Ex-teacher who violated boys spared jail

Young, then 24, was a history and Japanese teacher who also coached junior volleyball at Mazenod College, in Melbourne's southeast, in 1996. 

She went to one of the 15-year-old's family home one weekend, kissed him passionately, and let him touch her breasts. 

Young later drove him to a car park one night and had sex with him. 

But when the boy, who cannot be named, asked to see her again, she told him it was over. 

He would later tell a court he felt like he had been "lured, groomed, then spat out". 

In 1997 Young, now 25, kissed another year 10 Mazenod student during a school camp on the Mornington Peninsula. 

She called his family home under the guise of a fake name, kissed him in the change rooms after volleyball practice and had sex with him.

The two boys reported their former teacher nearly 20 years later.

Young on Tuesday faced the Victorian County Court, where she was handed a three-year prison sentence that was wholly suspended for two years, meaning she won't go to jail if she doesn't re-offend. 

She had in December pleaded guilty to three counts of sexual penetration with a child under 16. 

"It defies credulity that there could be any ambiguity around the appropriateness of this conduct," Judge Martine Marich said. 

Young was allegedly raped by a family a friend when she was 19, the court was told. 

And Judge Marich said the lingering effects of this trauma may have affected her ability to form safe, consensual and age-appropriate intimate relationships.

But she couldn't understand Young's attraction to the boys.

"Your offending was grave and shocks the conscious," the judge said.

One of boys told the court he had turned to drugs and alcohol as a means of escaping his deep sense of anxiety, desperation and loneliness after the incident. 

"It wasn't about getting high, it was just to feel nothing," he said in a statement to Young. 

"I've the gone through life thinking something wasn't right with me - that I wasn't wired properly.

"I was a kid who was lured, groomed, and then spat out just as quickly as it started. I feel at times that you ruined my life. 

"You need to know that what you did was wrong and you really hurt me."

The other former Mazenod student said he was an emotional wreck after the incident and suffered multiple anxiety attacks. 

"If I had known the repercussions, I seriously doubt I would have gone through with it," he told the court.