Teacher who groomed 13-year-old students jailed for less than a year

2 months ago 17

A teacher who says he groomed 13-year-old girls in his care because of his “poor self-esteem” will be out of prison in less than a year.

Richard Ho was a humanities teacher at a school in Mulgrave, in Melbourne’s south-east, when he met the girls, who were in year 7, and he sent them lewd messages asking them about lingerie, nude photos and threesomes.

Disgraced teacher Richard Ho will serve 11 months in prison.

County Court Judge Paul Higham said on Friday that the disgraced teacher used his position to advance his predatory behaviour towards the girls.

Higham sentenced Ho to 28 months in prison, but the jail term was partially suspended, and he will serve only 11 months behind bars.

Ho started messaging one girl on social media after she came to class crying because of problems at home, and messaged the other after meeting her at a school camp at Phillip Island.

Ho asked the teens to add him on Instagram and Snapchat, and then encrypted messaging app Wickr, which deletes texts after five minutes.

Their conversations soon became explicit, and the teacher asked the teens to play a game of “21 questions”.

During the game, the court heard, he asked questions about pornography, if they were virgins, if they had ever sent nude photos or would be in a threesome, and what boys they liked.

When one girl said she had small breasts, he said, “good things come in small packages” and told her he would take her lingerie shopping. In another message, he asked for a photo of her, and when she didn’t respond, he sent her a topless photo of himself in the shower.

Ho, pictured in sunglasses in November, pleaded guilty to using a carriage service to groom a child and possessing child abuse material.

Ho, 30, previously pleaded guilty to three charges including using a carriage service to groom a child and possessing child abuse material.

“Your facade of being a caring and disinterested listener was employed to further your interests, heedless of the impact upon the child who was in your care,” Higham said on Friday.

The judge said Ho was aware one of his victims was in a vulnerable position because of her home life, and their communications lasted for a year. The educator met the second victim at a camp, where he engaged in “flirtatious” behaviour, including while they were seated on a couch, the court was told.

“You pursued out-of-school meet-ups, you sent an intimate of yourself in the shower ... you were clearly aware of the wrongfulness of your actions because you instructed both victims to change your name on Snapchat,” Higham said.

The game of “21 questions” was wholly inappropriate and showed Ho was sexually interested in the teenagers.

“The questions asked in the game were the most invasive and intimate kind, not merely wholly inappropriate but clearly demonstrating a sexualised interest,” the judge said.

He said an educator’s impact could be immense and long-lasting, provided they acted in the best interests of their students.

“Your offending constituted a gross breach of trust and an exploitation of that teacher-pupil relationship,” Higham told Ho.

Ho’s lawyer, Amelia Beech, told the court earlier this week “poor self-esteem” was the reason behind the teacher’s offending. The lawyer conceded there was an “intense power imbalance” because Ho was the girls’ teacher, and that his conduct became “out of control”.

However, it ended at his own accord when Ho moved to work at a prestigious private school.

“It seems the only explanation for the offending ceasing is that [Ho] came to his senses,” Beech said.

Higham on Friday said regardless of whether Ho was driven by sexual attraction or a “self-centred need for affirmation”, his crimes were a gross breach of trust.

One of his victims previously told the court Ho’s actions deeply harmed her understanding of appropriate relationships, left her anxious and with deep fears about being taken advantage of.

“For the last three years my trauma has echoed in me like a haunted house,” she said.

“No parent should feel worried for their kids at school while they’re at school, and no student, let alone a child, should feel unsafe around their educators.”

Police found in Ho’s possession more than 90 child abuse videos, and some of the material was described in court as “depraved and degrading”.

The Victorian Institute for Teaching was notified of the charges in early September 2022 and the next month cancelled Ho’s registration. He also had his Working With Children’s Check revoked.