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A private high school teacher crossed a professional boundary in his first year of teaching by giving a student his mobile phone number and initiating a sexual relationship with her, the District Court was told yesterday.
The 24-year-old Heathridge man lied to the then 15-year-old girl about being a virgin when the pair got together outside school hours, the prosecution claimed.
But his lawyer, Tom Percy QC, said it was the teenager who was sexually mature, having started sleeping with her 20-year-old boyfriend two years earlier. Neither the offender nor the school where he taught is named to protect the girl's identity.
The offender pleaded guilty to eight counts of indecent dealings and five counts of digital sexual penetration over six months last year.
The court was told the young teacher exchanged flirtatious text messages with his student daily before arranging to picker her up from her house after her parents went to bed.
Crown prosecution [sic] Darryl Ryan said the girl would leave by her bedroom window and meet him in his car parked at the end of her street.
He said on two occasions he drove her to a deserted carpark where they kissed and he put his hands inside her pants
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and she fondled him. The third time they went back to his parents' house while they were away.
If not for the girl's boyfriend alerting her father after discovering an explicit text message, he believed the relationship would have continued.
"It was completely inappropriate for a teacher to be handing out a number to a student and sending her texts daily of a sexual nature," Mr Ryan said.
"Surely in his position the alarm bells should have been ringing."
Mr Percy said his client was a devout Christian with no worldly experience who lived with his parents until his marriage in December.
His promising teaching career had been destroyed by an unusual case of "mutual initiation" in which the teenager was a willing partner.
"The girl had no innocence left to plunder . . . with the corruption by an older man having already taken place," Mr Percy said.
He requested a suspended jail term for his client who was extremely remorseful and had confessed to his pastor and sought counselling.
Chief Judge Kevin Hammond remanded the man in custody to be sentenced next week.
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