Former Cairns school teacher guilty of 92 child sexual offences
A former Cairns lawyer became a teacher to feed his child porn interests and created exploitation material with his primary school students, a court was told.
A former Cairns lawyer became a teacher to feed his child porn interests and created exploitation material with his primary school students, a court was told.
The defendant, 37, pleaded guilty to 92 counts of child sexual offences before Judge Benedict Power KC at Cairns District Court on Monday, as parents of the victims sat in the gallery intensely watching the offender.
While the prosecution told the court the “chronology” of the accused’s offending suggested he became a schoolteacher to “feed” his child porn interests, his defence barrister said that was not his motivation.
His offending included 26 counts of making child exploitation material, 58 counts of inducement treatment of a child under 16, under 12, under care, five counts of repeated sexual conduct of a child, two counts of using a carriage service for child abuse material and one count of possessing child exploitation material.
The court was told the accused possessed about 950,000 images and about 10,000 videos of child exploitation material.
Crown prosecutor Matthew Le Grand said the 26 counts of making child exploitation material had the greatest impact, to both the children and their families, and the damage the case would do toward the education industry and the trust it held.
Mr Le Grand said of the 26 female victims, police had identified 20 who were aged five to nine years.
He said the defendant started his studies to become a schoolteacher in 2020, and that according to a psychology report tendered in court, “had by that stage come to be using child pornography.”
The accused undertook practical training at a Cairns school in October 2020 and gained employment there in July 2021, as teacher of a Year 1 class.
“Over the course of two years, from November 2022 until the time of his arrest in November 2023, the defendant used, at times, the internet to access child abuse material,” Mr Le Grand said.
“This material could be referred to as second generation material. However while he was accessing this material in his private life, he also used this time during his professional life to create his own material.
“The defendant used the primary campus (of the school) as his personal photo studio, he used the student body as his model.”
Mr Le Grand said the defendant started out by opportunistically filming female students while they were on the playground during lunch, and by the end of 2022 had “progressed” to instruct them to pose so their underwear was exposed.
“By October of 2022 he advanced to inviting girls into the classroom storeroom where he’d ask them to reach under cupboards and expose their underwear to him under the guise of helping him clean. At these times, he would sit behind the girls and film up their skirts.
“By 2023 the offending had escalated to the defendant filming himself touching female students in the storeroom after he had instructed them to remove their clothing, sometimes to the point of being naked or wearing only underwear from the waist down.”
Mr Le Grand told the court that a number of the teacher’s victims, despite their young age, resisted his actions but he would “manipulate” them by promising “class points”.
He said the offending came to light in November 2023 when one student complained to her parents about being smacked by the teacher, which led to a police complaint with officers eventually seizing his devices and locating the material.
The court was told during the search of the defendant’s home police also found the girls’ heads printed out on large pieces of paper and 23 pieces of female underwear. Mr Le Grand said it was not known who the underwear belonged to.
“There was an interest in child pornography that predated the defendant’s move towards teaching as a profession and continued throughout that period,” Mr Le Gand said.
“This was a truly developed interest, perverted interest, in children that occurred over a protracted period of time.”
The prosecution sought 20 years imprisonment.
“It is the context, it is the protracted nature, it is the number of victims, it is the breach of trust, it is misuse of authority in order to perpetrate and silence the discovery of the offending that places this in the worst category,” Mr Le Gand said.
“It is paramount that the industry of education be protected from participants who would engage in this kind of offending.”
Defence barrister Aaron Dunkerton said the former teacher was born and raised in Far North Queensland and was admitted to the bar in 2013.
He said his instructions were that while it appeared the accused became a teacher to feed his child porn interests, that “was not his motivation.”
“Nothing in my submission is seeking to justify or detract from the seriousness and consequences which flow from the offending,” Mr Dunkerton said.
In a letter penned by the accused and read in part by Judge Power, the former teacher said he was “ashamed” by what he had done.
“I am ashamed that I was engaging in continually escalating behaviour and stuck in such a disgusting headspace and didn’t have the forethought to seek help or remove myself from the classroom,” he wrote.
“I deeply regret my action and wish I could undo the pain I caused.”
Judge Power acknowledged the defendant’s guilty plea but didn’t accept the educator had developed an issue while teaching, saying the man at least in part, pursued teaching to access vulnerable children.
“It must have been at least somewhere in your mind that by undertaking this career you would be putting yourself in a position where you would have that trust of very young children and you abused that trust,” he said.
“It was only a matter of four months from when you began unsupervised teaching that you began surreptitiously recording the groins of female children while they sat with their legs displayed in the playground eating lunch, as children do.”
The court was told male role models and leaders were essential in primary schools but the defendant's actions might cast doubt over hardworking, good people.
“It has been repeatedly emphasised that having male teachers in primary school is a very important thing,” he said.
“For this to occur reduces the trust of people in male teachers, which of course 99.9 per cent of male teachers would never think, never do anything like this.
“It is this abuse of this particular position of trust that is very, very critical.”
The 37 year old was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
He will be eligible for parole on November 17, 2030 after serving seven years of his sentence.
Originally published as Former Cairns school teacher guilty of 92 child sexual offences
