Teacher’s sexual and violent offending against students at Gloriavale school revealed
A former Gloriavale teacher who was given credit for “previous impeccable good character” when he sexually abused a 9-year-old has now confessed to further offending against 20 children.
Just Standfast has been convicted of sexual offending against 15 girls.
He pleaded guilty in May to two charges of sex violation by unlawful sex connection against two girls aged seven and 14, 10 charges of indecent assault on girls under the age of 12 and six indecent assaults against girls aged between 12 and 16.
The 73-year-old also admitted five charges of assault with blunt weapons against five boys and a man. He lost a bid for name suppression in May but filed an appeal.
However, he can now be named after the court confirmed he abandoned the appeal ahead of his sentencing in August.
In March 2019, Standfast was sentenced to six months’ community detention and two years’ intensive supervision for indecently touching and kissing a 9-year-old student. He was given credit for his “previous impeccable good character” by the sentencing judge.
A New Zealand Teachers’ Disciplinary Tribunal decision in 2022 found former Gloriavale principal Faithful Pilgrim endorsed Standfast as being of “good character and fit to be a teacher” when Pilgrim knew he had sexually abused the student, and had heard a rumour about inappropriate conduct by Standfast to a different young person about 25 years earlier.
The decision said the girl told her mother immediately of the offending in 2012, who then told Pilgrim. Instead of alerting authorities, Pilgrim sent Standfast to work in the boys’ high school classrooms. Standfast’s offending was reported to police by the girl’s father in 2018.
According to the court summary of facts for his latest charges, West Coast CIB began “preliminary interactions” with Standfast in September and October last year after two large scale investigations into sexual offending in the community.
Before a formal police interview took place, Standfast provided a signed statement to police via his lawyer.
In the letter, which his lawyer advised not to make, Standfast confessed to sexual and violent offending against children in Gloriavale. He only named two of the 15 girls he said he had sexually offended against. Police asked him to identify the others.
“He refused to do so stating he had already approached and spoken with these victims himself and asserted that they had asked him not to identify them by name. This assertion was unable to be corroborated,” it said.
“He stated that his acts were intentional and he knew they were indecent.”
In court in May, Standfast’s lawyer Marcus Zintl told the judge Standfast accepted the summary of facts and acknowledged a term of imprisonment was likely.
He successfully sought bail saying Standfast was living outside the Gloriavale community and not a risk to the public. He also sought name suppression until at least his sentencing.
He said there would be a risk of casting aspersion on Standfast’s family member who shared his name. Standfast’s wife also made a submission in support of name suppression saying publication would cause suffering to her 10 children, 65 grandchildren and 10 great grand children.
She also said publication would harm the Gloriavale community, because some businesses like BNZ and Westland Milk had tried to stop working with Gloriavale due to “adverse publicity” in the past.
Judge Gerard Lynch declined name suppression saying the application was “tenuous at best and frankly unrealistic”.
He said Westland Milk was under pressure from Woolworths not to accept milk from Gloriavale’s farms but a court injunction had forced them to continue. BNZ was also under a court order to keep Gloriavale accounts open, which it was appealing.
He said publication of Standfast’s name would not allow BNZ and Westland Milk to contravene court orders and their decisions to cease working with Gloriavale were made independently of Standfast’s offending.
According to the summary of facts, Standfast was known as Harvey Weston Bishop before he joined the community, when it was based at Cust in Canterbury.
He was involved in a motorcycle accident which resulted in the amputation of his right leg above the knee and significant injury to his right arm at the elbow with the removal of the joint requiring him to use prosthestic limbs and braces.
The violent offending happened when Standfast was supervising boys aged six to nine years old in the community’s vegetable garden in the late 2000s.
He would get angry when the boys were not doing what he expected and would line them up and strike them once or twice across the backside, arms or backs of legs with garden tools and a plastic pipe.
It left the boys crying and one had bruising for four days and difficulty walking.
He also struck a man around the legs after getting angry with him in the vegetable garden.
According to the summary, Standfast committed various indecent acts upon multiple young girls aged seven to 14 years old between 1980s and 2000s.
He would put his hand under their dresses when they were sitting on his knee or they were speaking to him at his desk on multiple occasions.
He also sexually violated a seven-year-old and a 14-year-old by unlawful sexual connection.
Standfast’s statement to police said he was “totally ashamed” of his actions which were sexually motivated and intentional.
He said he needed professional help and had apologised to the victims as adults seeking their forgiveness.
“I will have to live with my guilt and shame for the rest of my life and beyond,” he said.
When Judge Raoul Neave sentenced Standfast in 2019 he did not put him on the sex offenders’ register because he was assessed as being at low risk of re-offending.
He said Standfast’s “opportunistic and spontaneous offending” was an isolated incident.