Chris Cranny admits grooming teenage boys
An Illawarra cricket coach has admitted to grooming teen boys after telling police he has a “disorder” relating to boys aged 14 to 17 about “seeing them naked”.
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An Illawarra cricket coach and primary school teacher has admitted to grooming three teen boys over a four-year period, telling police he had a “disorder” that made him “curious” about seeing them naked.
Chris Cranny, 31, faced Wollongong Local Court on Wednesday, where he pleaded guilty to 11 offences, including three counts of groom child over under 16 for unlawful sexual activity, two counts of aggravated indecent victim under 16 and six counts of committing aggravated sexual act child between 10 and 16.
Cranny was arrested from his Gwynneville home on January 17 by the Child Abuse and Sex Crimes Squad, after an investigation found he’d groomed three boys and exposed them to indecent material between 2015 and 2019.
An agreed set of facts tendered to the court on Wednesday revealed that after his arrest, Cranny admitted he had a “disorder” related to adolescent boys from the ages of 14 to 17.
He told police that while he didn’t want to have sex with them, he did sexualise them “in a way that he gets curious about seeing them naked”.
The 31-year-old told police that he had been fighting “urges” for years, and that he had rationalised his behaviour as “being okay” because he didn’t physically touch them.
“Despite the disorder there is a part of me that still believes in right and wrong and even though what I was doing was very wrong, I knew it would be even worse if I progressed the situation further to a stage where there was any touching or anything that could be deemed as a physical assault,” he told police in an interview.
While the nature of many of the charges are too graphic to repeat, Cranny admitted to supplying two of the boys with alcohol, showing three of them pornographic material and discussing highly sexual topics with them.
He also admitted he became “obsessive” over one of the boys, and became jealous and possessive when he got a girlfriend.
Over the course of his offending, court documents revealed Cranny would send the boys messages over social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, at times talking to them about his sexual experiences.
One of the boys told police during the investigation that Cranny “forced” a friendship on him, suggesting he, and the teen boy have beers together. They boy agreed and he and another victim spent an afternoon with Cranny, when he showed them a photo of a woman’s genitalia that he had “sneakily” taken.
After his arrest, Cranny told police he was “ashamed, remorseful” and acknowledged he needed help.
Cranny will return to court in November for sentencing.