A female New Zealand primary school teacher has been sentenced to 11 months home detention after pleading guilty to a representative charge of an indecent act with a child.
The indecent acts covered by the charge related to hugging and kissing that happened during a relationship that developed over an estimated nine-month period, the NZ Herald reported.
Erin Jarmey, 39, was a senior teacher at a Rotorua primary school, on the North Island, and first met the victim through her role there. But she was never the child’s teacher and the offending didn’t happen when the pre-teen girl was a student at the school.
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Jarmey had befriended the girl’s family and offered to pick her up and take her to extra-curricular activities.
The kissing most frequently happened when Jarmey picked up or dropped the girl off, the NZ Herald reported.
The pair sent an estimated nearly 6000 messages over “Messenger Kids”, and also emailed each other.
In Rotorua District Court on Thursday, Jarmey’s lawyer, Andrew Schulze, said his client had made a “horrific mistake”, and the situation was a “tragedy of Shakespearean proportions”.
Judge Greg Hollister-Jones said a letter of remorse provided to him from Jarmey showed she accepted she had crossed a line and had developed an inappropriate relationship with the girl.
“Reflecting on the situation I recognise that the mentorship friendship was blurred, became messy. It was not a romantic relationship. When she wanted more of my time I should have backed away but I didn’t,” Jarmey wrote.
The judge assessed that based on her letter and a pre-sentence report Jarmey lacked insight on some aspects of her offending.
He said she seemed to be “struggling to fully accept the physical aspects of the friendship”, outlined in the summary of facts.
He accepted that before the offending, Jarmey had been of “exemplary character”.
The offending, while a significant breach of trust, hadn’t involved contact with the victim’s genitals, Jarmey was a first offender, and she had good prospects of rehabilitation, the judge said.
This article has been reproduced with permission from Stuff.co.nz.
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