UPDATE 29 Nov 2018 00:05PM: Okay so after I posted at 8:36AM this morning, there was a Mothership article that came out 9 hours later at 6:02PM that used the screenshot of the CJC Principal’s email my friend gave ME, specifically, permission to use, and nobody else. I feel the need to point out that not once did the writer, Sulaiman Daud, try to contact me, and that I did not give them permission to use the screenshot of the CJC Principal’s email.

I obviously didn’t do this for the money, but it does bother me how he’s getting paid for basically providing an “objective” summary of what I stayed up all night to collate and write. The objectivity does bother me too because I actually care about this (why else would I put in so much effort??); he’s reporting it matter-of-factly for profit. Using MY framework, no less: reference to sginstababes > provide screenshots > talk about schools’ feedback > reference instagram’s impotence. All he did was take out all my very strong opinions and provided none of his own.

Even if he somehow got screenshots of the account elsewhere so it’s not clear-cut plagiarism, my point is that the flow of his article isn’t even entirely original AND I was only credited perfunctorily under one word as a “source.” A living breathing source he did not try to contact. Additionally, the credit under the screenshot of the email he reposted doesn’t even link back to here. I mean, c’mon I basically did half his work for him lmao.

And besides, I would have gladly given permission because I really disagree with the CJC Principal’s stance. In fact, Mothership can continue using it with my blessing. I just think that if the writer is just anyhowly taking other ppl’s photos and reposting it for his own benefit without asking for permission, it’s really, really ironic given the context of this situation.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and thank you everybody who boosted this/ reported the account. Let’s see if Mothership replies my instagram DM.

In case you’re not active on instagram/ acquainted with teenagers, there’s a relatively new instagram account that goes by the handle ‘sgjcbabes’ and what it does is post very voyeuristic photos of 16 to 18-year old girls in their school uniform. I was notified of its existence by a friend who’s studying for her A levels. Many people have tried reporting it to instagram but instagram just says there isn’t a problem. It is infuriating.

It’s a private account, meaning you have to request to follow, and I have no idea what being “verified to follow” means because they added that part only after I followed them to collect data.

The photos are allegedly submitted by JC boys, and seem to come from a variety of sources including the girls’ personal instagram accounts (posts AND stories), cropped class/CCA photos, personal facebook accounts, official school photos taken professionally by the FSV club, and there’s even a photo that was clearly taken secretly on the MRT. One particular post didn’t even bother to blur out the students’ names on their project work presentation name tags.















As if the sginstababes debacle wasn’t already a lesson in itself, someone actually thought to himself, “Hey how about we do the same thing BUT SPECIFICALLY WITH MINORS IN SCHOOL UNIFORMS?” Honestly what the hell is wrong with him?? He has to be some kind of pervert.

I think what’s really disturbing about this is how the guy (or guys – we can’t know) is specifically targeting young girls in their school uniforms/CCA uniforms/P.E. outfits. He doesn’t want polished professional photos of girls who have had their hair and makeup done and who look grown up, or even photos of girls wearing skimpy clothing/swimwear, which is what one would normally find on any chiobu appreciation page because society has become so inured to the objectification of women, especially online where images themselves have currency, that degrading behaviour like this is normalised. One could say it’s not a sexism thing, but why isn’t there an account called “SgJcHunks” or something to that effect?

Most importantly, this guy isn’t just trying to collect photos of flawless-looking young girls in bikinis to beat his meat to. No, he takes objectification further by turning it into fetishism*. He wants JC girls in uniform and no makeup, not Polytechnic girls in their normal clothes who could pass for any age. The very fact that these girls are in school-issued attire marks them as being of a certain age group, between 16-18 (which is a non-legal age by the way), and he finds that attractive because he likes girls who are below the age of 20. The presence of a school uniform is a sign of how young they are. In other words, HE LIKES YOUNG GIRLS AND THEREFORE IS RUNNING A PAGE DEDICATED TO COLLECTING PHOTOS OF THEM. It’s super obvious.

