A former serviceman has been jailed for ruining the life of a schoolgirl who he abused 40 years ago

 Donald Van Male left the 12-year-old victim with a lifelong fear of men which has wrecked her ability to form relationships or even find any work in which she has regular contact with them.

Van Male was in his 30s when he abused a 12-year-old girl while he was visiting a remote farm near Okehampton when she was growing up in the 1980s but he was only brought to justice after years of counselling gave her the courage to go to the police.

She had been too confused and frightened to report the abuse at the time but eventually described it in two recorded police interviews. She said Van Male’s drunken assaults had been ‘really horrible’ and involved him touching her over and under her clothing.

The victim wrote a personal statement detailing how she still has flashbacks about Van Male and needs medication for depression and to help her sleep.

She wrote: “His behaviour towards me as a child has ruined my life. There are so many aspects it has impacted on. I have difficulty trusting any man. I hate the physical act of sex and struggle to find any intimacy.”

 Former serviceman Van Male, aged 76, of St Clether, near Launceston, denied six offences of indecent assault but was found guilty by a jury at Exeter Crown Court. He admitted a seventh.

He was jailed for five years and four months by Judge James Adkins, who put him on the sex offenders register for life and made a 20-year-long Sexual Harm Prevention Order which restricts his future contact with children.

Van Male has already served a four and a half year sentence for the more recent abuse of a girl of aged 11 and 12 while living in Cornwall. In that case at Truro Crown Court he admitted six counts of sexual assault and was jailed for four years and a half years in 2019.

Judge Adkins told him: “You have serious convictions for offences against another girl, which proves that your sexual conduct in this case is not a one-off. It was open to you to admit all your offending earlier.”

During the Exeter trial earlier this month, Mr Simon Burns, prosecuting, said the offences were committed against a vulnerable girl when she was aged about 12 to 13 in the mid-1980s.

He said: “He committed multiple offences against a young victim. He took advantage of her and corrupted her such that she didn’t really know it was wrong, although she felt it was not right.”

He said the victim harboured the hurt from the offences for many years before first making a complaint in 2016. She told police ‘It was really horrible’ and said she had asked her mother to prevent him visiting again.

Van Male told the jury that he had never touched the girl inappropriately and only paid very rare visits to the farm where she was living. He said: “I never touched her sexually.”

His defence counsel told the Judge that Van Male is 76, in poor health, and poses no risk to the public because he completed a sex offender treatment programme while on prison licence after being released from his previous sentence.