A ”most despicable” Singapore mother who helped in the regular rape of her nine-year-old daughter has been told she must serve-out a 36-year jail sentence and is lucky not to be jailed for life, a report said on Tuesday.
The woman had helped her married lover sexually abuse her daughter almost daily over a five-year period, and also took part in some of the abuse herself, the Straits Times said.
She was ”the most despicable female I’ve ever come across,” Chief Justice Yong Pung How said in rejecting her appeal.
”In my 50-odd years in the Bar, I’ve never come across such a despicable female… Never in my life did I think I would find that a woman would do this to her own daughter.”
The woman, who cannot be named to protect the girl’s identity, and her lover Peh Thian Hui, were sentenced in May to serve 36 years’ jail each. Peh is also to receive 24 strokes of the cane.
Their lawyers had argued the sentences were
”manifestly excessive”. Yong said they should be jailed for life, but Singapore law does not have a life term for rape offences.
”This sort of thing merits a life imprisonment. My feeling is they should be there for the rest of their lives,” he said. When the pair were originally sentenced in May, Judge Tay Yong Kwang said it debases all notions of motherhood ”when a mother watches and participates in the rape of her young daughter by her lover”.
It was an ”incomprehensible atrocity that a mother would order her little nine-year-old daughter to submit to her then 42-year-old lover in this sordid fashion”.
At first the girl refused the man’s advances, but her mother reportedly scolded her and said that ”all women will like such activities”. – Sapa-AFP