Craigieburn train station: Melbourne City Mission employee Aroon Paul pleads guilty

A teenage girl is now too scared to catch public transport after a father’s sickening act on a Craigieburn train.

​Aroon Paul, 46, pleaded guilty to performing a sexual act in public after he touched himself inappropriately in front of a teenager in Craigieburn in March last year.

A young woman has been left traumatised after a man performed a sex act while sitting beside her on a Craigieburn train.

Aroon Paul, 46, pleaded guilty to the offence in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Thursday, with the court hearing that the young woman remains too traumatised to catch public transport nearly a year on from the event.

Police told the court that shortly after 12.30pm on March 21, 2021, Paul got on the train at Craigieburn railway station and sat next to the victim — a fact the 19-year-old found “strange” due to there being many empty seats on the train.

Paul, an employee of disability support agency Melbourne City Mission, began to rub his left hand up and down his leg and touch his groin with his right hand, police told the court.

The victim, who was on her way to school and had planned to get off at Southern Cross, moved to a different part of the train, only to be followed by Paul, who touched her with his elbow after moving slightly further to his left.

Minutes later the victim got off the train and reported the incident to police.

In a victim impact statement the young woman, who now lives in Tasmania, said activities once normal to her had become a significant source of anxiety because of Paul’s actions.

“Melbourne doesn’t feel safe or comfortable,” she said.

She said that Paul’s actions had had a significant financial impact on her due to the ongoing costs of seeing a psychologist and commuting via Uber and taxi services.

Isabelle Skaburkis, for the defence, said her client had recently finished a work shift and been drinking heavily since shortly after 10am.

Ms Skaburkis said that the combination of a Covid lockdown, combined with fear over the safety of his family in India, led him to behave in a hammer that “shocks even himself”.

“If this had happened to his wife and daughter, he would be very upset,” she said.

Ms Skaburkis said Paul, who arrived in Australia from India in 2006, was using alcohol as a “maladaptive coping strategy” and did not recall the event.

Magistrate Stephen Ballek said he found that assertion “hard to believe”.

Mr Ballek said that he did not understand how a drinking problem and stress over his family in India led him to sexually assault a young woman on a train.

“I regard this as extremely serious offending,” he said.

“There is another victim here, and that’s your wife,” Mr Ballek told Paul.

He sentenced Paul to a 12-month adjourned undertaking and fined him $700.