Lucy Jayne Hambley, 40, of of Mount Charles, St Austell initially denied any wrongdoing to police but pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual activity with a 13-year-old boy.

A court in Truro, in Cornwall, heard that Hambley sought friendship with the young boy – but she turned things sexual when he said he might be gay.

“I am going to prove you are not gay,” she replied as she led him to a bedroom, the Truro Crown Court heard.

Hambley encouraged him to drink alcohol and smoke and began kissing him.

“He told her to stop but she just ignored him,” Heather Hope, prosecuting, said.

“[The victim] said she didn’t use a condom on him and kept telling him she loved him and wanted to get pregnant by him.

Prior to this, he was a virgin and had never had sex before.”

The sexual abuse became almost daily over a period of nine months between 2018 and 2019 as she treated him as an “adult partner” after four weeks of friendship.

Hambley sent him explicit photographs of herself which she claimed she also sent to dating website users.

In one alarming moment, the court heard that a neighbour of Hambley’s knocked on the door to find both Hambley and the boy opening the door in dressing gowns, “love bites on their necks”.

Concerned, the neighbour filed an anonymous report to Childline

The boy “did not have the courage to tell anyone” but eventually confided to his mother and a social worker that Hambley had done “bad things” to him.

Hambley was arrested and initially denied any wrongdoing, but forensic examination of her duvet found semen that was identified as being the same DNA as the boy.

In a victim statement, he said: “I don’t see myself ever being happy again. It has destroyed me. I have changed everything about myself, and nothing for the better.

“I have self-harmed and go weeks without sleep. I took overdoses with the intention to take my own life.”

Judge Anna Richardson said Hambley groomed the boy in a deeply unsettling breach of trust. “There is very distorted thinking, that he had all the control and manipulated you,” she said.

“You were the adult in this situation.”

Hambley was sentenced to seven and a half years.

She must serve two thirds of this in prison before being considered whether she is eligible for release to serve the remainder on licence.