Teacher claims girl he was porn chatting with was 16 not 14

From the witness stand at his Toowoomba District Court trial, the former teacher said the girl told him she was 16.

Generic image of woman using the internet.

A FORMER Toowoomba primary school teacher accused of porn chatting with a 14-year-old girl over the internet has taken the witness stand to give evidence at his District Court trial.

Jarred Lee Wands, 28, has pleaded not guilty to 35 charges arising from communications he had with the teenager who lives in Scotland in May and June 2016.

Wands claimed during their first conversation via the chat site Omegle, the girl had told him she was 16 and he had not suspected she was not that age in the times they had communicated after that, he told the court.

The girl had sent him a photograph of herself in her school uniform which was shown to the court.

Under cross examination by Crown prosecutor Nicole Friedewald, Wands accepted he had lied to the girl, telling her he was a 20-year-old university student who also worked as a bar attendant when at the time he was 23, married and teaching at a Toowoomba primary school.

He told the court at the time he had been under stress due to some of his students being violent at school, that his wife had health problems and that he had to take time off work which had led to financial problems.

“I wanted to escape from my life at the time,” he said.

Ms Friedewald suggested the girl had told Wands she was 14 during their initial conversation which he denied.

After their initial conversation, the pair had continued communicating by email and then by Google Hangouts.

Wands agreed he had sent the girl 21 photographs of his penis and she had sent him nine photographs of her breasts and vagina.

Ms Friedewald suggested Wands had used sexually explicit terms and had instructed her on how to pleasure herself and that the two of them had during a video link masturbated in front of each other.

The matter came to light when the girl’s mother found material on the teenager’s tablet and contacted police in Scotland.

The trial before Judge Deborah Richards continues.