29 March 2025: Chia Boon Teck's lack of situational awareness

This is the last wrap for March 2025. April is a special month for We, The Citizens—this newsletter will be 7 years old on the 28th! To celebrate, I'm offering a discount: 25% off the first month if you subscribe monthly, or 25% off the first year for an annual sub. Just click the option you prefer below:

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There's long been a pattern of public servants leaving their jobs to become PAP Members of Parliament or ministers. When they make this transition, it's always expressed in very humble terms about "making greater contributions" or responding to a calling to serve the people. Naked ambition is unseemly; the furthest one can go is to say that they're ready to step up if called upon. We're supposed to believe that they quit their jobs without any certainty of actually being fielded by the PAP. 🙄

CNA has an article about "high-flying bureaucrats" being recruited into politics. In it, Inderjit Singh, a former PAP MP, commented that the PAP might be comfortable with former public servants because they're known to be "loyalist" and therefore trustworthy.

My question: "loyalist" in what sense? "Loyal" to whom?

It's precisely the issue I brought up in WTC's first GE2025 special issue that I sent out a few days ago. If you haven't read it yet, check it out here:

GE2025: Party politics in non-partisan spaces

What does it mean for one political party to be so entrenched in spaces and institutions that are supposed to be non-partisan?

We, The CitizensKirsten Han

It looks like even former Nominated Members of Parliament are going to hop over to the PAP. This shows up the NMP scheme for the farce that it is. What Singapore needs is an equal playing field for free and fair elections, not schemes offering ostensibly non-partisan parliamentarians to create the illusion of there being political plurality in Parliament.

Meanwhile, Ong Ye Kung, the health minister, was asked recently if a greater opposition presence in Parliament would disturb the political balance in Singapore. Simisai? Our problem is that there's no political balance in this country. The playing field is overwhelmingly skewed in favour of one party and that's not a good thing. Anyway, Ong talked about the importance of having an effective government, which is usually PAP-speak for "vote PAP and give us an overwhelming majority unless you want ChAOs".

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Someone get Chia Boon Teck into a class about consent and rape culture. I've been reading Hawon Jung's Flowers of Fire: The Insider Story of South Korea's Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women's Rights Worldwide and the shocking level of sexism and misogyny she recounts in the book is just blood-boiling, so I did not need yet another example of a man spewing victim-blaming comments all over the public sphere. Then in comes Chia, an established lawyer who has been active in the Law Society for a long time, with an absolute howler of a LinkedIn post in which he snarkily commented on the details of a rape case that recently ended with a conviction. He pointed to the 30-year-old victim, saying she was "not exactly a babe in the woods" and suggested that she should have been aware that a dating app like Tinder "ain't no LinkedIn". He said much more that I won't repeat here, because fuck that guy. I'll just share an old issue about the importance of consent and how it works:

We need to talk about consent.

Given that there have been so many cases of sexual assault, harassment, and molest reported in Singapore recently, I decided to do a special issue on the issue of consent.

We, The CitizensKirsten Han

Chia's comments sparked an uproar—rightfully so. As AWARE points out, such comments could make it even harder for victims and survivors of sexual assault to report what happened to them. He's since had to resign as vice-president and council member of the Law Society, but doesn't seem to have learnt very much. This is what he told CNA:

Following the backlash, Mr Chia took down the LinkedIn post. He told CNA that the comments were meant to draw people's attention to their situational awareness and not to cast blame on any party.

"As a criminal lawyer, my intent was not to cast blame on any party, but to highlight the importance of situational awareness – both to guard against being assaulted and to avoid actions that could later be misconstrued," he said.

"My comments were meant to encourage reflection on how individuals can better protect themselves in social situations. This is not about shifting responsibility but about understanding real-world risks."

The principle is really rather simple: the blame for sexual assault lies entirely with the person committing the assault. It doesn't matter how old the victim is, what app they were using, where they went, what they were wearing, what they ate or drank... what matters is that the perpetrator acted without consent.

It seems as if Chia himself had no "situational awareness" about how his comments played into rape culture. It makes me wonder: how normalised is this attitude within his social circles, so much so that it didn't even seem to occur to him that the post was going to be a problem?

Around the region

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