SINGAPORE — For his third sexual offence involving underage girls, a 32-year-old man was sentenced in a district court on Thursday (April 2) to a decade of corrective training and eight strokes of the cane.

Simon Wong Choy Chuan, whose Singapore permanent residency was revoked in 2018 after he was released from his previous prison stint, came up with a weekly roster for his four teenage victims to perform sex acts on him. 

He also lied and told his victims he headed the Omega secret society, knowing that they would not dare to report him to the police. In addition, he claimed to have clairvoyant abilities.

Wong pleaded guilty in February to four counts of sexual penetration of a minor. Another 24 similar charges were taken into consideration for sentencing.

His sentence was backdated to March 1, 2018.

Prosecutors sought corrective training for his actions — a harsher form of imprisonment, where the offender is unlikely to be given early release for factors such as good behaviour. This was because Wong had already been imprisoned for similar offences.

In 2007, when he was 19 years old, he was sentenced to one year of probation for having sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend.

In 2013, he was jailed for six-and-a-half years and given six strokes of the cane for similarly lying to five girls that he was possessed by multiple spirits, then forcing them to perform multiple sex acts on him.

WHAT HAPPENED

The court heard that he committed his latest offences from September 2017 — just two months after being released from prison — to February 2018, when he was aged 30.

After meeting a 15-year-old girl on Facebook through a mutual friend, Wong told her to introduce him to more female friends. He also lied that he was only 21 years old and sexually exploited her when they began dating.

The girl introduced her best friend — also aged 15 — to him, along with two other girls aged 13 and 14.

Wong lied to the other three girls that he was only 19 years old, asking them to join “his gang” and to pay him S$10 in membership fees every day.

In return, he promised to protect them from being bullied in school. He ended up collecting S$130 from them.

When he told the first victim to teach her friends how to perform sex acts, she complied after some reluctance. She did not want to risk angering him because he was her boyfriend and the “gang’s second-in-command”.

To persuade the other three girls into submitting to his demands, Wong claimed to have clairvoyant abilities. He also asked two of them to be his girlfriends, despite being in a “relationship” with the first victim.

He sexually abused them at locations such as the staircase landing of a multi-storey car park in Teck Whye, located in the Chua Chu Kang housing estate.

He also told one of them that “ill fortune” would befall her if she did not fulfil his demands.

One of the girls filed a police report against him when he kept calling her, requesting her attendance at the gang meetings.

The victims were later taken to the Child Guidance Clinic, where they were found to have an extremely low or below-average range of intelligence.

One of them failed nearly all of her subjects in 2018, became emotionally distressed and had suicidal thoughts. 

She blamed herself for what had happened, saying that she was “very dumb” and realised the acts were wrong only after she went for sex education in school.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said that Simon Wong Choy Chuan had been sentenced to 10 years of preventive detention. This is incorrect. He was sentenced to a decade of corrective training. We are sorry for the error.