Social worker is jailed for eight years over sex attacks

A SOCIAL worker who carried out a string of sex attacks on three women has been jailed for eight years.

Thomas Proctor used his position to threaten to have the children of two of them removed from their care.

The 43 year- old raped one woman while she was recovering in hospital.

He also took advantage of a victim after she drank water with a mystery substance in it.

Proctor had denied the accusations during a trial at the High Court in Glasgow.

But jurors found him guilty of a total of 11 charges.

They included the repeated rape and indecent assault of the first woman at different locations in Lanarkshire.

Proctor was convicted of sexually assaulting the second female at a flat in Glasgow’s Maryhill.

He was finally guilty of raping and making threats to a third woman in Fife and Lanarkshire.

The crimes spanned between January 2002 and August 2019.

Judge, William Gallacher imposed an 11- year extended sentence on Proctor, of Airdrie, Lanarkshire.

He will be behind bars for eight years and under supervision upon his release for three years.

The judge stated that Proctor’s actions were “simply disgraceful.”

He added: “It is difficult to figure out the appropriate sentence due to the level of abuse carried out over a period of time.

“I will impose a significant penalty.

“You will have grasped that because of the gravity of this case, there is only one thing I can do.”

An indefinite nonharassment order against Proctor’s victims was granted.

In his closing speech to jurors, prosecutor Alan Parfery told how Proctor was “calculated in a predatory fashion” towards his victims.

Parfery spoke of his position as a social worker to make sure threats to two of the women “packed a punch”.

Referring to one of the victims, the prosecutor put to him: “You told her that you held such a job and how the system worked.

“That she should be intimate with you if she wanted to keep her child. The cruellest of cruel threats.”

Proctor denied the accusation adding that he never mentioned his work to “threaten” anyone.

Parfery later told jurors that there was “only one person” who knew what to say to use “for a clear and devastating outcome”.

Proctor had latterly been a social worker in the Alloa area in Clackmannanshire before being suspended.

A spokesperson for Clackmannanshire Council confirmed after the case he “was no longer employed” by the authority.