Pastor Who Spanked Women in His Congregation for Sexual Pleasure Is Jailed
By Tom_Matthews
A COULSDON pastor found guilty of spanking women in his congregation for sexual pleasure has been jailed. Howard Curtis, 73, was unanimously found guilty of six counts of sexual assault and two counts of child cruelty on March 24, after a four-week trial at Croydon Crown Court. At the same court today, Judge Peter Gower QC ordered that Curtis, former minister of Coulsdon Christian Fellowship, in be jailed for six years and sign the sex offender register for life. Judge Gower said: "These are serious offences involving a gross abuse of the trust that was invested in you, and in your position in the church. Indeed, custody is inevitable." As he was led down, Curtis, of Bloxworth Close, Wallington, blew a kiss to his family from the dock.
Curtis committed the sex attacks against two women and the non-sexual spankings on two children between the mid-1980s, when he was in his early 40s, until 2013. During the trial, the court heard how he "brainwashed" the women into accepting spankings as the "will of God". He claimed he spanked one of the women on her bare backside during religious deliverance healing sessions to "heal" her of depression, and that he "didn't see any harm" in it. Curtis spanked the other on her naked genitals, while she was completely undressed, to "cure her frigid spirit" and he led her to believe the sessions would improve her marriage and sex life. Judge Gower said Curtis had spanked her on between 10 to 20 occasions, "hard enough, on one occasion, to bruise her", and during one of the sessions he even photographed her afterwards while she was naked on the floor of his office, before showing her the pictures and deleting them. "You had persuaded her to believe that what she was agreeing to was some form of therapy," said Judge Gower. "[It was a] gross breach of trust by a man whose station within the church put him in a position of very considerable power." Curtis accepted he had smacked the children, a boy aged either two or three, and a nine-year-old girl, though denied the smackings amounted to child cruelty. The court heard how the boy's mother discovered the youngster's backside was "black and blue" when she went to change his nappy after Curtis had taken the child to "calm him down". Judge Gower said Curtis "at no stage" had permission to smack the boy, while Curtis had told the girl's mother her daughter "needed to be disciplined" and he left her with red marks to her backside. Julia Flanagan, mitigating, said her client was "thought of highly" by the many people he had helped as pastor over the years. "He's in many respects a genuinely spiritual and religious man, and in many respects he is a good man," she told Judge Gower. "Helping his community, that's what he tried to do for forty years. "He does want me to say to the court that he is sorry that his actions have caused harm or upset to anyone."
But Judge Gower said Curtis's expression of remorse were "somewhat hollow" after his not guilty pleas. "It's clear to me that your controlling, bullying and, as a jury found, criminal conduct has had a lasting effect on them," he said. "Moreover you have caused them to relive in public, in a jury box, the sustained assaults to which you submitted them." Curtis was arrested in 2013 after one of his victims reported him to the police. Before his arrest he lived near the church in Chipstead Valley Road. The jury found him not guilty of two counts of indecent assault, two counts of child cruelty, a count of causing greivous bodliy harm, one further sexual assault and an assault by penetration count.
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