A former Catholic school teacher who sexually groomed two male students and assaulted them in various locations has avoided jail time.
Catherine Young, 50, pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including sexually penetrating a child younger than 16.
The then Japanese teacher at Mazenod College’s Mulgrave campus, who was known as Catherine Waters at the time, preyed on two male teenage victims in the mid-1990s.
Young also taught history, coached the junior volleyball team and supervised at school camp.
The court was told that she violated the two male students on school grounds, at her home, at the victims’ homes and also in a university carpark.
She appeared on Tuesday in txjmtzywhe County Court, where Judge Martine Marich said Young had caused her victims “lasting trauma”.
“I am still at a loss as to why you might have been attracted to two children,” she told the court.
The court was told that one of the boys would deliberately misbehave to get Young’s attention and she flirted with him in class.
One incident involved Young driving one of her victims to her home where she dressed in lacy lingerie and sexually assaulted the boy.
Young, who was in her mid-20s at the time, also visited a victim at his home during her lunch break and sexually violated him.
According to court documents, she later taught him how to place a condom on before having sex.
Afterwards she cuddled him and asked if “he’s OK”.
The court was told that Young had sex with a victim in the Mazenod sick bay during a school sleepover for a week-long sports event.
She later told her victim not to contact her again because she was leaving her role at the school in 1998.
Police were told about her offending in 2018 after one of her victims acknowledged the seriousness of her crimes and what had happened to him.
A heartbreaking victim impact statement from one of the boys was read in court and told of how the incidents turned him into “an emotional wreck”.
He wrote of having moments of “deep depression”.
“I feel at times you ruined my life. It makes me really sad and it hurts me a lot,” he wrote.
“I was a 15-year-old kid, who was lured, groomed and spat out just as quickly as it started.”
Judge Marich dismissed the defence submission that Young had little support from school administration staff and felt overwhelmed in her job, which contributed to her offending.
But she acknowledged that Young had good prospects for rehabilitation.
Young’s immediate jail term was wholly suspended for two years. She was convicted for her crimes.
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