A PAEDOPHILE who drove his Selby area victim to suicide bids by abusing her from the age of five has been jailed.

The young girl had been abandoned by her mother, and her father died during the seven years of sexual assaults at the hands of Steven John Twigg, York Crown Court heard.

Geraldine Kelly, prosecuting, said that since the abuse stopped, the girl has had ten years of counselling and seven of psychotherapy.

"The complainant in this case was about as vulnerable as a young child could be," said Judge Shaun Spencer QC.

"She has been seriously damaged by this. I heard evidence of seven years of psychotherapy, self-harm, attempts at suicide and being troubled by flashbacks and bad dreams."

Twigg was jailed for seven years and banned from working with children for life.

He will also be on the Sex Offenders' Register indefinitely. The chef, 44, now of South Marine Drive, Bridlington, denied nine charges of indecent assault and one of indecency with a child.

At the end of a five-day trial, the jury convicted him on seven charges of indecent assault and one of indecency with a child. They acquitted him on one charge of indecent assault on the judge's direction and was discharged from reaching a verdict on another.

He was already serving a 15-month jail term imposed at Exeter Crown Court for voyeurism where he took secret films of a girl in a bathroom.

The jury heard the Selby five-year-old girl stayed at times with Twigg's family after her mother left her to marry another man.

The jury heard Twigg began the abuse when he was in his mid-teens in the late 1970s and it continued for seven years.

For Twigg, Ann Munday said the convictions had destroyed Twigg's life and career.

His father had been admitted to hospital with a hernia problem and developed MRSA during the trial and Twigg himself suffered from rheumatoid arthritis.