It’s not exactly pedophilia, but it’s pretty damn close in my books especially if the guy is 40-something, which is very likely given the way that he talks.

And as if posting photos THAT ARE NOT HIS TO POST isn’t bad enough, he tries to turn it into some kind of online pageant by asking people to “vote” with “Admire points” by liking the posts, and then the girl with the most likes is hailed “Queen'”of the moment. To make it more interactive for his followers, after a girl has “won,” he posts her photo on his story inviting people to “rate” her. Is this supposed to be flattering? Why does he address the girl directly, saying, “You are our most admired babe as of now!” as if she can see it? As a girl, I don’t think any girl would want to have any kind of title on such a repulsive page as this.

Furthermore, what an account like this does is encourage others to join him. There are people asking him for the girls social media profiles (and ironically, he replies, “we dont expose sry” as if it’s somehow okay to post entire albums of far-from-legal girls online because their images are magically distinct from their persons so whatever you do with/to a photo does not affect the person itself), and also people who suddenly have the license to comment whatever they want on the girls’ looks, saying “This one ugly,” or “this-and-that school has better girls than this,” because a platform like this allows men to treat these girls as nothing more than objects for their visual consumption and gratification without being punished for it.





It really isn’t any business of their’s (or anyone’s) to decide whether or not a girl is chio/not chio because the girl’s job is not to be chio for you. Her job is to study for her A levels in the supposedly safe and protected environment of her fenced-up school campus. What the creator of sgjcbabes did is provide a (yet another) space where men can feel free to act like dickheads (pun intended) and threaten the safety of these girls who are just going about their normal student lives AND following the school rules.

Thankfully, some people followed this account not to ogle at minors, but to fight back in whatever small way they can. There are people who lambast OP for being a pervert, telling them to take down a certain album, or just insulting OP with a hearty “Fuck u” the way teenagers are wont to do. I wonder why OP hasn’t deleted the comments yet. Maybe because he’s not very familiar with instagram and so he doesn’t know how to.

Which leads to me to my theory that the owner of this account is not actually a JC boy, for whom it is normal to be interested in girls this age. No, I think he’s actually a dirty old man who created this account so that JC boys can provide him with the pictures he desires.

So many things point to this: the awkward syntax, the typos, the lack of slang phrases or references to memes, the inconsistent capitalisation of first letters, the general inactivity, the unnatural use of English, etc. The captions are really gross I doubt all of them were written by actual teenagers. There’s just something off about them. At the time of writing, these are all the captions used:

“Looking like an angel”

“Stunning ever since i first saw her.”

“Hyper active bomb”

“Cutie”

“Such an adorable babe”

“Innocent looking with nice assests, what a delight! 👌🍭”

“She’s the type i want”

“She’s my fantasy idol 🤤”

“Innocently cute outside but she’d be wilding on the inside”

“Nerdy mess of a teaser”

“Beautiful n slim!”

“Adorable little Doll”

For example, “nice assests”? You expect me to believe that a JC boy can’t even spell “assets” correctly? Or that he wouldn’t use “titties/boobs/rack” instead? Also, there’s something about the phrasing of “what a delight” that sounds very old-fashioned. It sounds like something someone in my parents’ generation would say on a whatsapp group chat when discussing church sandwiches. And what about “Beautiful n slim”? No one in this generation uses ‘n’ as an abbreviation for ‘and’ anymore, usually only middle-aged uncles or aunties do it. There is also a really disturbingly consistent emphasis on how “innocent” or angelic or cute the girls are, as if their very youth is the highlight of their attractiveness. Don’t teenage boys usually go for “hot” girls?

In general the captions and replies just sound really off and not at all like how teenagers in Singapore (or teenagers anywhere, for that matter) talk. Of course it’s not okay if a fellow teenager was running this account and sexualising his peers, but it is Extra Not Okay if it’s a dirty old man doing it, for the obvious reasons. My friend told me that there are creepy uncles who wait around outside the school gates, and her own JC had a creep who surreptitiously used his phone to take up-skirt videos of girls as they were leaving school.

