Koo Koo Court

Soap Opera time in the land of kangaroos.

October 31, 2008 - A judge slashed the sentence for a 40-year-old Paul Incani, a teacher who had been sentenced to 15 months for indecently touching a student. The judge reduced the sentence to a suspended nine-month term.

The judge - Justice Dean Mildren (shown right)- says the man was in love with the girl.

The judge said girl had exaggerated how much she had suffered in a "very dramatic and emotional" manner. The judge said there was no seduction and the facts of the case, including intimate text messages Incani sent to the girl, showed nothing other than a willingness by the child who was as "romantically involved" with Incani as he was with her.

He said the girl's "self-loathing" and "sense of rage" could be attributed to Incani's offending, which had exacerbated the kind of reaction "one would normally expect" from a romantic break-up.

Incari pleaded guilty to indecent touching in July.

Did we mention that the girl was 16?

Australia

You just don't get headlines like this from the amoral U.S. media.

Ex-Brighton Grammar teacher admits child pornography shame
Defence lawyer John Dickinson said Hewitt's former high standing in the community had made his downfall all the greater.

"One doubts he will ever regain that reputation," Mr Dickinson said.

Brighton Grammar chaplain Brian Porter gave evidence that Hewitt had lost just about everything.

The Victorian Institute of Teaching said Hewitt was no longer registered as a teacher.
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TT - If it had been reported here in the U.S., a shameless defense lawyer would claim the pictures were no worse than watching a video game, no one would ever use the "R" word because reputation is something our Peter Pan Press knows little about. A psychologist would actively campaign against sentencing him to anything but expensive sex therapy, provided, of course, by another expensive psychologist, if not the same psychologist. And, despite the guilty plea, it would take two to three years and $200,000 to strip him of a teaching license.

Online Database in Australia

June 15, 2008 - In Australia, every state school student - all 480,000 - will be posted online by the Government. Photographs, personal details, career aspirations, off-campus activities and student performance records are being collected from all 1251 state schools.

Education Minister Rod Welford said parents could be denied access to public education if they refused to consent to their child being profiled on the system.He dismissed concerns from parents about pedophiles hacking into the database.

Participation in the online database is non-negotiable, he said.

And there is this:

At least four Queensland teachers have been arrested in the past fortnight in connection with an international child porn network. One is accused of super-imposing photos of himself and his students on online images of children being sexually abused.

TT - Something like that should make it a lot harder for the newly-elected Liberal government in Australia to dismiss, but theEducation Minister is undeterred. See TT entry on the arrests (one teacher committed suicide, another attempted suicide.)

See our Link to Teachers and Child Pornography for teachers in the U.S. we have found who have been sentenced or are awaiting sentencing for child pornography.

Operation Centurion

The arrests have been headlines in Australia for days.

90 arrests

4 teachers

June 5, 2008 - One of the largest child pornography sweeps in Australia resulted in 90 arrests. Four of those arrested were teachers. One committed suicide, another attempted suicide.

A 59-year-old Sunshine Coast teacher committed suicide after being charged on two counts. Another, a Queensland primary school teacher, 48, caught in the police swoop, was taken to hospital late yesterday. It is believe he had also attempted suicide.

More arrests are expected in coming weeks with at least 1500 Australians - using 2883 IP addresses - under investigation. More than one million illegal images were unearthed on computers, DVDs, CDs and other material during raids led by the AFP.

The investigation began when hackers placed nearly 100 photographs on a legitimate site in Europe. Within three days the images had attracted 12 million hits -- from 144,000 IP addresses across 170 countries.

Another six people who worked with children had their accreditation removed.
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See our Link to Teachers and Child Pornography at the right.

Crackpot judges are everywhere.

Feb 14, 2008 - A judge in Australia is allowing a teacher three months to gather evidence that that he was educating his victim in "men's business" when he forced an 11-year-old boy to perform oral sex on him.

The Australian newspaper reported today that teacher James Last pleaded guilty in Cairns before District Court judge Sarah Bradley last week to seven counts of indecently dealing with an 11-year-old boy over a four-month period in 1983.

Judge Bradley has granted a three month adjournment to allow Last, who claims he received no sexual gratification from the assaults, and his lawyers to find an anthropologist to support his claim that he had been trying to introduce the Torres Strait boy to "traditional" islander sexual practices.

Last year, the north Queensland judge allowed nine child rapists to go free.

Those Silly Reporters

The report is from Australia, but we see plenty of it in American newspapers.

Oct 9, 2007 - From an the Courier Mail, an Australian newspaper, comes this absurd characterization of illegal sex between a teacher and student.

SHE was 37 and a respected and popular schoolteacher at a Queensland school, while he was her 13-year-old Year 6 student prodigy.

Exactly how it ended up in a lurid and passionate affair with repeated acts of sexual intercourse was not revealed in detail in the District Court in Maroochydore yesterday.

TT - A lurid and passionate "affair"?

Anyone who finds the idea of sex with a 13-year-old exciting, lurid, or passionate really ought to take an "Am I a Pedophile?" test.

Exporting Pedophilia

It's their fault - the street urchins in Indonesia.

AN Indonesian court has cut three years off a jail term handed to an Australian teacher who sexually abused street kids, ruling the crimes were "not entirely" his fault.

Peter William Smith, 48, was originally sentenced to 10 years in jail after he was found guilty of paying teenage boys as little as $5 each for sexual acts, which he also filmed.

Smith, who committed the crimes at his home between 2003 and 2006, was a teacher at the Australian Government-funded Indonesia Australia Language Foundation in Jakarta at the time.

Indonesia's High Court, which heard his appeal, ruled his original 10-year term was excessive despite judges in his original trial noting he had committed similar offences in Australia, India and Pakistan.

The High Court judges said the abuse was not entirely Smith's fault, and some of the blame rested with the street urchins who lingered at his South Jakarta home.

"The High Court considered the District Court verdict has been precise and correct and was based on well and correct considerations except on the term of jail … it is too harsh," the judges said in a written ruling. "The sentence given to Smith needs to be reduced because the crime was not entirely caused by [the] defendant's mistake, but also because the presence of the victims in his house wanting to get money from him."

Smith spent four years in a Northern Territory jail in the 1990s, under the name of Ellis David Eyre, for sexually abusing Aboriginal children.

Hmmmmmmmm

Just to lighten up here. Things could be worse. We could, for example, live in New South Wales, Australia.

The new boss of the NSW Education Department says he understands the interest in his conviction, but doesn't think it will make any difference to his performance.

Reportedly, Michael Coutts-Trotter pleaded guilty more than 20 years ago then served three years in jail. Since then he has carved out a career in the public service.

Mr Coutts-Trotter has to undergo police checks, but says he's not concerned by that.

"It's normal procedure to conduct a Working with Children check for everyone that comes into contact with children in the school system," he said."I am subjecting myself to that as I should."

They were heroin offenses. He was, by his own admission, a drug user and a drug seller. He became addicted to heroin at age 12. He has, of course, no background in education whatsoever.

AUSTRALIA

Jan 3 - 2006 - "Alarm over teacher child-sex offences" in The Advertiser, by Nick Henderson. Subhead:

NEARLY 20 South Australian teachers have been sacked in the past three years, most for committing child-sex offences.

Not all were fired.

Australia

Nov 27, 2006 - From the Australian:

A detailed dossier of the Education Department's 104 dismissed teachers, obtained under Freedom of Information laws, reveals for the first time the disastrous outcomes for students when the wrong people enter classrooms.

And that's only in New South Wales - total population 6 million.