Singapore police to roll out priority queues for reporting sexual crimes at neighbourhood centres
Home Affairs and Law Minister K.Shanmugam highlights recent initiatives to improve support for sexual crime victims in Singapore.
SINGAPORE — Starting from April this year, sexual crime survivors in Singapore will be given priority and greater privacy when reporting crimes at neighbourhood police centres.
During the Sexual Crime Awareness Seminar held at the Police Cantonment Complex on Friday (14 April), Minister for Law and Home Affairs K. Shanmugam said that the police will be progressively rolling out the "Sexual Crime Report" option in the queue management kiosks.
This option will allow survivors to indicate that they are reporting a sexual crime and provide them with a private space.
“This year, we will increase our efforts to support victims of sexual crimes and that hopefully will lower the barriers to report sexual crimes,” Shanmugam said.
"With the new 'Sexual Crime Report' option at the kiosk, when someone selects this option, the system will immediately alert officers at the neighbourhood police centres, and the person reporting the sexual crime will then be given priority and some privacy when they come forward to report," Shanmugam added.
Sexual crimes remain a concern in Singapore, according to a police press release issued on Friday.
About 9,629 reports of sexual assault - including rape, sexual assault by penetration, outrage of modesty and sexual crime involving children and vulnerable victims - were reported between 2019 and 2022.
Last year, molestation cases returned to pre-pandemic levels, with 1,610 outrage of modesty cases reported in 2022, up from 1,474 cases in 2021.
Enhancing support for victims of sexual crime
Shanmugam also elaborated on other initiatives put in place by the police to better support victims of sexual crime.
Early this month, the police formed the Sexual Crime and Family Violence Command (SFC) under the Criminal Investigation Department, which has officers specifically trained to deal with sexual crime and family violence cases.
The minister said the police are also improving their infrastructure and processes, such as the refurbished One-Stop Abuse Forensic Examination Centre (OneSAFE Centre) at the Police Cantonment Complex, which will open later in April. The centre will allow sexual crime victims to undergo forensic and medical examinations in a private facility.
“The redesigned layout and environment of the Centre will provide victims with more privacy, more comfort, during the investigation process. The Centre will also include two new medical rooms, which will increase the capacity for forensic medical examination," said Shanmugam.
Acknowledging that there is always room for improvement in the way the police manage sexual crime cases, Shanmugam emphasised that the police will 'continuously learn, internalise and improve'.
"We will never get this completely right, because any organisation that has a large number of people dealing with a large number of different types of cases, with human agency, even with the best will in the world, there will be errors, if not something else," he said.
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