Warwickshire Police
A teaching assistant has been jailed after performing sex acts on a 15-year-old child on a school trip overseas.
Daily Mail reports the first incident occurred on a mini-bus with other students present, and the teaching assistant performed oral sex on the boy the next day in a secluded spot. Several more sex acts occurred on the plane back from the school trip several days later.
Police were made aware of the incidents in February this year when rumours spread around the school community.
Jill Meldrum-Jones, who is married, was charged with five counts of sexual activity with a child and two counts of causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity at Warwick Crown Court in early November.
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Meldrum-Jones pleaded guilty to all charges, and she was sentenced to jail for two years and eight months.
The prosecutor, Stefan Kolodynski, summarised the teenage victim’s statement in response to the incident.
“He says: ‘I just feel horrible about it all, when I’m out I feel quite cautious because I don’t want to bump into people who know what has gone on’.
“He said he feels very nervous. Every time he goes out he feels people are talking about him.
“When he’s walking with his dog he likes to put his hood up because he always feels people are gossiping about him.”
Meldrum-Jones’ defence lawyer, Simon Hunka, pushed for a suspended sentence as Meldrum-Jones had been diagnosed with depression two months after the incident.
“Depression can’t be an explanation but when someone suffers from depression they lose that same sense of fear and they take decisions that others wouldn’t ordinarily do.
“I can’t explain away what she did but it sets in some context why this woman goes to such strange extremes.”
Judge Philip Gregory announced to the courtroom during sentencing that Meldrum-Jones “must have completely lost control of her senses and been consumed with lust for this young boy.”
“It seems to me that you lost control of your senses as well as control of your physical urges.
“At the time you were a teaching assistant charged with responsibility for teenage children on a school trip.
“This should have been a wonderful experience but for one of them, the victim, it was an incident which has plagued him ever since because of the serious sexual misconduct of which you involved him.
“You’re 37, he was 15. That’s a substantial age difference, you and you alone are responsible for what happened.
“It would have been bad enough if it happened on one occasion but it happened repeatedly.
“And it didn’t end there on the holiday because under the cover of darkness on the flight home, and this almost beggars belief, you engaged in similar conduct with him.
“Once you were back in the UK you exchanged explicitly text messages with him.
“It almost beggars belief that someone from your background, happily married with two children, should so lose control of your senses and judgement that you would permit yourself to behave in this way.
“You and your family need to understand that judges have to follow the law and have to implement it.
“I acknowledge the appalling humiliation to which you’ve been subject and the hell that your husband and children will suffer as a consequence of your absence.”
