A former student at Marist College has accused his Year 4 teacher of reaching into his school shirt and putting a hand down his shorts when he was in the back of a classroom of students.
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There were, the former student has told a court, multiple inappropriate touches during the course of that year.
The trial of the former teacher, David Kisun, began in the ACT Supreme Court on Monday. Mr Kisun, 71, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of indecent assault and denies any wrongdoing.
The former student, the Crown's key witness in the historical sex abuse case, was the first called to give evidence.
It was the early 1980s, the boy was 9-years-old, and he had just started at the Catholic boys' school, the jury heard.
The man said he had been an excellent student and had been put in the back row, where Mr Kisun put all the better students.
He said while the other students had been occupied with individual work, Mr Kisun would make his way to the back of the room.
He said the teacher sometimes touched him over his shirt.
Sometimes, when it was hot and the boys had taken off their ties and unbuttoned their shirts, Mr Kisun would reach under the shirt and rub his chest, the witness told the court.
He said on other occasions Mr Kisun asked him to stand at the back of the room. He could not remember why, but told the jury if a teacher asked you to do something, you did it.
He said Mr Kisun would reach around and into his pants.
Prosecutor Trent Hickey asked how he felt in those moments.
"Scared. Unsure. Afraid," the witness replied.
"It's ... I don't know how to explain it. It felt wrong."
Sometimes Mr Kisun asked him to stay back during recess or lunch.
He would be asked to sit on the edge of the teacher's desk and Mr Kisun would put his hands up the legs of his grey school shorts.
But as the year progressed, he said, his grades started to fall and he started acting out. "I fell off significantly in Year 4," he said, "started to get in a fair bit of trouble."
He said people would look at him if he was in trouble. "If people were looking at me, people weren't touching me." Even if it meant he got the cane, "[it was] much easier to deal with that than the alternative."
He told his brother, his girlfriend and his friends what had happened after he had left school. He said his brother told him Mr Kisun had made similar assaults on him while he was his teacher at Marist.
In 2014, after reading an article about the The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the man said he called a solicitor at a civil litigation firm.
On cross-examination, defence barrister Winston Terracini, SC, produced the man's tax returns for 2010 and 2014 and suggested he was not earning much money when he approached a compensation lawyer about the allegations.
The witness disagreed, and said he had support from his wife.
The court heard the man was suing both Marist College and Mr Kisun for compensation in relation to the allegations.
Aren't you claiming $1 million in damages? Mr Terracini asked.
The man said he would have to check the documents.
Mr Terracini also produced his school records. He pointed to the man's marks in language, reading and handwriting, and suggested none revealed worsening grades over that year.
"Can you point to any subject where there's been a significant decline in your results?" he asked.
"A significant decline? No," the witness replied.
Mr Terracini suggested the boys shared double-desks at school and that meant "another young boy is literally next to you using the same piece of timber as a desk?"
The witness agreed, but in response to more questions was unable to identify the boys he had sat next to that year.
The trial continues.
