Speech by Minister for Law, K Shanmugam, at the Institute of Policy Studies Conference: Harassment in Singapore: Realities, Conundrums and Approaches Moving Ahead

18 NOV 2013

18 Nov 2013 Posted in Speeches

Social context in which we operate

As we start this conference, I think it would be good to look at the social context and the background leading us to have this conference, and start thinking about whether and what we should do about harassment.
Harassment can take place anywhere, and in any form: At the workplace, in school, at home, to adults and children, and by adults and children. The means by which one can harass another have increased exponentially.

Bullying of Children
We start with what is happening with our children.
In schools, we are familiar with the kinds of bullying that take place - name-calling, inappropriate jokes, intimidating behaviour, physical attacks and the like.
This is not new and not uncommon. What is new is of course cyber-bullying of children.
A recent Microsoft Study 2012 on bullying among youth aged 8 to 17 worldwide, in which 25 countries were surveyed, found that bullying was particularly pervasive in 6 countries – China, unfortunately Singapore, India, Argentina, Russia and Turkey.¹
86 per cent of those surveyed had experienced bullying online, offline or both.
The situation in Singapore is reflective of the global trend. 83 per cent of youth in Singapore aged 8 to 17 have been bullied (in the online, offline or both spaces).
I do not intend to give a detailed speech, and will just touch on some points. I hope that the panels, which comprise of experts, will look at this issue in greater detail. We can close the discussion at the end with a Q&A session, where we can have a full discussion. I hope you will have very frank discussions with the panelists throughout the day.

Sexual Harrasment
If we move to sexual harassment, again, this has been an issue, and is an issue in many different contexts. A variety of acts qualify as sexual harassment within and outside the workplace. This is something we need to look at and see what can be done as well.

Stalking
We move to stalking. Stalking can be highly disruptive to the lives of many people, and often in devastating ways.
To give an example, a former local journalist in 2008-09 received multiple phone calls and voicemails. At one point, she received at least 21 voicemails a day, one voicemail lasting more than 54 minutes, more than 100 voicemails in a week when she went on annual leave, and numerous gifts and letters.
She eventually quit her job because of the trauma and anxiety. The stalker was fined $4,000. As a society, I think our view will be that this was not adequate.
If we look at another Asian society, Japan, which is socially conscious, according to the Japan National Police Agency, there were nearly 20,000 stalking cases in 2012 alone.
These figures are accompanied by frightening real-life examples.
There was a newly-wed who was stabbed to death by an ex-boyfriend who stalked her. He had sent her more than 1,000 emails to her cell-phone in a 2-week period.
A nursing assistant in Japan was arrested after he allegedly sent nearly 200 emails to a former girlfriend, demanding that she kill herself.

Online Harassment
If you move to the online space, the Internet has added a new dimension to the way people interact and socialise with others. There are unprecedented levels of speed and interactivity when communicating with one another in cyber space.
But the anonymous, borderless, viral and permanent nature of cyber space also makes harassment and bullying easier, and in some ways, more egregious.
Many children are au fait with use of social media eg Facebook, Twitter. These are useful tools of bullying in the hands of those who wish to do so.
As I referred to earlier, harassment can take place in the physical space and the online space. According to Microsoft, 37 per cent of youths globally have been affected by online bullying.
And unfortunately, we have the 2^nd highest rate of online bullying of youths (58%), behind only China (70%).
Together with China, we are the only two countries among the 25 surveyed where online bullying is more pervasive than bullying in the physical world. I do not know about China, but for us, I can try and guess at a reason. In the physical world, our laws are strict. We enforce them, so law and order is very pervasive in Singapore. We know what the limits are.
Someone asked me last week, how are our freedoms impacted? I do not think the issue is really freedom. The majority of us – probably over 90 per cent of us – do not need laws either in the physical space or online space to behave within the boundaries of what is decent, what is right and what is not illegal. But there will be a smaller minority who need laws to keep them in check in the physical world, to avoid criminality, and when they do engage in such conduct, to deal with it. I think the situation is no different in the online world.
So it is not really an issue of freedom to do what you want or say what you want. It is really an issue of what conduct society would consider to be criminal or egregious, and how such conduct should be regulated. It is not so much to make you a better person, but more to protect the rest of society from these actions.
We need to be very clear on what actions we are focusing on, whether we should consider it criminal, why we should consider it criminal, and if so, what the remedies should be. As Arun alluded to earlier, my preference is to use the law as a last resort, and see what other options there are. I’ll come back to that point in a minute.
When you take the online bullying of children, it is a particularly worrying phenomenon, because it really scars them, leaves them permanently damaged, and impacts their entire life.
Children are physically and psychologically less resilient than adults. They do not know how to protect themselves. They do not know where to look for help.
Sometimes, that helplessness may then manifest as violence. On other occasions, their helplessness often leads to infliction of damage on oneself, for example, suicide. There were two recent examples in 2013. There were many more:
- In the US, a 12 year old girl jumped to her death after being bullied online by as many as 15 girls who picked on her for months.²
- In the UK, a 14 year old girl hung herself after weeks of taunting by anonymous cyber bullies, including receiving messages telling her to kill herself.³
Adults also manipulate cyber tools to harass, stalk, manipulate, and abuse others.
Online harassment can be multi-dimensional.
- Pretending to be someone else
- Spreading malicious rumours, lies, deliberate untruths, inaccuracies
- Posting pictures of others without consent
- Tricking people into revealing personal information
- Hacking of email account
- Cyberstalking
- Peppering online discussions with abuses and insults which one would otherwise not utter in the context of the physical world.
Prior to this conference, REACH commissioned a study, with a three per cent margin of error, so it is quite accurate. It gave us a good sense of what people on the ground thought, rather than just people who might be louder in making their voices heard.
More than 80 per cent of those surveyed in Singapore felt online harassment to be a serious issue. This was a poll of more than 1,000 Singapore residents above the age of 15. The Singapore Kindness Movement Graciousness Index Study earlier this year also showed that a large proportion of those surveyed did not feel the need to be gracious online. That was a survey of 1,200 people.
These findings are commensurate with increasingly egregious instances of harassment reported in the local media.
I’ll just share with you one example, the example that Arun shared. Cyberbullies targeted the baby of a blogger, who had given birth prematurely because of a life-threatening condition during pregnancy. They called her baby an ‘alien’ who should be euthanised, matters that go well beyond what any decent human being would consider to be freedom to exercise one’s viewpoint or speech.

