A MAN, accused of raping his stepdaughter, told a psychiatrist that she had initiated the relationship by massaging his private parts in 2005 when she was 11.

That was a few months after she arrived from India.

Testifying at the trial on Thursday, Dr Wei Ker-Chiah of the Institute of Mental Health said the 37-year-old IT operations specialist had told him they then graduated to her performing oral sex on him in January 2005 and then to sex, when she reached puberty later that year.

She said that she loved him and wanted him to get a divorce and marry her.

The man, a Indian national and a Singapore permanent resident, said that they would have sex once or twice a month in his three-room flat. This would be during his days off and while his wife was managing her beauty salon business.

The man, who has two stepchildren and two younger ones of his own, cannot be identified to protect the identity of the victim.

He faces 16 counts of statutory rape and 26 counts of making the girl perform oral sex for him.

Dr Wei said the man told him that he did not know that having consensual sex with a girl below the age of 14 was considered rape here.

Under the law, a girl aged below 14, cannot consent to perform sex acts.

In his police statement, the accused claimed that his stepdaughter was jealous when he was with other women. She spilled the beans to her mother after finding out that he was having an affair with a woman colleague.

The mother and daughter then made a police report and he was arrested on May 9 .

The trial continues next Tuesday.