Initially receiving only a “manifestly inadequate” sentence, the couple who starved their domestic helper for over a year have since gotten a manifestly longer jail term. Both 48-year-old Chong Sui Foon and her 48-year-old husband will have to serve 10 months in prison each, The Straits Times reported.
Both had been convicted of failing to provide their Filipino maid, Thelma Oyasan Gawidan, with enough food while she was employed by them. So severe was their treatment that Gawidan’s weight dropped dramatically from 49kg to 29.4kg before she finally managed to escape their home in April 2014.
Chong was originally jailed for three months, while Lim initially received three weeks in jail and a $10,000 fine. Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon allowed them to stagger their sentences in order to make arrangements for their three children — Lim will only start serving his sentence a week after his wife is released from prison. They have also been permanently banned from employing maids, for obvious reasons.
The Chief Justice didn’t mince his words, calling the couple’s treatment of their former maid a “systematic cruelty and denial of her basic human dignity”. Gawidan started working for the couple in January 2013, and she was only given instant noodles twice a day for meals. Showers were a luxury that were only permitted once or twice a week, and even so, at a public toilet in her employers’ Orchard Road condo. The domestic helper was also forced to sleep in the storeroom in the day and worked overnight. Her mobile phone, passport and salary were taken away from her as well.
Every time Gawidan asked her employer for more food, Chong would often refuse, and the Filipino was also prohibited from buying or eating any other food at home. Although Chong claimed that her obsessive-compulsive disorder was to blame for mistreating the Filipino, psychiatrists denied the link to her mental illness.
Regarding Lim’s sentence, Chief Justice Menon noted that he was equally culpable for allowing the cruelty to continue as he had full knowledge of it all.
Now 41, Gawidan has since returned home after her former employers compensated her with $20,000.
