Admitting sixteen crimes against young children, teenage nursery worker and Royal Wootton Bassett Paedophile Sophie Elms became Britain’s youngest known female convicted child rapist in 2018.
Sophie Elms, barely seventeen, committed crimes against two small children aged two and three years old.
During her 2019 trial at Swindon Crown Court, she entered a guilty plea to the charges against her; her sentence was seven years and ten months in jail.
This covered penetration, sexual assault, and gathering and sharing obscene images of toddlers.
Sophie Elms has the most appealing background for a babysitter. She was on work placement in a nursery as part of her training while enrolled in a course on childcare at Swindon College.
Her past did not point to anything suggesting she was anything except a law-abiding, moral young woman. Today, she can still be seen on social media attending joyful family events, getting ready to go (in a polka-dot dress), and holding her beloved terrier, Chalkie (under one picture).
“Sophie Elms comes from an adorable family,” [Editor’s Note – yeah sure she was born a paedophile…not!] remarked someone who lives a few doors away from her and her parents in Royal Wootton Bassett, the Wiltshire market town on the outskirts of Swindon. ‘If ever I run across them in town, they will always stop and chat.’
But yesterday, the red-brick end-of-terrace door stayed closed, and the curtains at every window were also closed. There seemed to have been a bereavement. For the closest relatives of the youngster, particularly her mother, the new, startling discoveries about her daughter must feel like a death in the family.
When Sophie Elms, now 23, was 17, she molested two sisters, both young children. She was arrested this week. She is said to be among the youngest female paedophiles ever recorded in the UK.
Although Britain currently has a few taboos, one of them is female paedophilia. When such abuse takes place, it seems more disgusting and more disturbing since cultural tropes support society’s perspective of women as carers and nurturers. After all, they are our mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers. They are probably also our babysitters as well.
Sophie Elms, on the outside at least, seemed reasonable and decent. At college, she had completed a safeguarding course. She checked every box for the couple who would pay her to watch after their two- and three-year-old darling children.
They would not have guessed she may endanger their small daughters, let alone engage in sexual activity not in a million years.
Two charges of sexual assault by penetration, two charges of sexual assault by touching, four charges of taking indecent images, six charges of distributing indecent images and two charges of possessing extreme pornography spelt out on the indictment at Swindon Crown Court this week, the degree of her hideous betrayal. All there were were sixteen charges.
Usually connected with men, these are crimes not traditionally associated with women.
When Sophie Elms was sentenced to seven years and ten months a few days ago, the father of her victims presented the court with a moving “impact statement”. She had admitted guilt at a prior hearing last year.
“The damage Sophie Elms caused to our family is unimaginable,” he remarked, expressing both pain and wrath.
His younger daughter, now three, still experienced “night terrors” at bed, which were “extremely disturbing as we can see her kicking and she yells “get off me.”
Sitting a few feet away in the dock, Sophie Elms started crying when he told his family what she had put them through. She had never expressed regret until now.
The father mentioned a Snapchat selfie Sophie Elms had uploaded from her bedroom just before she showed up in court (last year) to sign her plea. “All ready for court,” she added beneath, as though she were off to a party.
The father then remembered in his statement that she had “looked right at me and smiled,” which was “beyond words,” as she entered the courtroom.
From Plymouth, maybe the most infamous female paedophile in Britain, Sophie Elms and Vanessa George share similarities.
Married mother of two, George, was a nursery nurse who was imprisoned in 2009 for at least seven years following images of herself injuring children under her care.
She had fallen under the sway of a stranger she had met online, who turned into her online friend, lover and collaborator.
Like George, Sophie Elms carried out the attacks following a sex offender’s internet communication, encouraging her to mistreat the youngsters and forward shockingly horrible WhatsApp images of her actions.
David Geering, the suspected paedophile, received a 15-year term in a separate trial held in November last year—Geering, 59, used to be a Metropolitan Police Homicide and Serious Crime Command investigator.
Two toddlers might never have been abused, and Sophie Elms and David Geering’s lives would not have intersected before the internet age, with its ability to bring together the desperate and the deviant.
Therefore, This is a modern horror tale that we can only pray never to be repeated.
Still, numbers reveal that female paedophilia is rising. The most recent year for which data are available, 2017, saw 108 women found guilty of sexual offences. This exceeded three times the number found guilty ten years ago.
The numbers are relatively low, but they include instances of women sexually attacking males and professors engaged in intimate relationships with students that have drawn a lot of media attention. Thankfully, the type of mistreatment pre-schoolers subjected to by Vanessa George and Sophie Elms is far less prevalent.