The conference today
This is the context in which we operate today.
This conference is timely, and I thank IPS for organising it again. The focus is on three areas which warrant attention both here and internationally: (1) Harassment in Schools and Bullying of Children and Youths; (2) Sexual Harassment and Stalking; (3) Online Harassment, at this Conference.
We’ve brought together experts in the field. Legal professionals, educators, social workers and civic groups are gathered today.
It is an opportunity for us to discuss issues of harassment, identify gaps in our law and available remedies, and think of possible solutions.
I think there is a need to better protect victims of harassment, both in the real world and online.

Practices of Other Jurisdictions
In that context, I think it is useful to look at what other jurisdictions have done, or are doing. Our concerns with harassment in Singapore are reflective of those in other countries, across cultures: East and West; developed and developing.
Many of these countries, including liberal democracies, have responded with strict legislation to combat harassment.
If you look at the experience of the UK, New Zealand and South Africa, they have standalone Harassment Acts. Last year, the UK introduced the specific offence of stalking to buttress its laws against such behaviour.
If you look at Australia and some of the US States, they have comprehensive state/territory legislation providing for criminal, as well as civil remedies for harassment.
Japan amended its anti-stalking laws this year, expressly making it an offence to make threats by email.
In Hong Kong, while there is no specific anti-harassment laws, the Government has been examining the need for an anti-stalking law and what form that should take.

Feedback on Practices in Singapore
In Singapore, the feedback we have been getting is that our laws are inadequate. The Miscellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act is more commonly applied, but at least as the Courts have interpreted it, it does not apply to all online conduct which we might consider egregious.
If you look at the other legislation we have, the Women’s Charter (in the context of domestic violence), Moneylenders Act (in the context of harassment for moneylending) and so on, they are specific, rather than covering general conduct.
The people we have consulted also tell us that our civil remedies are limited.
We have seen the decision of AXA Insurance. It has cast some doubt as to whether a victim can sue another for harassment in Singapore. There appears to have been no appeal.
Civil injunctions are available to restrain the perpetrators, but they may or may not be effective, because by then the information has been disseminated and widely spread.
Other forms of private action are possible, like suing for private nuisance, assault, battery and so on. These have limited applicability. But they give us a roadmap because they show not just what kinds of conduct, but also that the law has always developed by looking at what were the consequences of the conduct. We have an action for assault. Assault does not have to be physical attack. A threatened attack which has not yet become a physical attack can be assault, as long as the victim feels impacted and threatened.
The law, whether in the UK or many other Commonwealth countries, has always looked at the consequences to the victim, and there, we ask the question – does that sense of fear, threat, unhappiness need to be dealt with? Does the victim need to be protected? Where society feels that the victim ought to be protected is when the law intervenes, giving both civil and criminal remedies. Where it is part and parcel of life and society, then the law does not need to intervene.
One of the things we are doing today – the main thing we are doing today – is to keep that in mind and to ask ourselves the extent to which the law should intervene and give remedies, to what extent should we leave the situation alone. That is really what we are talking about.
Again, going back to public opinion, 87 per cent of those polled by REACH were of the view that those who harass others should be dealt with firmly under the law. That gives you what perspective public opinion has.
More than 80 per cent also support tougher measures to deal with harassment online and offline (about 83 per cent of those polled). They are in favour of giving courts powers to order that online comments be taken down if they caused distress or alarm to others, such as if you post a naked picture of someone else. The feeling is that if the person does not take it down, the courts should be given the power. That is just one of the examples. There are many other examples of posting which cause alarm or distress.
82 per cent also felt that people should have a legal right to require that online factual inaccuracies about themselves be corrected, or should give victims the power to require a correction for factual inaccuracies.
It is really quite incredible and illustrative that more than 8 out of 10 Singaporeans felt the need for these laws to be in place.

