Helen goddard where is she now

Her barrister Anthony Heaton-Armstrong claimed that she was 'subjected to a lot of pressure from the child', and added: 'Miss Goddard is quite young for her age.

Goddard is a former child prodigy who was one of only six British teenagers to play at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in She went on to become student union president at Trinity College of Music in London, where she earned her degree.

She is known to have had several boyfriends, including Jonathan Ansell, the tenor who found fame as a member of the operatic 'boy band' G4. The head of music at the London school - which cannot be named for legal reasons - told Southwark Crown Court in a statement: 'The girls all adored her, and would flock to her room at break times. But Goddard, a slim blonde who faced the court in tight blouse, waistcoat and pinstripe trousers, ignored the warning and fast became increasingly close to her victim, one of her trumpet pupils.

The girl, who had been traumatised by her parents' separation several years ago, told police she and her teacher went for coffees together after lessons, and began confiding in each other. By January of this year, the girl invited the teacher to join her parents dog walking on Hampstead Heath - and then began to visit Goddard's flat in Greenwich with her father's knowledge.

Flirting and text messages followed and in February the pair went for a walk near the school, and kissed for the first time. Days later, they shared a bed at Goddard's flat. From then on, the girl would stay with her teacher every Friday or Saturday night, telling her parents she was with a schoolfriend. Prosecutor Regina Naughton said: 'Miss Goddard was aware it was the girl's first sexual relationship. By June Goddard was so brazen that when the girl told her parents she was visiting her older sister in Paris, she in fact stayed in a hotel with her teacher, and joined her on a gay pride march there.

The girl told two fellow pupils about her relationship with the teacher, however, and the school became abuzz with gossip. In July, 'a concerned parent' sent anonymous emails to the school to report the relationship, and called on the head: 'Please act quickly'. The parents were informed, police were called - and when the mother tried to track her daughter down, she discovered she was at Goddard's home.

Analysis of phones showed the girl had sent her teacher texts, while the teacher had sent 60 back, many sexually explicit. Self-esteem was beyond her reach. So how old was she? How old was he? The results are nearly always catastrophic, whether the love is returned or denied. When an old friend of mine was still a schoolboy, he climbed into the bed of his guardian, who he adored. His appalled guardian threw him out of the house. He swallowed rat-poison. She has tried to take the blame, she had admitted that it was she who first kissed Goddard, but it makes no odds.

As a year-old she was incapable of consent, let alone of seduction. Yet it is Juliet who instigates the affair and precipitates the clandestine marriage and its consummation. In a sane society lovers are protected from mutual self-immolation; in a crazy one they are driven to it. Goddard will be allowed to write to her from prison and they will be allowed to meet once she is released.

It looks very much as if the judge believes that the unnamed victim is capable of love, and that separation from Goddard, the criminal who abused her, will cause more pain to her than to Goddard. Some would say the judge is being sexist, and believes, perhaps, that being seduced by a woman is less damaging to a child than being seduced by a man.

The child in question is capable of becoming pregnant, so sex with a man is far more dangerous for her than sex with a woman, sex toys and fluffy handcuffs notwithstanding.

There is, after all, a difference. Our teenage girl has been led to believe by Miss Goddard that their contact is within the bounds of a normal relationship, apart from the fact that our daughter is under age.

The same could as fairly be said of the Jazz Lady herself. Goddard had never had a relationship with a female before she fell in love with a schoolgirl; the schoolgirl had never had a sexual relationship with anybody.

The younger woman is the likelier to grow out of her teenage feelings. Goddard might find herself, besides being disgraced and stigmatised for ever, dumped for a man.

The blogs are a-throb with people asserting that a man who had had a relationship with a pupil would have been more harshly treated than Goddard. Brett Meads, of Peterborough, for example, is facing a lengthy jail term. This year-old teacher has admitted nine sex offences involving three girl pupils aged 15 and This was not love: this was predation. I do not expect to hear the three girls claiming that they seduced him, nor do I expect to hear that they are writing to him in prison.

The situations are different, not because the offenders are of different sexes, but because the nature of the interaction is fundamentally different.

In , a science teacher at Headlands School, Bridlington, was sentenced to four years and nine months for having sex with three pupils, not a lot more than 15 months per victim. It seems that all the girls in her classes adored Goddard, but only one got close to her, disastrously for Goddard.

She was foolish, and she broke the law, but she is not dangerous. Unless of course her fellow prisoners fall in love with her too. I hope the authorities let her have her trumpet. I was 15, a pupil at a co-ed public school in Surrey, when the affair happened. I had an inkling I was gay, but would never have labelled myself as such.

I just knew this particular teacher was — she had the classic butch lesbian look. I approached her after a few months. She asked me how old I was. She was I asked for her phone number and she gave it to me. The affair began three weeks later. We would spend time in her car. The affair went on for 15 months. Neither did the school. I do think it was an abuse of trust to an extent. She was manipulative and threatened to kill herself when I tried to end it.

She claimed she had cancer. It was very damaging. The flipside was I was doing what I wanted to do — I was having gay sex and I enjoyed it in the way straight girlfriends told me they liked having sex with boys. At one stage she threatened to use a note I had written to out me, and she threatened to tell my parents. I think that Helen Goddard should have been reprimanded, but that harshly? Surely the question is: what was the girl like and what did she want?