Sophie Elms thus lives in a very dark area on the continuum of wickedness; however, there are few outward signs of her deviance. Then, once more, there are few.
Sophie Elms shared a house with her mother and stepfather, employed by a packaging company. She registered at Swindon College, which runs various “early years’ childcare facilities,” on leaving the university.
Neighbours stated they occasionally saw her strolling her dog. She was, however, “naive, immature for her age” (her barrister’s words) and “lacking the social skills one would expect from an 18-year-old.”
She was prone to grooming because of these very things.
Mainly shown on her previous Facebook page, Elms claims she enjoys EastEnders, Home Alone, and Ice Age films, a love heart under the words “In a Relationship.”
Looking back, this innocuous personal detail could have had a worse meaning.
At the time, Sophie Elms was thirteen. The court heard one of her pals had grabbed her mobile phone as a prank and put up an online dating profile for her with her age listed as 22.
This is fascinating in and of itself, a glimpse of how different the planet has become.
Sophie Elms began getting messages not so long ago. She disregarded them until she received a note from one person stating, “Hi sexy,” her counsel disclosed in mitigating form this week.
He said, first neglecting this, but the “person” was tenacious and kept getting in touch. She gave in finally and answered.
Then, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the person she revealed on Facebook was a dangerous predator rather than an innocent boyfriend on Facebook.
At 13, Sophie Elms was convinced to show him nasty videos of herself over her webcam. The cruelty persisted for four more years.
Police think four different internet guys groomed her. Geering among them was one of them.
Geering had been a police officer for 27 years when he was imprisoned for two-and-a-half years after being found guilty for the first time of distributing and seeing obscene photos of children in 2008. After his release from prison, he relocated to Shropshire from St Albans in Hertfordshire, where he had been living with his wife. Whether his wife accompanied him is not known.
However, residents claim he showed a woman hosting jewellery parties on the four-bedroom property in Shrewsbury, once his late mother’s residence. Parking on the drive was a BMW.
The ideal neighbour was David Geering. Everybody stated this.
One of the friendliest persons you could ever meet, one cul-de-sac homeowner this week remarked. For him, nothing caused more than necessary difficulty. He would give our grown-up offspring lifts. He would empty the bins while we were away. He was brilliant.
At the time of the crimes, Sophie Elms was seventeen years old.
Unknown to them, though, “good, thoughtful” More over 100 miles down the M5 in Wootton Bassett, David was a nasty puppetmaster and paedophile who had started dominating and corrupting a teenage girl.
His “relationship” with Sophie Elms started in 2017. Elms told investigators she “liked talking to him” and that he must have found her details “from online”.
Their internet “meeting” timing could not have been more unfortunate. Elms had just begun watching children. David Geering grabbed upon his chance.
She gave him pictures and videos of her sexually abusing the sisters left under her care at his direction. Geering sent this trash to a gang of paedophiles via the WhatsApp messaging app. Two cell phones discovered during a police search of his house revealed his links with Sophie Elms and his network activity.
The effects have been rather terrible.
This week, the mother of her victims watched in the public gallery as her husband presented the impact statement to the court.
“All of us sleep in our bedroom now; what was the girls’ bedroom? It is a closed, empty shell,” he remarked. “Just having to leave the children at school or pre-school challenges us as this is the field of work you were training in.
You have so impacted our children and us that we only let them visit friends’ homes under our presence. They are thereby deprived of their personal growth.
“We hope to rebuild our faith in people in due course, but right now, our anxieties persist. We sense ourselves imprisoned in our own house. We seem to have been handed a life sentence practically.
‘You have utterly wrecked our life. We have concluded that it would be better for us to go; we cannot stay in Swindon fearing we may run upon you one day. This whole terrible affair has irreversibly harmed our family.
At least the judge agreed that David Geering had groomed Sophie Elms, who her mother accompanied.
He replied, “He bears responsibility,” but added, “To lay all the responsibility at his door is misleading and, in my opinion, wrong.”
You participated as well as a victim. For jealous reasons, you sought his attention and wanted to please the man towards whom you felt love. You prioritised these items above the welfare of young, vulnerable youngsters under your care.
More than anything, though, what was done to Sophie Elms and what she did is a message — if one were needed — to all parents in the digital age.
If you or anyone you know have been affected by the people highlighted in this article, then please report those individuals to the Police on 101 (999 if an emergency) or visit their online resources for further details of the options for reporting a crime. You can also make a report at Crimestoppers should you wish to be completely anonymous. There is help available on our support links page.