously, perhaps the MSM find Singaporeans easier to bully.

It particularly irks me that the MSM again selectively destroyed the lives of a few men much like how it has splattered the private information of the pre-Dana Lim ExCo during the AWARE drama. Those private information include not only the occupation of the members of that short-lived ExCo, and in some cases even the number of children they have and their spouse. It is of no surprise that the MSM is steadily losing credibility among Singaporeans. What it is doing is no better than the wall posters of Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

That said, I am not expecting the MSM to start making the information of the foreigners involved in this case headline but rather that I wished they would stop selectively destroy the lives of people in this manner.

Recommended Reads:
FoxTwo: The 44 Men Charged For Illegal Commercial Sex Are Victims!