As she put it, “what if some tikopek sees this and decides oh well I guess today I’m going down to CJC,” and she is right. This account draws way too much unwanted attention to girls who have no choice but to go to a public school 5 days a week for a fixed time. It’s not very hard for someone with ill-intentions to stand outside the school gate at the end of a school day and just wait for that one particular girl he saw on this page. All the girls whose photos were posted here are now at risk of becoming some pervert’s IRL target. And for what? So some dirty old man can get his kicks?

Because of instagram’s complete uselessness when it comes to this issue, there is very little any of us can do to purge this account from the internet. I myself have reached out to the girl whose name is not properly censored out and whose photo was secretly taken in the MRT (and if I can find her so easily it just goes to show how dangerous it is) so she can be more careful and make sure no one’s following her. My friend took it upon herself to contact every single JC she could identify so they can do something. This is what she sent them.

However, one particular JC Principal really disappointed us both with her reply, and especially so for me because I was from that JC. Look what Phyllis Lim, current Principal of Catholic Junior College (and ex-Principal of TKGS) wrote.

“We will engage the student featured in the attached picture of find out more about the Instagram postings…” yeah but the point is that she probably has no idea who, how, or why it happened to her. My friend already said that it was not consensual.

“…and will take the necessary steps to safeguard her well-being” for example? This isn’t particularly reassuring.

“We will also enhance our cyber wellness programme to raise students’ awareness of cyber wellness and help them better understand the advantages and disadvantages of social media…” sounds like customary damage control, and personally from experience, these “cyber wellness programmes” don’t really benefit anyone lol. Been there done that.

AND THIS PART REALLY TAKES THE CAKE:

..how to be more discerning in terms of what they upload on social media, what they should be mindful of in order not to be exploited and how their irresponsible use of social media can have a negative impact on others

What is she saying?? I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and read the “irresponsible use of social media” part as referring to the JC boys who submitted photos of their schoolmates, but isn’t she also saying that the girls are not “discerning” or “mindful” enough and therefore they got “exploited”???? This is victim blaming and I must strongly disagree.

Most of these photos are LITERALLY ordinary class photos that some boys took and cropped to single out one particular girl. Some photos are taken with classmates or even with tutors. These are photos taken in school, during events like sports day, racial harmony day, or in front of the milo truck during the annual school marathon. So are all JC girls now supposed to not take a single photo anymore for fear of men misusing it?

The two CJC girls who had their photos used were already being relatively conservative – they were taking normal sitting/standing photos, no twerk poses or anything. So is it their fault they wanted photos? No what. All the girls on this account were exploited, but they didn’t ask for it. It is NOT their fault some disgusting person cropped out their faces to focus on their body and then submitted it to an anonymous online platform. It is NOT their fault they wanted to document a happy day they had with their classmates. And most importantly it is NOT their fault that there exists revolting men with uniform fetishes and a penchant for underaged girls. If they weren’t in the school uniform or the school P.E. attire they wouldn’t be receiving this kind of attention to begin with.

They are VICTIMS in this situation, and they were not trying to make themselves sex objects when they decided to take normal group photos with their friends in school. They are wearing the school uniform as per the school rules. The problem is not that they took photos in school uniform (which is supposed to the opposite of sexy but humans have a tendency to fetishise just about anything yeah), but that there are people out there who find images of young girls in school uniforms sexually appealing, and who think it’s okay to take it one step further by creating an instagram account dedicated to ogling them. Collectively. Like a circle jerk. I cannot stress how sickening this is. It’s not acceptable, even if instagram says it is.

Be like @evantxh. This account’s owner really deserves a big fat “Fuck u.”

*Not to get academic here but I’m using the Freudian sense of this term, which is when “some inanimate object which bears an assignable relation to the person whom it replaces and preferably to that person’s sexuality” becomes substituted for the sexual object, which is the person (The Freud Reader pp. 249).