The co-founder of Singapore's anti-capital punishment organization We Believe in Second Chances is also a filmmaker and a freelance journalist who has written for Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Asian Correspondent and The Diplomat. She’s also a regular contributor to The Online Citizen, where she has writen about migrant worker issues, the elections and other social justice issues. Here, she talks to us about click bait journalism, the problem with the death penalty and the advantages of freelancing.

I was quite the wallflower when I was in school. I can’t say that I was some sort of social justice crusader as a kid.

I really only got started when I was 21 and starting to learn more about Singapore beyond the stereotypes of the “multi-racial, multi-religious and meritocratic” values that we were taught in school.

Once I started to find out more about other people’s experiences, I found it very hard not to care, or to just walk away from them again.

I sometimes meet people who seem to think Singapore is a totalitarian or police state, and then find myself having to explain that’s not the case.

But saying that doesn’t mean I think that we’re free. We’re not unfree but we’re not completely free either.

I wish Singaporeans would question things more. There are so many myths that we tell ourselves, and we don’t question so many of the assumptions that we have. It stops us from imagining different possibilities that might not fit into the current narrative of the Singapore Story.

I don’t count on crowdfunding [on website Byline] to pay my bills, but I liked the idea of connecting journalists to readers so directly. It’s also really encouraging to see people who are so supportive of my work that they’re willing to fork out money for it. It can be quite hard to maintain, but I’ve always liked having an option, whether on my blog or on Byline, to self-publish.

The more I am involved in the death penalty, the more I see the overlap with the other social justice issues I care about. So many of the death row cases we have come across involve ethnic minorities from poor or broken families. I realized that so many of the families of the inmates we work with are made up of women—sisters and mothers who are taking on the emotional and sometimes financial burden of fighting for their brothers and sons.

So many people are punished by the death penalty, from the family members who have to go through the anguish of counting down the days to prison wardens who have to deal with the reality of the execution—and all for a form of retributive justice that has no proven deterrent* and certainly no rehabilitative effect.

I don’t find it hard to write about issues I’m invested in. When I write something that I feel strongly about, though, I have to remind myself to keep an open mind and give other arguments due consideration too.

Many advocacy groups—from us in the death penalty to migrant rights and gender equality—run into problems with access to information, which makes it hard for us to conduct proper analyses of issues and to give helpful recommendations.

My family was quite worried when I first started volunteering for The Online Citizen, but five years on, they’ve got used to what I do. Now that I’ve got a Master’s degree, my grandparents do often mention that maybe I should stop running around and get a steady job teaching.

I’m just as guilty of falling for click bait as the next person. I’ll click on anything that mentions or features cats. But I worry that we might be stuck in a situation where simplistic, click baity stories are what editors want to go for. They’re cheap to produce and get the eyeballs, but if we all move in that direction then we lose out on really rich stories that might be more expensive to produce, but actually give us a meaningful insight into our world.

There are times when I wish I had a steady pay cheque and an office job that would let me switch off at the end of the day. It can be exhausting to feel like I should always be pitching or working because each pay cheque could be the last for a while.

But at the same time I know that a full-time job might not allow me the freedom that I currently have to choose the stories I want to do and when and how much to do. For example, I heavily pared back on work one week when we had a death penalty case to work on so that I could spend as much time as possible making sure that the family of the inmate had the support they needed.

The best advice I’ve ever received came from a friend and former boss. She said that while one should strive to be a good journalist, one should always be a decent human being first. It’s really stuck with me throughout the years and influenced many of the choices I’ve made.

*Speaking at a United Nations General Assembly sideline event in September 2014, Foreign Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam argued that Singapore's success in quelling drug problems in the city-state proved that the death penalty had been a successful deterrent in drug trafficking cases.