A woman has been jailed for three years after being found guilty of sexually touching and exchanging thousands of Facebook messages with a teenage boy, with the intention of procuring him to engage in sexual activity.
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The woman also pleaded guilty in November to another charge of using a carriage service to transmit child abuse material in the form of discussing a fictional scenario involving sex with children.
In sentencing yesterday, Wagga District Court Judge Gordon Lerve said the woman was aged in her 40s at the time of the offending and the victim was aged under 16 and suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
The offender and victim talked on the phone and exchanged 5870 messages on Facebook Messenger and 738 SMS messages between December 2019 and January 2020.
The messages contained explicit references to masturbation, oral sex and scenarios involving the offender fighting with her daughters over the victim.
She told the victim that their relationship should stay secret and they discussed deleting their messages as "your age means we are gonna have to sneak and hide".
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In late December 2019 the victim and the offender stayed at a hotel as they had been forced to evacuate their homes due to a bushfire and while at the hotel's pool the offender pinched the victim on the buttocks.
The victim's mother later found some of the messages on her son's phone and contacted police.
During an interview with police, the offender admitted to sending the messages but maintained that she had no intention of procuring the boy for sex.
"She said she was just 'mucking around'. Clearly, given the verdict, that was not accepted by the jury," Judge Lerve said.
Judge Lerve said there was "no doubting the extreme and graphic sexualised nature of some of those messages" but accepted she had not wanted to engage in sex with the teenager until he turned 16.
The victim's impact statement said he had been left angry and ashamed of himself, had isolated himself from others, felt used and violated and that his relationship with others had been impacted.
The court heard the offender engaged in sex work in the 1990s to pay for her violent partner's drugs, had used heroin to cope, and was sexually assaulted a number of times.
Judge Lerve found she was remorseful, had accepted she had caused the victim "so much stress" and what she did was "horrible", and had a low risk of re-offending.
Judge Lerve ordered the offender be released from custody in 18 months' time on a $1000 good behaviour bond.
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