In 2022, Sherley Bond, the Sheffield Paedophile, was jailed for 10 years for grooming and sexually abusing a vulnerable boy more than 30 years ago when she was working as a school nurse.
Sherley Bond, aged 66, from Sheffield, was in her 30s when she started having unprotected sex with the youngster while working as a nurse or care assistant at a school in North Yorkshire.
York Crown Court heard that Sherley Bond had sex with an underage teen boy, the complainant, on multiple occasions over two years.
The complainant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, did not report matters until 2020, some three decades after the abuse, because he was worried that he had let the school down and felt an inexplicable guilt.
Sherley Bond was charged with seven counts of indecent assault on a child under 16 years of age, but denied all allegations, and a jury found her guilty of all but one count following a trial earlier this year, during which she claimed she only had a ‘vague recollection’ of the complainant.
Trial prosecutor, David Gordon, said that Sherley Bond, who was more than twice the boy’s age, had lied about her nursing qualifications to land a job at the school.
The complainant said he did not realise at the time that sexual activity with the adult staff member was illegal and didn’t say anything about it for years because he feared he would be blamed and did not want to let her down.
“(The victim) remembered Sherley Bond as a care assistant, although he classed her as more of a matron,” said Mr Gordon.
Sherley Bond, a mother of three, became a school staff member and ‘senior house parent’ when the complainant reached his teens.
She had sex with him on ‘multiple occasions,’ either on school premises, at her own home or in her car, the court heard.
Mr Gordon said the victim had carried his own sense of guilt because he ‘regarded Bond as some kind of friend or even a mother figure’.
At the time of the trial in May, Sherley Bond was living on Abbeydale Road, Sheffield. She had since moved to Hyde in Greater Manchester, and her registered address is Higham Lane, Hyde.
Defence barrister Patrick Palmer said that Sherley Bond, who is also a grandmother, was going through ‘severe’ mental-health problems at the time of the offences and was now in poor health.
Judge Simon Hickey told Sherley Bond that she had ‘quite deliberately used your position of trust to abuse this boy’.
“(It happened) in a car, in a motel, on school premises, at your home – all places where this young victim should have felt safe and protected,” he added.
“It’s had a lifelong effect upon him. There was significant planning; there was grooming behaviour. He was a particularly vulnerable child.”
He said that Sherley Bond had ‘played up her illness’ in efforts to get the case against her stopped or delayed.
During a September 12 hearing at York Crown Court, Sherley Bond was jailed for 10 years, of which she will serve half behind bars before being released on a prison licence.
Sherley Bond was also placed on the sex offenders’ register for 10 years and slapped with a 10-year sexual harm prevention order to put curbs on her contact with children.
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