Goldfields comes to terms with crimes
It's 9pm in the Goldfields and a young teacher sits in the quietest corner of the loudest bar, shakes his head and says: "How could this happen?"
It is a question that has gripped a small WA town for much of the past month.
In a tight-knit community of young families - where everyone knows each other's business - how could no one have known that a teacher at their local school was abusing their children?
"It's the ripples in the pond," the man says, sipping his beer and explaining the fallout.
"A school loses its innocence, a town is tainted. And people are thinking why didn't anyone see it?"
The man, who worked alongside the WA teacher arrested over his links to an international child abuse ring, says no one suspected a thing.
Not the teacher's colleagues at the two rural schools where he committed his crimes, not his friends and not his neighbour, who lived next to him in a nondescript block of units on the town's outskirts where police uncovered the cache of videos that implicated him.
"He's not coming back any time soon, mate," the neighbour says, gesturing towards a brick wall that separates his unit from the empty home of the former friend who has now pleaded guilty to more than 100 charges of crimes against children.
Child sex abuse hearings in Perth
The unit was abandoned in a hurry because of fears for the teacher's safety and because bail conditions ban him from setting foot anywhere near the community he shattered.
When The West Australian visited the region, former colleagues and community members said many in the town still didn't know what had happened.
"They're keeping it very, very tight for the students," one woman explained.
"I can't imagine how the parents are feeling."
Police began investigating the teacher as part of Operation Thunderer, the Australian arm of an international investigation targeting an alleged global paedophile network that shared videos of children being sexually abused.
The man was one of six WA men identified by Canadian authorities as buying photographs and videos from a Canadian man who created and sold child exploitation material.
When police raided his Goldfields home and checked his computer they not only found images of naked children he had bought but also more than 50 videos he had made of himself groping students at two rural WA primary schools where he had worked.
He had set up the webcam on his school computer and would record the videos secretly in front of the rest of the class.
Police said he would sit the boys on his lap while showing them things on the computer or talking about their schoolwork. He then exposed their backsides to the cameras, put his hands between their legs to pick them up or groped them over their uniforms.
He has pleaded guilty to indecently dealing with three boys at one school in 2010 and two boys at another school in 2011.
When two child abuse squad officers went to the town to make the arrest, they kept the operation low key. When they went to the school where he was still teaching, his colleagues were in disbelief.
The man was well liked by both his parents and students and wrote on his blog about the importance of a "safe and welcoming classroom". He always had a camera with him and - separate to the videos the police found in his home - he would document more innocent scenes of his students in class and around the school, posting their activities on YouTube and his school blog. Until last month, those videos were still on the internet.
The parents of the students he taught were told of the allegations and were urged to talk to police if they had any concerns about their child.
There is no indication he shared any of his secretly-filmed movies with the international child abuse ring, with police believing he kept them for himself.
He has pleaded guilty to all charges and will be sentenced later this month on 54 counts of indecently dealing with a child under 13, 47 of indecently recording a child under 13 and two of possessing child exploitation material. The maximum penalty for each of the indecent dealing and indecent recording charges is 10 years.
Now, members of the shocked community say they are trying to heal.
"At the end of the day, how do you give kids back their innocence," a former teacher said, adding that everyone in the community now felt a sense of guilt.
"You don't. It's gone. These kids will have this for their lives. All we can do is walk alongside them and help them any way we can.
"People will query what is going on in the school.
"Why didn't someone pick it up earlier? Why didn't other people pick it up?
"What checks and balances weren't in place? Our main concern now is the kids."