First principles
I think really, it is because harassment today affects people from all walks of life, young and old, male or female. So, everyone has felt the impact and are able to take a view.
Some anti-social and disruptive behaviour, if we leave unchecked, will strike at the heart and foundation of society, and impact on the rule of law as it is practised. And that really is the bedrock, and the way our entire society is structured.
Our children must have a right to grow up in a stable and safe environment, free from bullying by peers, discrimination. Our women, – 8 out of 10 victims of sexual harassment are women, 2 out of 10 are men – should be free from sexual discrimination. People should be able to go about their lives without being abused.
We should not tolerate unsavoury conduct which creates an intimidating, hostile or abusive environment.
Conduct which we consider to be unacceptable in the physical world must also be regulated in the virtual world. The difficulties of propagating norms in the virtual world should not prevent us from dealing with it if that conduct should, in the first place, be criminalised.

Conclusion
These are the issues that people in this room, I hope, would be discussing. I encourage all of you to express your views clearly. There is a wide range of topics that we are discussing, but one caveat: my Ministry cannot, in one stroke, deal with all these issues through legislation.
For example, bullying in schools. It is not something we can be specific about in the legislation, because schools do not come under my Ministry. We can deal with – in any legislation on harassment – bullying, generically. After that, it is left to, I think, my Senior Minister of State and her Minister to deal with it in the context of schools and see what other administrative norms and rules need to be put in place.
Likewise, sexual harassment in the workplace is not something we can cover specifically because it is under the Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Manpower. We can again look at harassment in the generic sense and try and deal with sexual harassment in the law. And how it applies in the context of the workplace would have to be left to the Courts, hopefully with administrative norms and conventions developing as a result of the law.
So that caveat is really to say that we may not be able to fully legislate for everything that we discuss. But at least if we start discussing them and identifying the norms towards which society ought to move, and put in place some legislation as a marker, I think that gives a very solid framework to take further steps. These things cannot be dealt with by legislation alone. They have to be dealt with ultimately by society accepting some conventions, norms or behaviour.
In terms of the balance between legislation, self-regulation and self-help, as Arun had indicated in my previous discussions with IPS and some of the panelists, my own approach is that the law should be the last resort. First, we need to try and create an environment where norms of conduct are established and therefore people will feel that they ought not to partake in particular types of conduct. For example, if everyone frowns upon sexual harassment, that will create a powerful norm without even having to resort to the law.
Second, we need to, as far as possible, allow people self-help without having to go to the police and the courts. For example, if there are attacks against someone which say amount to harassment or involves similar factual inaccuracies, instead of having to file a complaint with the police or getting their lawyers to sue, if possible we should look at trying to get it corrected.
If it is not too egregious, we should as far as possible try to leave it at that. Have the correction published, either in terms of what the victim says is the truth, or in appropriate cases, the original writer of the article makes the correction and puts out the truth, or have something in the article itself which says there was a factual inaccuracy and this has been corrected, something like that. Leave it to the readers to judge for themselves. There is really no need for the law to get too deeply involved in these things.
Of course, at the next layer, if people refuse to correct those inaccuracies, the law can be given some power to intervene. But as far as possible, keep the law very much in the background. Ultimately, of course, where it is thoroughly egregious, then criminal and civil remedies will come in. But as far possible, we try to keep it to a limited space.
That is my mental framework, but I’m happy to listen to suggestions. I hope you will have a good conference.
Thank you.

^[1] Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Turkey, UAE, UK, US.

^[2]Rebecca Sedwick, The New Paper, 3 Nov 2013.

^[3]Hannah Smith, The New Paper, 3 Nov 2013.

Last updated on 21 Nov 2013