Between 1996 and 2000, over a period of four years, a young girl was raped by her mother's boyfriend Peh Thian Hui (白添辉 Bái Tiānhuī), a married father of three.

[4] Peh Thian Hui, a Singaporean citizen and housing agent married with three children (one son and two daughters), first met his girlfriend in 1988 through the introduction of his childhood friend, who was the husband of the woman.

As they worked together, Peh and his friend's wife grew closer to one another, and aside from this, the woman was gradually drifting apart from her husband, who began to stay away from the flat from 1990 onwards, and only returned on public holidays or weekends.

[18] Some instances of the abuse were given in detail according to court documents related to the case: one of them took place on the night of 31 December 1999, when Peh (who was staying over his lover's flat at that time) raped the girl inside the bedroom as usual, while the television was having a live broadcast of the countdown to the year 2000.

The victim did not wish to stay with her mother any longer and she finally told a laptop store owner and his wife - whom she befriended the year before - about the sexual abuse she gone through.

On 5 November 2001, after much persuasion from the couple, the victim, accompanied by the laptop store owner, went to a police station to file a report against Peh and her mother.

Peh faced a total of 62 charges, including 54 counts of rape and eight other counts related to oral sex and molestation, while the female co-accused faced a total of sixty charges, most of which were related to abetting Peh to rape her daughter and the others included the possession of pornographic material and molesting her daughter.

[24] When the incident first came to light through the media coverage of the trial, it sparked a huge public outcry and many Singaporeans were shocked and angered to hear that a mother had helped her boyfriend to rape her own daughter, and even forced her daughter to undergo such a traumatizing ordeal, and most of them (including readers who telephoned the press) condemned the couple for their heinous acts.

[28] The prosecution, consisting of Ravneet Kaur and Francis Ng, argued that the sexual crimes committed by Peh and his co-accused were particularly atrocious and inhumane, and they cited the trauma of the victim and her age when she was raped by Peh, and the number of such sexual abuses that occurred in this case to support their notion for a harsh and deterrent punishment.

Not only that, the prosecution submitted that the female defendant's betrayal of her child's trust, her failure to uphold her maternal duty of protecting the victim and her role of instigating and abetting the rapes should also be taken into consideration, as these factors made the victim's mother equally culpable for the horrific ordeal she subjected her daughter with and that her punishment should be as severe as that of Peh for the case.

[5][38] On the same date of the couple's conviction, the trial judge, Judicial Commissioner Tay Yong Kwang, delivered his verdict on sentence.

Stating that Peh's crimes were not a one-off crime of passion, the judge concluded that based on the various aggravating factors of the case and his sexual obsession with female genitalia, it was convincingly clear that Peh's perversion "must never be allowed to touch and affect" another young girl's life, and that he should also be isolated from society for as long as possible under the law, including the life of the victim in the long run.

[45][46] The judge also did not put much weight in the claims of alleged childhood trauma raised by the defendants, stating that these were not the excuses for their crimes.

[51] At that time in May 2002, the couple's sentence of 36 years in prison were known to be one of the harshest penalties ever meted out for convicted sex offenders in Singapore.