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A Study of Outrage of Modesty Offenders in a Singapore Prison

Outrage of modesty (OOM) offenders cause considerable annoyance and distress to their victims. The offending behaviours include touching, grabbing or fondling of erogenous or non-erogenous parts of the victim's body. The purpose of this study is to examine a prison cohort of OOM offenders and to compare them with a group of OOM offenders who had been remanded in a state mental hospital. All prisoners serving sentence over a two-year study period were interviewed. They were of similar mean age to the hospital cohort but were better educated, more likely to be married and most were working. Victims tended to be young females with an average age of 19 years. Psychotic disorders were rarely present, although 15% had a dissocial personality disorder. Those with previous OOM convictions were likely to have had past psychiatric consultations and were more likely to be unmarried. However, there were no statistically significant differences between convicted first-time offenders and repeat offenders with respect to age, educational level, nature of offences and alcohol consumption. The prisoners were less inclined to commit their offences in the mornings. Breasts and genitalia were the favoured targets for molest action, irrespective of time or place or whether the offence was committed by a first or repeat offender. The offences were often committed along staircases, corridors and in crowded public places. CONCLUSION: Interesting differences emerged when a cohort of prisoners was compared with another cohort of molesters remanded in a psychiatric hospital. The prison cohort contained fewer individuals with psychiatric illness, whereas the converse was true for the hospital cohort. Although it is thought that sexual offences are typically committed by those with no psychiatric disorders, much depends on the type of study population being evaluated. If the study population is from a prison setting, fewer mentally ill individuals would be expected. In these situations the Dissocial Personality Disorders are expected to be more prevalent. The surprising finding that the prison group comprised those who were fairly well educated with high employment contrasted with an age-old concept of the criminal population as a whole. While mental illnesses tended to be found in a minority of the prisoners, there seemed to be an indication that those who had committed repeat offences were in some way more psychologically impaired than those who had molested for the first time. Such impairments were probably responsible for problems in forming intimate relationships leading up to marriage.