A SOCIAL worker's claim that she did not have sex while spending the night with a 15-year-old boy at a seaside guest house was described as "rubbish" by prosecution counsel.

During cross-examination, Richard Haworth also suggested to Lisa Smith that she had targeted the two boys she is accused of having sex with when they lived at the home where she worked.

He said: "You preyed on them, didn't you?" Smith, 26, of Victoria Street, Wheelton, replied: " No. I didn't."

The married social worker, who denies 14 charges of indecent assault, also rejected a prosecution suggestion that she had been a "control freak" with the two boys.

It is alleged that she formed sexual relationships with them after they were placed at Glendale Community Home, Leyland, where she was a residential social worker.

Giving evidence to the jury, she said it had been a distressing experience receiving phone calls from one boy over a period of several months.

She said she tried to deal with the matter on her own and was scared of telling the police because the boy had threatened her and her partner.

"It was an awful situation all the way through."

Smith accepted that she had contacted the teenager in return, in a bid to make the calls stop. She said she agreed to travel with him to Blackpool one night in November, because he threatened to go round to her home if she refused.

They arrived at the resort around 10pm and the boy booked them into a room. "I had not been physically forced, but mentally blackmailed. I was not thinking of the danger I was in, but the danger to my fiance."

Smith insists that they did not have sex as they spent the night in the room. She says the boy did ask for sex but she refused. "There was no way on this earth that was going to happen. I was awake all night and he was awake all night".

In the days and weeks that followed, she continued to receive calls and threats, she added. She had not gone to the police at that stage because she was afraid of him coming to her home or what might happen to her partner.

The boy has told the court that he slashed his wrists and was admitted to hospital in the New Year.

The prosecution claim that she pulled the plug on the "relationship" because things were getting out of control -- a suggestion she denies.

Documented phone records are said to show that the two were in contact during the New Year. Smith could not recall sending many of the text messages and suggested they had been edited.

However, according to a prosecution expert, the messages could not have been edited, without the date and time being removed.

Smith denied she had put forward a "tissue of lies" about the content of the messages in the face of a raft of telephone contacts.

(Proceeding)