The Role of Audio Transcription in Singapore Disputes: Harassment Cases

When we think of harassment, it is common to visualise the more commonly reported cases of office harassment, stalking or online "doxxing". (Doxxing is the act of publishing private information about the target and perhaps even their family members online, with malicious intents.) However, what constitutes harassment in the legal context is broader than this, which we will touch on in this article.

The distress experienced by the victims of harassment is not to be ignored as this has lasting consequences for one's emotional and mental well-being in the long term. Finding recourse through legal proceedings is one of the ways to deal with such a situation should one find themselves in this unfortunate position.

This is where digital audio recordings and their accurate transcription evolve from being merely supplemental evidence to constituting foundational evidentiary pillars in contemporary harassment litigation proceedings. The ability to capture and analyse verbal interactions objectively is indispensable in establishing the facts of alleged misconduct, especially under Singapore's comprehensive Protection from Harassment Act 2014 (POHA).   

As the fifth article in our series on audio transcription in Singapore disputes, we delve into how these vital pieces of evidence support not only legal cases but also internal HR investigations in cases of harassment, coercion and threats.

What Constitutes Harassment?

Taken from the 2020 Revised Edition of the Protection from Harassment Act 2014:

	An Act to protect persons against harassment and unlawful stalking and false statements of fact, and to provide for the establishment of the Protection from Harassment Court.

Harassment is broadly defined under POHA, covering a wide range of anti-social behaviours committed in the physical world or online. Understanding the diverse contexts in which harassment occurs is crucial to appreciating the scope of audio evidence required.   

Among the cases of harassment filed with the Singapore court, cyber-bullying and doxxing take the top two spots, followed by workplace harassment, sexual harassment and lastly, harassment by debt collectors and creditors.

Documenting Coercion, Threats and Psychological Abuse

Harassment is not limited to physical spaces; it is often psychological, manifesting as verbal degradation, threats and isolation. Victims frequently utilise personal recording devices, such as smartphones, to capture attempts at coercion and threats by perpetrators because these acts, particularly in cases of domestic abuse or coercive control, seldom leave physical traces.   

Coercive control involves the pervasive regulation of a victim's life through non-violent verbal means. Since physical evidence is often lacking, victims must provide a "record or history of the instances and frequency of abuse," which explicitly includes audio recordings and text messages. Transcription converts these transient, repetitive verbal patterns into a tangible, reviewable document, demonstrating the continuous nature of abuse required by the courts for POHA to apply. The acknowledgement that emotional harm is "no less significant" than physical harm emphasizes the critical role of recorded sound in these sensitive cases.   

Harassment Across All Contexts

Crucially, harassment does not only happen in the workplace. POHA addresses alarm or distress intentionally caused by using threatening, abusive, or insulting words or behaviour, or by making such communication. Examples include loitering near a victim's home or work place, following someone or the repeated circulation of revealing photographs.   

The Tripartite Alliance on Fair & Progressive Employment Practices (TAFEP) on managing workplace harassment in Singapore defines misconduct broadly, including threatening, abusive, or insulting language, cyber bullying, sexual harassment and stalking. Critically, harassment can occur through digital channels such as email, text messaging or social media, or even outside the office on business trips or client premises. 

The necessity of audio evidence here is to establish the specific content of threats or abusive language, linking the words directly to the intent of causing alarm or distress.   

Judicial Scrutiny and High-Profile POHA Enforcement

The legislative response to harassment includes the establishment of the Protection from Harassment Court (PHC), dedicated to accelerating hearings and providing timely relief for victims.   

Case Example 1: Unlawful Stalking and Digital Threats

One of the landmark early convictions under POHA, reported widely in the Straits Times, involved Lai Zhi Heng (2016), who was jailed for unlawful stalking. Lai repeatedly used digital threats, specifically threatening to release the victim's nude photographs, if she failed to comply with his requests. His actions included uploading photographs to a student club's Facebook page and putting up physical fliers with her photograph and harassing messages near her home. 

Case Example 2: Judicial Scrutiny of Evidence Integrity

The courts maintain strict control over how digital evidence is presented, focusing heavily on whether the submitted material is a neutral, factual representation of the event. In a high-profile dispute case involving a doctor at a Caltex station, a district court ordered the defendant to remove captions he had placed into two videos documenting the run-in. This judicial action confirms the court’s rigorous alertness to the risk of  misrepresentation or alteration.   

The implication for professional transcription is clear: the judicial preference is for raw, authenticated evidence and a neutral, verbatim transcript. Summarisation, interpretation, editing or adding context that is not directly audible or visible must be strictly avoided.