Was she timid, or like me, did she know what she wanted and go after it? Historians of child abuse have pointed out that public awareness of the issue can be dated back at least as far as the Victorian era, through the efforts of child protection groups from this time, though many for some time imagined this began in Britain roughly at the beginning of the s see Brian Corby, Child Abuse: Towards a Knowledge Base , third edition Maidenhead: Open University Press, , pp.

It is probably simplistic merely to imagine that such abuse is simply a phenomenon which has occurred with equal or greater frequency in historical times, the only differentiating factor of today being the extent to which it is reported both to the authorities and in the media see ibid. The passing of the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act in , followed by further consolidating acts in , and , as well as the formation of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, brought an intensified focus on mistreatment of children in the family, though a greater amount of attention continued to be paid to child prostitution.

Whilst medical literature identifying symptoms of abuse increased from the s onwards, the primary catalyst for a greater sense of urgency from both politicians and the wider public was the case of Maria Colwell, killed by her stepfather in , after various health and welfare officers failed to identify her predicament earlier ibid. This emphasis continued through the s, including in such prominent inquiries as that into the death of Jasmine Beckford in , or the Cleveland child abuse scandal in , which brought false diagnosis of abuse into the public arena, leading to the rather ambivalent Children Act of Corby, Child Abuse , pp.

It is however at this point in time that the issue of abuse in specialist music schools first came to public attention. Since around , there have been sporadic reports about abuse in music education, which have come to a head this year. Ling would never to date return to the UK; following his departure, revelations began to emerge of widespread sexual abuse of students at the school by Ling, which had been rumoured for a time. In December , the long-serving Director of Music since , Michael Brewer, resigned apparently on grounds of ill health.

For all her pop-star exes and brassy instruments, Helen Goddard is probably the one who fears other people, hunches from low self-esteem and fails in social situations; if she were otherwise, she would have found romance somewhere healthier than her own classroom.

When the Jazz Lady comes scurrying out of prison, high on the judge's permission to jump straight back into this court-certified love affair, will the schoolgirl still be waiting? I wonder. Five years from now, will the schoolgirl see this lonely music teacher who fell in love with a pupil as anything other than pitiful? Hard to imagine. She is only 15 and absolutely should not have been touched. But she is only 15 and whether she knows it yet or not — and I suspect she might — she has all the power.

She has no reason to lack confidence. Sooner or later, with or without a teacher, she will know how to blow her own trumpet.

This article is more than 12 years old. Helen Goddard's crime is a curio. She is jailed, but can stay in contact with her lover. Move on, girlfriend! You have to feel it, man… In disapproval, we imagine her to be a particularly vulnerable child, a late developer, seeking guidance and emotional support from a teacher who vaulted what should be a concrete border between caretaking and inappropriate intimacy.

Topics Teaching Opinion Crime Child protection features. This, he says, is proof that she would 'never be a danger to her pupils and doesn't deserve to have her name on the sex offenders' register'. But the law - and most parents - don't make that distinction. Goddard's friend says: 'It's not an excuse, but I think the pupil is mature for her age, and Helen is perhaps less so.

Maybe that's why they clicked. There is no doubt that the softly spoken and devoutly Christian Goddard is an unlikely woman to find herself cast in the role of sexual predator. And those who know her best are even more stunned that she has been having a lesbian relationship.

She is known to have had several boyfriends, including Jonathan Ansell, the tenor who found fame as one quarter of G4, the operatic boyband. Ansell, now a successful solo artist who is due to marry his fiance, TV presenter Debbie King, in a fortnight, was said to be 'very surprised' at reading about Goddard's disgrace in the papers this week. They lived in the same student halls of residence five years ago when she attended Trinity College of Music and he attended Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

Goddard's arrest in July was the first her father and mother, Yvonne, a year-old City accountant, knew of the relationship with the girl. But according to a source close to the case, 'the school was abuzz with gossip' about it, and the arrest came after the headmistress was informed.

When police and social workers arrived at the house of Goddard's lover, they were told that she was out. It is unknown whether the girl's parents support their daughter's decision to continue her relationship with Goddard.

Mr Goddard, however, says it is a shame she didn't come to that decision before she got herself into this mess. It's a sentiment no doubt echoed by many, including the school's headmistress, Diana Vernon, who dispatched an emergency text message to all sets of parents to inform them that an 'inappropriate relationship' had been reported to the police. As a member of the Salvation Army and a devout Christian, he brought his children up to believe in God and to serve their community.

Helen, who attended local Catholic primary and secondary schools, is known to neighbours as a quiet girl who never failed to return home from London at Christmas to play carols on the trumpet at her local church.

She also played a charity concert in Salisbury on Good Friday. Her brother David had arranged the score. Understandably bewildered by how it all could have gone so wrong, Mr Goddard says quietly: 'We gave her and her brother great childhoods, filled with opportunities to develop their innate musical talents, so that they could both get great jobs and have great lives.

She is thought to be staying with her brother. Indeed, it is not hard to find evidence of Helen's extraordinary talent. She was considered a prodigious musical talent from an early age, playing the trumpet in an unders orchestra and the Hampshire County Youth Band. The pinnacle of her playing career came in , at 17, when she was one of five young British musicians chosen to perform at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games. She paid her own way through a four-year Bachelor of Music degree at Trinity where, as president of the Student Union and co-founder of the Repertoire Orchestra, she was a model student.