Jeremy Forrest Jailed for Pupil Abduction and Sexual Offences

By Peter Walker
The Guardian
June 21, 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/21/jeremy-forrest-jailed-pupil-sex-abduction

[with video]

A teacher convicted of child abduction after fleeing to France with a 15-year-old pupil has been jailed for five and a half years after also admitting five counts of sexual activity with a child.

Jeremy Forrest, 30, prompted an international police hunt after he and the teenager spent just over a week on the run in France last September. He faced only the single charge of child abduction during his trial at Lewes crown court.

On Friday Judge Michael Lawson QC jailed the married maths teacher for four and a half years for the sexual activity with a child and one year for child abduction, to run consecutively. Forrest has spent nine months on remand.

The judge also imposed a sexual offences prevention order permanently banning Forrest from working or volunteering with children or having unsupervised contact with children.

Although the girl, who cannot be named, told the court that she and Forrest began having sex shortly after her 15th birthday, he was not initially charged with sex offences for legal reasons linked to his extradition from France, something which could not previously be reported.

Sentencing Forrest, from Petts Wood, Kent, Lawson told him he had chosen to "ignore the cardinal rule of teaching" in never even attempting to maintain proper boundaries between himself and the girl. By taking her to France he subjected the girl's family to "appalling distress", he said, while the girl had been forced to relive her private life in the glare of publicity.

Police have confirmed that they are investigating whether Forrest contacted the girl to alter how she gave evidence at his trial.

The judge had questioned the evidence she gave in court as it varied from her original police interviews and fitted with Forrest's defence that he took her to France to prevent her succumbing to suicidal tendencies.

Lawson told Forrest: "You have contested the abduction charge, raising a spurious defence so that she had to give evidence, evidence very different in content from her original account and designed to support it.

"She had clearly received assistance in relation to what she should say."

He told Forrest on giving his sentence: "Your behaviour over this period had been motivated by self interest and has hurt and damaged many people – her family, your family, staff and pupils at the school and respect for teachers everywhere. It has damaged you too, but that was something you were prepared to risk. You now have to pay that price."

Forrest did not react to the sentence but nodded to his family, who have been in court throughout the trial, as he was taken down to the cells.

In a victim impact statement read to the court, the teenager's mother said Forrest had driven a wedge between her and the girl and they now lived apart.

It said: "I feel the [daughter] I knew is dead and it upsets me beyond words. I feel completely useless most of the time. I feel like I have failed as a parent as I cannot understand how someone could do this to my child and I had no idea."

She added: "I feel like the worst mother in the world, whatever anyone else says it doesn't matter. Someone has got my child and I never saw it coming and never saw it as it was happening.

Forrest was charged only with child abduction because this was the sole reason for his extradition from France since British prosecutors said they did not initially have the necessary evidence to proceed on the sexual offences.

He faced the possibility of a separate trial over the sexual activity even though it featured heavily in the abduction hearing and was never disputed by Forrest's lawyers. The agreement to admit sexual activity charges, made between the conviction and sentencing, brings legal proceedings to an end.

The jury took less than two hours on Thursday to dismiss Forrest's defence that he had not abducted the girl and went to France with her only reluctantly, believing she would otherwise go alone and could come to serious, self-inflicted harm.

This narrative was expounded in the testimony of his former pupil, now 16, who remains supportive of her former teacher. She sat near Forrest's family for the verdict, weeping when it was announced.

While the court was told of repeated rumours about the pair's closeness at their school, Bishop Bell in Eastbourne, East Sussex, it was only discovered at the start of the next school year when police were tipped off that the teenager's phone contained intimate photos of Forrest. Officers seized the phone, and Forrest and the girl departed for France the next day.

From Paris they went to Bordeaux. There, Forrest devised a false CV and started looking for bar work. They were caught after the owner of an English bar where Forrest asked about work recognised them from media coverage.

While the teenager has stood by Forrest, police and prosecutors argued she was a vulnerable child exploited by a narcissistic abuser.

Questions remain over whether more could have been done to prevent the relationship. Headteacher Terry Boatwright defended the school, saying that until last September there had been "very limited anecdotal hearsay and no evidence of a relationship. However, even so, everything was investigated following appropriate safeguarding procedures."

The Local Safeguarding Children Board in East Sussex has begun a serious case review into the actions of the school, local authority and police. It will investigate whether a wider pattern of poor pastoral care exists at a school that has faced three cases linked to child sex abuse within four years.

In 2009 a supply teacher from Bishop Bell was jailed for having sex with two teenage pupils. More recently, the school was widely criticised after failing to remove a retired priest as chair of governors for more than a year after claims of child sex abuse against him emerged.