A FORMER Beechworth teacher involved with child pornography has avoided a stint in jail with a magistrate yesterday saying the sex offender was in a mental prison after being shunned by his community.
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Ronald Hayes was convicted and given a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for two years, on a charge of transmitting child pornography, while also receiving an 18-month community-based order for production and possession of child pornography.
The former Beechworth Secondary College teacher, who had worked in Myrtleford, Rutherglen and Wangaratta as well, will have to undergo a sex offenders’ program and has been put on the sex offenders’ register for life.
Magistrate Reg Marron disagreed with the prosecution’s argument that jailing Hayes would assist in providing a general deterrent to the community.
“The four walls of his prison is what has been created by himself,” Mr Marron said.
“He will be shunned by the community in which he existed.”
Hayes was sentenced over the charges in the Shepparton Magistrates Court yesterday.
That was after a plea hearing in the same court last Thursday heard he had exchanged 6520 pornographic images and sent 2859 explicit pictures.
The pictures were mostly of males aged about 15, between 2006 and 2008.
He was caught by police after a complaint from the operator of a German internet site, with Interpol then alerting Australian authorities.
Police arrested him in May last year and he was then stood down by Beechworth Secondary College.
Mr Marron said Hayes was living a “parallel existence” with his family and teaching colleagues knowing nothing about his pornography habits.
He said these habits involved Hayes taking part in chatrooms and making generally “bland responses” about the images.
The magistrate added that Hayes appeared to operate in a “tiny, tight cell” with his internet activity but once it had been revealed he had lost his career and suffered personally, financially and emotionally.
Mr Marron said Hayes’ crime was not victimless, because those in the images were likely to be “ticking time bombs” with the sexual abuse they had suffered leading to difficulty maintaining relationships, fractured lives and a “great distrust” of adults because of the exploitation involved.
He said those in the pictures were probably from the Third World and unaware of how their image was being used.
Hayes, who has been living in northern NSW and receiving welfare benefits, plans to move to Melbourne to meet the demands of the sex offenders’ course.
He will not be allowed to work with children again.
