She wasn’t the first, and nor will she be the last, but her case illustrates Singaporean attitudes to harassment: In 2019, National University of Singapore (NUS) student Monica Baey took to Instagram to speak out against a fellow student who had filmed her in the shower at a university hostel. NUS had treated the voyeur with lenience.
A new kind of solidarity has begun to take root in Singapore. Women have decided to take a stand against gender-based violence. They're speaking up, pressing institutions to better manage the issue. And the internet is their principal tool.
Baey used it to rally support. This is particularly significant in the context of Singapore, where the state controls mass media institutions — newspapers, radio, and television — at the expense of civil liberties and press freedom. Yet 90 percent of Singapore's population was using the internet daily as of 2022, creating fertile ground for digital activism.
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