A chemistry teacher has been found guilty of indecently assaulting two teenage pupils at an all-boys school in the late 1980s.
Sally-Anne Bowen, who taught at Christ’s College in Finchley, north London, assaulted the teenage boys when they were aged around 14 to 15 and she was in her mid-20s.
Bowen, of Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, did not appear to show any emotion as a jury at Harrow crown court returned majority verdicts finding the 65-year-old guilty of seven counts of indecent assault after six hours and 29 minutes of deliberations.
One complainant told jurors he had sex with the teacher “about 20 or 30 times” over several months. He would visit Bowen’s home, considered her to be his girlfriend and had fallen in love, the court heard.
In his evidence, the man – who cannot be named for legal reasons – said he kept their relationship secret because he felt compelled to protect the teacher, who he said had drummed it into him that he was not allowed to tell anyone.
“I never, ever spoke to anyone about it,” he said. “I was always really aware, she drummed it into me.” He added: “Years she got to teach because I remained silent.”
He said in a police interview that the experience had been “the destruction of my education”.
Madeleine Wolfe, prosecuting, told jurors in her closing speech that the man’s evidence had “a real visceral quality to it”. She said: “There can be no doubt that there was a lasting impact on him. It’s not a schoolboy fantasy, is it? He’s started this account in 2014 – this has real-life implications for him, remained with him for decades.”
It was not until he became a parent himself that the man began to realise what had happened to him, Wolfe said.
The second complainant said he and Bowen kissed once in a cafe when he was goaded into it by other boys.
Another former pupil at the school, Tobias Oliver, said during the trial that Bowen acted as if she was in “a Sabrina Carpenter video” while in the classroom, and “dressed and behaved more like my teenage female friends than the other teachers”.
Oliver, who did not know the two victims, told jurors: “The topics of conversation in class often strayed away from chemistry and became quite sexual.”
Bowen had no boundaries and “felt more like trying to be one of us, like our friend, than a teacher,” he said. Bowen was “very flirtatious” in class and told them how she enjoyed giving oral sex to her boyfriend, he said.
He recalled an occasion when a boy in Bowen’s class was reading a “sex manual”, which he believed to be the Kama Sutra. He said Bowen went through the book and discussed “the merits of different sexual positions” with the students.
Oliver also described how on another occasion Bowen sat on a desk and caught the attention of the class before slowly opening her legs, revealing her underwear.
Richard Luker, who was head of science at the school in the late 1980s, told the court he remembered a complaint from the first victim’s mother that she was concerned the boy was planning to travel abroad with Bowen at the end of term.
During the trial, Bowen claimed the allegations were “total fabrication”. She said she had had a medical condition that in the late 1980s had not been diagnosed and had made sexual intercourse difficult and painful for her.
Her partner of 36 years, Darren Scotchbrook, giving evidence, said Bowen had not been aware of her condition when they met in 1990, and sex had been “clearly not enjoyable for her” as a result.
Asked under cross-examination how she had dressed in the classroom, Bowen replied that she “wasn’t going to dress like Margaret Thatcher” in her mid-20s. She told the court she did not flirt with students and was “just friendly”.
She denied having a relationship with the first complainant. “Absolutely not, no relationship whatsoever. Student-teacher,” she said.
She denied knowing the second complainant, saying she did not remember him even after seeing him give evidence in court.
Allegations against Bowen featured in the Tortoise Investigates podcast Lucky Boy last year.
Bowen was granted bail until her sentence hearing on 20 November.
