geylang checkerwhen she opens her e-mail account, she psychs herself for death threats and warnings of rape and other forms of assault from anonymous senders. "I will kill you when I hunt you down," one e-mail reads. Another says: "I will rape you ladies when I get hold of you." Yet another adds: "Geylang syndicate is not good to be trifled with." But these ominous e-mail messages have not deterred the woman, who prefers to be known as Angie, from running Geylang Checker, a website she set up last July to monitor "cheating men in Geylang".
In an e-mail interview with my paper, she revealed that she has put together a team of more than 50 so-called "checkers", mostly women and a few men, who conduct "hourly patrols of Geylang streets" every day. They snap photographs of boyfriends, husbands, male relatives and colleagues who solicit the services of prostitutes, she said. The checkers receive assignments and tip-offs from women who seek their help in finding out if their men have been to the red-light district. Angie is in her early 30s and works in "one of the five big auditing firms" here.
She confessed that she feared for her life and those of her volunteers "many times". "Safety is a concern, but helping Singaporean women takes a higher priority," she said. Her family is unaware of her activities. She started the website because she did not want other women to go through what she had experienced. In May last year, she caught her then boyfriend stepping out of a brothel in Geylang and saw him kiss a woman on his way out. "I didn't believe it when my friend told me, so I took a cab down and waited outside," she recalled. Angie immediately broke off their relationship.
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