A controlling paedophile has been jailed for 16 years for subjecting a vulnerable Bradford girl to eight years of sexual abuse and rape after her mother “gave her up” into his hands.

The victim was left with a neighbour after her family moved house when she was only seven-years-old.

The man, assumed by many people to be her father, shared her bed and called her “my babes,” a jury at Bradford Crown Court heard.

Yesterday afternoon, he was convicted by a jury of ten specimen offences of raping the girl at least once a week when she was aged 11 to 15 and 12 charges of sexually abusing her from the age of seven.

The short, tubby man sat impassively in the dock, with his arms folded over his stomach as the guilty verdicts were returned.

Judge David Hatton QC said it was “a deliberate and prolonged course of sexual abuse”.

“You blighted her childhood and cast a dark shadow over her adulthood,” he told the man.

The victim, now in her 30s, broke down in the witness box, where she gave her evidence without the use of screens to shield her from the defendant.

She told how she ended up living with their neighbour when her mother moved to another part of Bradford.

“My mum gave me up to him,” she said.

She said her mother was usually out and had a series of boyfriends.

The man, 20 years her senior, began indecently assaulting her when she was seven to “make sure she was growing properly”.

She tried to tell her mother but she was told: “Stop being silly.”

When she was about eight, she went to Bradford Central Police Station for a social services medical, she said.

Afterwards, the man told her: “Since I am being accused of touching you, I might as well do it.” She was forced to have sex in return for clothes and to stop him cancelling her birthday party.

“I could only go out and play if I let him do things to me,” she said.

He threatened her: “If you tell anyone, you will all get put in a care home and you will never see anyone ever again.”

When she told him the abuse must stop, he put a bag over his head and said he would kill himself with live electrical wires.

“I am stupid. I should have stopped it from the start. I just blame myself. I should have said ‘No’. All I ever wanted was for someone to love me but it never happened,” the woman told the jury during the trial.

After the case, Acting Detective Sergeant Richard Dove, of Bradford District Safeguarding, said: “We welcome the conviction of this man who preyed on a vulnerable young girl over a period of years. I want to commend her courage in reporting his offending and helping us bring this case to court.

“She has conducted herself with great dignity throughout and also stood in the witness box to face her accuser.”