Transcription in HR Investigations: The Need for Legal-Ready Records

Internal corporate investigations into harassment or discrimination are essential components of a robust corporate security system. For employers, the imperative is speed; failure to engage in a prompt investigation into allegations might lead to significant liabilities.   

Transcription drastically improves the internal investigation process. Transcribing witness interviews captures every word that is said, serving as an objective record that helps identify leads or details that might have been overlooked during a live interview. For HR professionals grappling with high-risk investigations (such as sexual harassment in the office), transcription aids immensely in helping the investigating officers sieve through and organise all the materials provided by different parties, some of whom may have the tendency to ramble and talk at length about unrelated matters.   

A critical operational challenge arises because HR often prioritizes readability and expediency, leading to the use of "clean transcripts" where non-essential language like filler words ("um," "uh") is removed. However, legal standards mandate the strict verbatim inclusion of these elements. Filler words and non-verbal sounds must be documented in legal transcripts, as they are crucial indicators of witness credibility, state of mind, or potential deception during testimony. If an HR investigator relies on a cleaned transcript, the removal of these vital elements can compromise the credibility and admissibility of the transcription as legal evidence, making the original evidence susceptible to challenge. Internal HR investigation protocols must therefore adopt a "Legal-Ready" transcription methodology from the outset.   

Avenues for Recourse

Besides taking the legal route to file for a protection order against the perpetrator of harassment, where the parties involved are neighbours staying in the same community, help can also be sought from the Community Mediation Centre, or, as a last resort, the Community Disputes Resolution Tribunal (CDRT).

The Indispensable Role of Professional Transcription and Translation

For audio recordings to serve their purpose in court, they must be accurately transcribed.   

A professional translation agency like Wei.Trans.Create understands the unique demands of legal documentation in Singapore. With years of experience in legal translation and transcription for the Singapore courts, Wei.Trans.Create ensures that every word, repetition and nuance is precisely captured, preserving the integrity of the evidence. This meticulous attention to detail is crucial for lawyers, judges and all parties involved to understand the full context of the spoken word, enabling them to make informed decisions.   

Audio recordings in harassment cases might include emotionally fraught conversations, attempts at coercion, or threats. People might shout or talk over one another. Sometimes, people are located at different distances from the recording device; or some of them might simply have a habit of speaking softly.   

These situations present challenges during transcription and translation, as words are not articulated clearly enough to be transcribed without a doubt as to their meaning. A role of a professional transcriber-translator includes patient re-listening of audio files with the aim of identifying and separating the different voices of the parties captured in the recordings.   

The Rojak in Singapore’s Audio Transcription Projects

In Singapore's multilingual and multicultural environment, conversations at home, in offices and in various other settings rarely occur in purely monolingual forms.  

The common languages translated and transcribed in Singapore include English, Singlish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien, Malay and Indonesian. Furthermore, when individuals are highly emotional, their speech can become incoherent and messy. The role of a transcriber-translator is to act as a neutral party, accurately converting what was said from an audio format onto paper.   

Understanding the Legality and Illegality of Recordings

A common question regarding such recordings is whether they are illegal in Singapore and their admissibility in the Singapore courts.  

To understand when and under what circumstance your audio recording can be admissible in the Singapore courts, you will need to consult with an experienced lawyer on this. The admissibility of audio recordings in Singaporean legal disputes is a nuanced area, balancing the need for truth with privacy concerns and procedural fairness.

Mandating Clarity in the Pursuit of Justice

The proliferation of digital recording devices has provided victims of harassment, coercive control and threats with unprecedented means of evidence collection. However, the subsequent conversion of this raw audio data into judicially viable evidence requires rigorous professional and technical adherence to strict standards.   

The analysis confirms that the intersection of technology and harassment law in Singapore places audio transcription firmly at the centre of both investigative and judicial proceedings. For HR departments, transcription ensures swift, objective internal fact-finding and record-keeping, which is critical for mitigating corporate liability. For the Singapore courts, transcription provides the essential textual scaffolding needed to analyse complex, often non-physical evidence of harassment and coercive control under POHA.   

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We hope that you have enjoyed reading about the role of audio transcription and translation in harassment cases in Singapore.

Keep a lookout for the next article in our series on Singapore disputes - construction litigation.

And if you have any questions or audio recordings that require transcription and/or translation, or if you need to translate your any evidence into English, contact us here for a quote. Your files will be treated with confidentiality.