ABSTRACT
In April 1995, after a 68-day trial, the court found a 24-year-old man, Tan Kuan Meng, guilty of 11 charges of rape, attempted extortion and oral sex, and sentenced him to 13 years’ imprisonment and ten strokes of caning. In a country where Playboy and Penthouse magazines are banned, where net access to pornographic sites is restricted, the case enjoyed a certain public notoriety. For a few weeks newspaper readers were given sensational accounts of sexual misdemeanours committed under lurid circumstances. Tan, a dispatch rider – whose photo in the paper shows a man with a flabby face and sly, sheepish eyes – had taken the victim, a 22-year-old woman clerk, to various hotels and subjected her to his demands for ‘sexual perversions, sex and money against her will’. The offences took place over a period of five months from April to September 1993. The court judgment described Tan in no uncertain terms as a ‘manipulator’ working his callous charm on a ‘timid and somewhat weak-minded’ woman. ‘She was unwilling to engage in any sex with you or to part with her hard-earned saving. You drove her to the end of her tether’, the presiding Justice Lai told the accused. ‘Timid, timorous, and all the more even weak-minded girls have to be protected from people like you’, he said.
