Rapist ‘gratified himself on the body of an innocent child’

In her victim impact statement, the mother of the 9-year-old girl said that since the attack, she is living a nightmare that she can’t wake up from.

“He made a cold predatory decision to rape my daughter. He made her believe in her little heart that she would die if she didn’t comply. He gratified himself on the body of an innocent child.”

She said she lies awake at night tormented by unbearable images and that she imagines hearing her child’s heart beating in fear.

She said her daughter has gone from being a happy exuberant child to a worried, reserved person who doesn’t feel safe anymore.

The father of the 6-year-old sobbed while reading through his victim impact statement in which he said that hearing his child first tell him what the man had done to her was “like a bomb going off in his head”. He said his daughter has repeatedly asked him about why the accused did what he did. She described the pain of the rape as cutting like a knife.

He said she freezes or panics when she sees “creepy men everywhere, everyday” and refuses to be on her own at any time.

He said the idea that she had to perform oral sex after being anally raped was “incredulous and deplorable”, adding: “This just blows your mind” to know her mouth was used in such a “disgusting and abusive way”.

In a poem he wrote and read out in court, he asked: “What can a daddy do to protect this princess beauty? Are we lost to evil?”

In a plea for mitigation to the court, Martin Giblin, defending, said his client had a difficult family background and his father had abandoned him when he was 6 years old.

He said that in an extensive medical history that took place as a result of contact with psychological services, there was “not a trace or scintilla of evidence of any form of paedophilia in his medical records”.