Chris Dawson case: The Teacher’s Pet podcast inspired legal claims against predator teachers who used school as ‘meat market’

The NSW education department has settled claims from former students who alleged they were preyed on by teachers, as one woman declared the school a ‘meat market’.

Debra Hood, pictured at her Brisbane home in 2019, when she first spoke about sexual exploitation of students at her former school, Port Macquarie High, including her own relationship with a teacher. Picture: Glenn Hunt

The NSW education department has quietly settled legal claims from former students from Port Macquarie High who alleged they were preyed on for sex by teachers, as one woman declared the school was a “meat market”.

Allegations of teachers rampantly abusing their positions to pursue schoolgirls for sex at parties, a local hotel and on the grounds of the school itself from the 1970s onwards emerged as a result of The Australian’s podcast The Teacher’s Pet.

Port Macquarie law firm Scott Mackenzie Lawyers represented at least five former students from the school who sued the education department and, in some cases, individual teachers.

“Settlements were reached and the matters were finalised,” the firm’s lawyer Mandy Mackenzie told The Weekend Australian. “Non-disclosures were signed in relation to the settlements and no further details can be provided.”

Three former Port Macquarie High students told The Australian in 2019 that they were “targeted, groomed and seduced” by teachers as schoolgirls in the 1980s, and that they were investigating legal action against the department.

The women linked up after The Teacher’s Pet revealed widespread teacher-student relationships on Sydney’s northern beaches in the same period.

They formed a Facebook group, Teacher’s Pets Released, and at the time said their experiences may be the tip of the iceberg in the town, 380km north of Sydney.

One of the women, Debra Hood, said on Friday that a total of 42 former students from the school had come forward with allegations against more than a dozen teachers. The Facebook page has since been shut down.

“It was just a marketplace for them. It was a meat market,” Ms Hood said of her former school.

Debra Hood (holding yellow towel) during a Year 10 science excursion in the 1979.

Among the allegations was that teachers regularly held parties at a house where they competed with each other to have sex with schoolgirls. Teachers referred to sexual conquests of virgins as getting “a Japanese flag”, she said.

“The aim of it apparently was to get as many virgins.”

In class, a teacher would drop pens to try to look at schoolgirls’ underwear. “So the girls would continually have their pencil case between their legs,” Ms Hood said.

And underage students would go to the Port Macquarie Hotel, where teachers would buy them drinks and “get them pretty intoxicated”.

Ms Hood spoke in 2019 about how she had a troubled home life, with her late mother battling ­alcoholism, when she had sex with a teacher at the age of 17.

She was above the legal age of consent under the laws at the time, so pursuing a criminal charge was not an option.

“Something went badly wrong in the NSW education system,” she said.

Launched in 2018, The Teacher’s Pet brought worldwide attention to the 1982 disappearance of mother-of-two Lyn Simms from her home in Bayview on the northern beaches.

Her husband, former teacher and professional rugby league footballer Chris Dawson, was last year convicted of her murder and sentenced to 24 years in jail.

Dawson was on Wednesday also convicted of unlawful carnal knowledge of a 16-year-old girl he went on to marry, and will be sentenced in September.

He groomed the girl, known as AB at the trial, by placing notes in her bag and inviting her to become his family babysitter when she was in his sports class at Cromer High.

Chris Dawson and his former babysitter on their wedding day. On Wednesday he was convicted of unlawful carnal knowledg of a 16-year-old girl and will be sentenced in September.

Lyn’s brother Greg Simms and his wife Merilyn this week called for an inquiry into education department failures that allowed teacher-student relationships to flourish in the 1970s and 1980s, saying: “They need to be answerable.”

Ms Hood said that as a result of non-disclosure agreements she could not discuss legal action against the department or teachers. Speaking out publicly had been tough emotionally, and led her to seek help from a psychologist for the first time in her life, but had been worth it, she said.

“It was hard, especially because other women were coming forward and hearing all the other horrible stories, and knowing there were so many, and feeling so helpless, I guess,” she said.

“But in lots of ways I’m really glad that I did go through that, because other women did get to tell their story, and it’s made some difference in their lives as well.”