SINGAPORE, Dec 13 — A mother noticed red marks resembling nail marks on her autistic child’s arm after his closed-door session with an educational and behavioural therapist.
Suspicious, she installed a closed-circuit television, which recorded the therapist’s physical abuse of the boy on several occasions during the next session.
Nur Amira Muhamad Razali, 33, was sentenced yesterday to three weeks’ jail after she pleaded guilty to voluntarily causing hurt to a nine-year-old boy.
The boy and his mother cannot be named under a court order to protect the victim’s identity.
Two similar charges relating to Amira’s treatment of another boy, aged six, were taken into consideration during sentencing.
The court heard that Amira graduated from the Singapore Institute of Management with a degree in psychology in 2016 and completed the registered behavioural technician course in July 2020.
At the time of the offence, she was working as an educational and behavioural therapist at an autism therapy centre.
The boy, who was diagnosed with severe autism when he was four, had been unable to express himself verbally and was attending educational and behavioural therapy sessions with Amira for five years.
Before the incident, the victim’s parents had a good relationship with Amira and even attended her wedding.
Suspicious red marks
The therapy sessions were conducted in a bedroom at the boy’s home and would last for about 90 minutes each time.
Sometime in June 2020, the mother noticed that there were scratches on her son’s back and a red lump on his hand.
She initially brushed it aside, thinking that her son was careless, but on July 28, she discovered that there were red marks on his left arm that resembled nail marks.
The discovery was made right after the boy had completed a therapy session with Amira.
Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Tan Shi Yun said that the boy’s mother then decided to set up a hidden camera in the bedroom, suspecting that her son may have been bruised during his therapy session.
After a therapy session the next day, she reviewed the recorded footage and found that Amira had hurt her son multiple times.
This included scratching and grabbing the boy’s neck, hitting his forehead and mouth, and hitting his left arm.
About a week later, the boy’s mother took him to a clinic where he was examined by Dr Leo Hamilton who discovered sustained bruising on his neck and elbow that appeared in a “fingerprint” pattern.
The medical report stated that the injuries the boy had sustained raised concerns over physical abuse, DPP Tan said.
‘A vulnerable victim’
Defence counsel Joyce Khoo urged the court to consider imposing a two-week jail term for her client as she is pregnant and has a one-year-old son.
Khoo said Amira was under stress when she committed the offence as she had just been diagnosed with at least five fibroids.
Amira had also been told that the fibroids, a non-cancerous growth in the womb, could affect her ability to conceive, she said.
However, Khoo added that Amira was told about this possible effect after she had committed the offence, and it was not intended to be regarded as a mitigating factor.
In delivering her sentence, Principal District Judge Jill Tan noted that there was an abuse of trust as Amira was the boy’s therapist and his parents had left him in her sole care.
“Even if he was not an easy student, given his autism, you ought to have exercised more patience and gentleness with him,” the judge told Amira.
The judge added that the victim was vulnerable and non-verbal, and Amira’s acts might have gone undetected if not for the red marks and the recorded footage.
The judge noted that Amira is now 26 weeks’ pregnant but said that a jail term of three weeks would be appropriate because her condition does not outweigh the aggressive factors of the case.
For voluntarily causing hurt, Amira could have been jailed for up to three years or fined up to S$5,000, or both. With the offence committed against a person below the age of 14, she could have faced twice the maximum punishment imposed by the court. — TODAY
