By Qiuyi Tan, Open Justice reporter of
The teacher exchanged explicit messages and photos with a teenage girl. Photo: 123rf
In a two-week exchange of explicit texts, photos and videos over Snapchat, a teacher groomed a teenage girl as a form of escapism during New Zealand's first Covid-19 lockdown.
The young teen believed the man, many years her senior and a teacher at her school, cared about her.
"You've ruined two years of my life and put a mark on my previous years that I cannot erase," she told the Auckland District Court in a letter.
The man, convicted and sentenced in September to home detention for six months, was this week granted permanent name suppression.
Judge Kathryn Maxwell ruled the man would likely suffer extreme hardship if he were named, considering the state of his mental health.
She said he was not a risk to the public, he had shown remorse and taken responsibility, and his teaching registration was cancelled.
"He will never teach again," the judge said.
In 2019, the young man was teaching at the girl's school in a different class where she would often go to help him after school.
On one occasion, she told him she was not a virgin. He reported this to the principal, who advised him to keep his distance. Taking his advice, the young man blocked the girl when she added him on Instagram.
In 2020, New Zealand entered its first Covid-19 lockdown and the man, then 23, was suffering from acute burnout and was overwhelmed by his responsibilities as a teacher.
On Instagram, he unblocked the girl, who was no longer a student at his school.
He asked her to download Snapchat, where they started exchanging explicit messages, pictures, and videos of themselves over the next two weeks.
The man also asked her to meet at a playground several times but she told him she could not leave the house in lockdown.
Their messages came to a halt when she began to feel uncomfortable and asked him to stop.
In her victim impact statement, she said she believed the man had good intentions but he went on to take advantage of her, she said.
Later, she had nightmares and was afraid to go to sleep, developing depression and anxiety.
It was a struggle to open up to others because her friends thought it was a joke that she had believed he cared for her, she said.
"No young girl should have to go through what I went through," she said.
"No one should exploit my naivete the way you did. You've ruined two years of my life and put a mark on my previous years that I cannot erase."
The man told a counsellor he was emotionally overwhelmed with teaching and had lost sight of his boundaries. The offending was "a form of escapism" for him in lockdown, he said.
He earlier pleaded guilty to one charge of indecent communication with a young person and sought a discharge without conviction, but was declined by the court.
At his sentencing hearing, Crown prosecutor James Dalton argued for the man's registration as a sex offender, saying it was a serious abuse of trust of a young victim.
Judge Maxwell declined the sex offender registration, taking into account his burnout at the time, his relative youth, remorse, and low risk of re-offending.
"You've lost your job as a qualified teacher, your career and prospects are significantly affected," she said.
In addition to the sentence of home detention, he was ordered to pay $4160 reparation to the victim.
* This story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald.
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