Army sergeant ‘raped vulnerable young girl recruits’
AN ARMY recruitment sergeant abused his position of power to rape and sexually abuse female cadets as young as 15, a court heard yesterday.
Edwin Mee, 45, allegedly bullied and groomed 11 victims who wanted to join the Forces, including one cadet who fell pregnant after he raped her while she was still a virgin.
Many of his ‘vulnerable’ victims were said to be black immigrants, who were threatened with deportation if they did not submit to his sexual demands.
Jurors were yesterday told how Mee started off spanking many of them on the bottom, after which he told one teenager: ‘It’s you who needs the Army, not the Army that needs you.’
The Scottish officer established a ‘ pattern of bullying sexual behaviour that was repeated again and again’, Southwark Crown Court heard. Known as ‘Jock’, the divorced father-of-five from Glasgow was said to have carried out the attacks on women aged between 15 and 25 between October 2010 and September 2011.
Prosecutors said he ‘deliberately targeted’ young black women from overseas, because he believed they were ‘vulnerable’ because of their immigration status.
Mee would stay late at the Army careers centre in Mitcham, South London, and conduct interviews with applicants out of hours so he could abuse them while no one else was there, it was said.
He disregarded normal Army interview procedures to keep the complainants to himself and ‘gauge their vulnerability’.
Prosecutor Rosin Cottage QC said the attacks had been an ‘abuse of trust and power by this defendant in order to bully and groom young women’.
Mee would speak to the women about sex, their partners, and touch them, and in the most serious instances rape those over whom he had established control, Miss Cottage said.
One of his victims, a virgin in her early 20s, fell pregnant when Mee raped her in a locked waiting room, the court heard.
She was in the UK on a student visa and Mee told her she needed to renew her passport and asked if she worked as a prostitute in the UK, jurors heard. He became ‘aggressive’ and looked down her top and rubbed her thigh while she was taking a test, it was claimed. After raping her, Mee told her she was a ‘sweet child’, jurors heard.
She fell ill and doctors found she had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy for which she was operated on after collapsing in hospital.
On another occasion he raped a 19-year- old from Sierra Leone after asking her for sex on the basis that he would get her a passport in return.
‘He pressurised her to the extent that she felt she would be compelled to submit to his demands,’ Miss Cottage told the jury.
‘He told her that he had control over her status in the country.’
Mee raped her, before forcing her to perform a sex act on him, it was said. ‘He told her that if she said anything, no one would listen to her, she would not have a job, she would have nothing,’ Miss Cottage said.
Mee, who was living in Croydon, South London, at the time of the alleged offences, denies 17 counts of sexual assault, three rapes and one count of assault by penetration. The trial continues.
‘A pattern of bullying
and grooming ’