The Voice of Spalding and South Holland
A former scout has told a jury that he was repeatedly sexually assaulted by an ex-Lincolnshire police officer.
The complainant, now in his 40s, told the jury at Lincoln Crown Court that John Edward Bates abused him over a six-year period.
Bates, who at the time was a scout leader in Spalding, is currently on trial facing 22 charges involving four boys.
The complainant told the jury Bates regularly committed offences against him saying: “It was every time he had the opportunity.”
He said that when he was just ten years old Bates abused him on a weekly basis and the incidents continued into his teens although, he said, the frequency reduced as he approached his 14th birthday.
The witness said: “I was trying to avoid it. I learned how to avoid things.”
He told the jury that in April 1979 Bates took him to London for a weekend to watch a Chelsea football match.
He said: “I’d been a Chelsea supporter since I was four or five years old. I’d never been to London before.”
The man said that they stayed at Bates’ parents home and he slept in a sleeping bag on the lounge floor but said that during the night Bates sexually abused him.
He told the jury that when the defendant was jailed in 1983 he wrote to Bates in prison.
“I didn’t know what he had gone to prison for. I suppose in a weird way I supposed him to be innocent. He was a policeman. He went to church.”
The witness said that after Bates was released from jail they met up and stayed at a relative’s house.
He said he slapped Bates after the defendant kissed him and added: “He went to bed and to sleep and disappeared early in the morning and I have never had any contact with him until seeing him in court.”
Bates (68), formerly of Pinchbeck Road, Spalding, but now living in Camden, North London, denies 18 charges of indecent assault on a male, two charges of indecency with a child and two charges of attempting to commit a serious sexual offence. The charges relate to the period between March 1972 and October 1989.
Bates says the allegations against him are fabricated and says nothing sexual happened between himself and any of the four complainants.
The trial continues.
